SPOTLIGHT: Becoming Starlight by Sharon Prentice @annasacca @seprentice
Becoming Starlight
by Sharon Prentice, Raymond A. Moody Jr.
You've heard of a Near Death Experience - now take a look inside The Shared Death Experience!
Continue below to learn more about the book, watch the trailer and read an excerpt!
Continue below to learn more about the book, watch the trailer and read an excerpt!
Publisher: Waterside Press
Publish Date: May 8, 2018
Paperback
220 Pages
Standalone
The Shared Death Experience (SDE). Most people know of or know someone who has experienced a Near Death Experience (NDE), but very few have heard of the SDE. The SDE is similar to the NDE except that it occurs not to the person who is dying, but to their loved one who is physically well. That person could be sitting right next to their loved one, or sitting across the room, or even across the globe unaware of the impending death of someone they love. Location or activity level is of no consequence to the SDE. That person, the loved one, is "invited along" to witness the aftermath of physical death. The invitation extended has no RSVP--the person accompanying the dying individual can neither accept nor refuse--they are just "taken" or "given" the experience by powers outside of their control. Becoming Starlight is one of those stories. It is a story filled with the type of pitfalls that accompany much of mankind on the journey through existence. Deeply embedded in Starlight is an ongoing war with death, faith, and hope- and with God--a war most of us have experienced or will experience in our lifetimes. Becoming Starlight is a story that has been written, in one way or another, since the beginning of time. The war between life and death--who lives and who dies and why they die--is at the heart of this deeply personal experience. It's a life-and-death struggle with spiritual darkness and loss of faith. It is a story not unlike the stories of anyone who has loved and lost, grieved and sorrowed, felt anguish and rage, fallen from Grace and questioned the very existence of God. The specifics are different, but the humanity splattered on the human soul and on every page is the same as that of any life lived fully. Some find redemption more easily than I. It took a complete fall from grace for me to be awakened from the trauma and darkness that had found its way into my life, and it took an unexpected encounter - an SDE -- to bring me into the arms of God, where I finally found the solace and understanding that I had yearned for. "Becoming Starlight" is the "Lifting of the Veil" that led to a peek into foreverness and to the compassion of a loving God. Dr. Prentice's book is a thought-provoking advance that can help bring about progress toward rational enlightenment on the afterlife question. What you will read here opens many new avenues for thinking about humankind's deepest mystery. Hold onto your hat when you read this book. Becoming Starlight is truly sensational; everybody who is seriously interested in the question of life after death should read it. -Raymond Moody, M.D., Ph.D., author of Life After Life, Reunions, and Glimpses of Eternity.
Becoming Starlight
Excerpted
from Becoming Starlight: A Shared Death Journey from Darkness to Light by
Sharon Prentice, PhD. Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Prentice. https://sharonprentice.com
Heaven.
There are many different words for it in many different languages. And each
day, it’s a “place” that’s referred to more than any other in the world. Why?
Every single race, religion, ethnicity, and culture—members of each one believe
in the concept of Heaven. Religious scholars and philosophers have debated,
argued, and fought over the very nature of Heaven since time immemorial and
they have written reams and reams of papers about it and stockpiled book after
book on library shelves for millennia.
But it’s not the conversations or writings
of the religious scholars or philosophers that touch the true nature of “that
place.” It’s the conversations that take place in the hospices, hospitals, ICU’s
and funerals of the world that take us into the soul of humanity and, therefore
–into Heaven. It’s in times of great personal trauma that many of these
discussions take place. And, sometimes, these private moments can become very
heated due to the stress and fear that exist in the trying moments before the
death of a loved one. Once the word “Heaven” is spoken out loud, the
underlying, unacknowledged, unspoken word that goes with it is death. Fear that
death is near--especially in the waiting rooms of the ICU--prompts exchanges
that are not normally heard in everyday family life.
When “the end” is near, people shy away
from using the word “death”; their conversation will, instead, turn to the “place”
where their loved one “is going” and to each person’s individual interpretation
of exactly what and where Heaven is--and everyone has their own “truth.” Listening to, and being part of these
conversations, is both joyous and heart wrenching as families try to come to
terms with exactly “where” their loved one will be after they die. This
conversation is repeated countless times, every single day, all over the globe.
The conflict begins the very minute
someone questions the interpretation of another. In these moments of great
tragedy, having one’s viewpoint understood and accepted as truth--the only
truth--is vitally important to each person’s peace of mind. Therein lies the
problem. The discussion turns to debate--then to all-out disagreement.
I understand the conflict. Over the years,
I have shared my SDE with many friends, colleagues, and mentors, and my
explanations and descriptions have sometimes caused heated debate among them. I
have spoken to individuals from all walks of life, from all the great religions
of the world, from every background and school of thought, and every one of
them had their own version of what “truth” should “be” or “is.” While all their
“truths” were different, they did have a unifying thread--a belief in an
afterlife. “Heaven” and “Hell” were central to every debate and the descriptions
of these “places” were similar in both nature and belief.
