Arizona author Sarah Hinze was the speaker for the October meeting of the Salt Lake chapter of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) on Oct. 12. The conference room at the Utah Power Building in Midvale was filled with people curious to hear about the newest phase of "otherworldly" research - the "pre-birth experience" or PBE.
As Dr. Raymond Moody has been dubbed the pioneer of life after death studies, Hinze has been called the pioneer of life before life research.Hinze has collected some 250 stories of parents having contact with their pre-born children through dreams or "waking visions." She has written two books, "Life Before Life" and "Coming From the Light." Simon & Schuster recently purchased publishing rights to "Coming From the Light," and Hinze will be featured in an upcoming special on the Discovery Channel.
As an LDS mother of nine, Hinze found many of her PBE stories coming from her own culture. But she began hearing from people of all faiths and from around the world who had similar experiences.
NDE researcher Dr. Kenneth Ring asked Hinze how many of the case histories she'd collected were outside the LDS community. She told him at least half were. And she found it interesting that there were no differences in the stories whether they were from Mormons, Baptists or Catholics or even non-Christians such as a woman in Ethiopia who told a friend of Hinze's that all nine of her children had come to her before they were conceived.
During her lecture, Hinze told about a black minister from Los Angeles who called her to tell about an experience that happened 15 years ago. He told Hinze that for four nights he was taken in a dream to the spirit world. The second night he met a young woman, the third night she said, "My name is Maria." On the fourth night, she told him, "I need to come to earth now." On the fifth night he woke up to see her standing by his bed as a being of light. He woke up his wife and she agreed that she would have another child. That child was a daughter they named Maria and as she grew, the father recognized her as the young woman he saw in his dreams.
Hinze said the world is undergoing a spiritual renaissance and that she believes that a study of the spiritual origin of man and where we come from will be the next area of interest.
But while interest in this subject is burgeoning, it is certainly not the first time the subject has intrigued man. Hinze quotes passages from the Nag Hammadi text, the Book of Thomas, a message from the 40-day ministry of Jesus following his resurrection: "If they say to you, from where have you originated? say to them, we have come from the Light, where the Light has originated through itself. If they say to you, who are you? say, we are his sons and we are the elect of the Living Father."
In a telephone interview from her home in Arizona on Wednesday, Hinze said that she was filmed last week for the Discovery Channel's "Angels and Miracles" and that the producers also traveled to Ogden to interview one of the women who contributed a story to Hinze's book. "They are dramatizing her story for the program," she said. The program on Hinze's research will be aired sometime in January.
Hinze's psychologist husband analyzed traits from the pre-birth experiences and found that there were nine aspects of a typical experience including a radiation of love, a sense of timing when the child should come to earth, an expression of loss at leaving a heavenly home and some preborn appearances providing a protection or warning to the recipient.