In the course of these debates and
conversations, I have been asked to explain “where” I was taken, what I meant
by “I became Starlight,” and to describe exactly what “God” looked like. It is
so very difficult to accurately relay my experience because I must rely on “words.”
To use words such as “majestic, magnificent, purity defined, peaceful, still,
home” dulls the experience because of the mere fact that labeling it--using
words to describe the indescribable--just doesn’t do the SDE justice. To
characterize the face of God, the touch of God, is tantamount to explaining
perfection itself--how can it be done?
How do you depict an emanation of love and joy combined with
otherworldly purity? How do you describe an ethereal form that consists of pure
light? The “how” lies in the experience itself as given to you by God
Himself--His face, His thoughts, His Word engraved upon your heart--how do you
give voice to that feeling?
The “how” lies hidden in the vision, the “feeling”
of pure Spirit–the soul must feel its way through to see perfection without
being polluted by the scripts we grew up identifying with and falling victim
to. “God looked like love I have never experienced before” has always been my
answer. There are some feelings and thoughts that can never be expressed--words
don’t exist to describe them. Our own humanity puts locks on the words felt in
the Soul. The physicality of God’s appearance—it simply wasn’t important. I
felt absolutely no curiosity about it--His touch was just too all-consuming and
comforting to think of anything else. Perhaps one day, someone will invent a
word that accurately depicts “the pure light that is love” that will get us one
step closer to seeing His perfection.
Once the head shaking stops from my lack
of a physical description, the conversation turns to “where” was I? Most
organized religion tells us that God is “separate” from us, that He lives
somewhere “out there,” above the clouds in a place called Heaven. Religion
teaches us that God is the creator and final arbiter of the rights and wrongs
of living and that we all will surely answer to Him for all our wrong doings.
And just as we’ve been told who and what God is, we’ve also been told what “heaven”
is, in descriptive terms that everyone can visualize. Heaven is a specific
place, the likes of which there is no equal. It is an “other” world, out there
somewhere, filled with everything wonderful and beautiful, full of creature
comforts that we only dream about. Mansions line golden streets encrusted with
pearls and diamonds, and everyone has everything they ever wanted--and everyone
who was the best “good little boy or girl” has even bigger and better things
than those who weren’t quite as good in this life. We earn that mansion on that
particular street in that particular neighborhood by the things we do or
believe or by the things we don’t do or don’t believe while living on this
earth. Sounds like a bigger and better version of life here, doesn’t it? I
fully accepted that version, that description of Heaven given to me as a child.
The innocence of childhood demands “pictures” we can understand. Adjectives
that paint a picture of a human paradise comfort and console us when we think
of death--ours or anyone else’s.
But that is not what I found in “that
place” among my stars. Was there physicality, a form, a space--a specific place
that could be described? I can’t say there was! What I found, and felt,
instead, in the place where I was held, was magnificence itself: Pure
Starlight--and God Himself. And the most amazing surprise of all--I found the “me”
as God intended me to be from the moment He formed me in my mother’s
womb--before this world got ahold of me and slapped labels on me that told me
who to “be” and what to believe. But in “that place,” I found myself as a
magnificent extension of God. My answer to the question, “What does God look
like?” has always been the same: to describe God, I would be describing my own
Soul. And to describe “that place” requires a complete letting go of everything
that any logic and human reasoning would dictate.
The very essence of God, of Heaven, was in
and of that Starlight. I discovered--no, I just knew--that there is nowhere
that God is not. He is in and of everything that has ever existed. There is
nothing that He is not. There is no place that He is not. If it exists, it is a
part of Him--His thoughts created everything, including every one of us. We
exist purely because he thought of each one of us. We are the physical forms of
His thoughts. We are his creations--part of a whole that we can’t perceive. We
are all intricately combined as one thought of God but gloriously separate as
individuals for some reason unknown to us--but known to Him from the moment He
gave each of us life.
About the Author:
Dr. Sharon Prentice is
the author of Becoming Starlight: A Shared Death Journey from Darkness to
Light. Soon after completing her graduate studies in psychology, Dr. Prentice
longed to discover “the why’s” about her own intimate experience with death in
the form of an SDE, and that of others who had experienced something “weird,
unbelievable, odd” at the time of the death of a loved one. Dr. Prentice is in
private practice as a Licensed Clinical Pastoral Counselor - Advanced
Certification. She is also a Board Certified Spiritual Counselor (SC-C) and
holds Board Certification in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Group Therapy,
Integrated Marriage and Family Therapy, and Crisis and Abuse Therapy. She is
also a Board Certified Temperament Counselor. Dr. Prentice is a Professional
Member of the American Counselors Association, a Professional Clinical member
of the National Christian Counselors Association, a Clinical member of the
American Mental Health Counselors Association, and a Presidential member of the
American Association of Christian Counselors. She is also a Commissioned
Minister of Pastoral Care.
For more information, please visit https://sharonprentice.com
and follow the author on Facebook
and Twitter.
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