Here are a few purely subjective observations I’ve long treated as facts, and though they really are opinion I find that essentially everyone to whom I mention them readily agrees:

In every nation including our own, nearly half the human population value helping other people as a matter of personal service and life purpose, whereas another nearly-half seek mainly to serve themselves even when they know their self interest can be or in fact is harmful to other people. The undecided few are easily swayed either way, and the self-serving nearly-half tend to be disproportionately overrepresented in corporate, financial and political occupations.

By any reasonable standard, it is easy to point out the loving good works of people from Pope Francis to Martin Luthur King, Jr., and not excluding all those good folk who live quietly just down the block. As a U.S. citizen surrounded by this nation’s dominant religion, I have many dear friends, as perhaps do you, who are deep believers in and committed to Christian beliefs. I observe that many of them live their lives deeply immersed in other-serving goodwill and good works that are right and ethical by any measure. Their daily choices large and small, their very way of living, demonstrate loving values so seemingly ingrained that they seem to have been born with them. They are self contained—seldom is it evident that their values were acquired from the teachings of any religion.  I love these good folk and respect the integrity of their ingrained presumption that their lot is to continually do right and good in this life, ever seeking to help others. Those are and clearly would be their values with or without any religious overlay, because just as many religious believers are found on the other side, among the self servers.

The values so many ordinary good people demonstrate naturally, as if inherent in their nature, is pretty much indistinguishable from the values we learn from near-death experiencers.  As emphasized in Chapter 1, the Teachings and Mandates delivered up to us in the reports of people describing what happened while they were having an NDE constitute the most pure, simple and elegant values I have encountered through a lifetime of interest in every possible well spring of human values; these constitute the utmost foundation of guidance for human conduct:

• Love others unconditionally, as God loves you. This is how you praise God, exuding God’s unconditional love through your own genuine feelings and actions. Love them all, even those who behave despicably. Don’t waste time telling God how great God is; make it real by genuinely loving others. When you can do this, you grow in spirit.
• Help others whom you can plainly see need to be helped. Some need help in the form of a kind word or a smile, some obviously need a five-dollar handout for their next meal. Others need a job that pays enough to live on without privation of food or a roof over their heads, not to mention electricity and plumbing that works. Still others need help in the form of incarceration to counteract their disordered inclination to exploit or harm others. You need not abandon common sense and good judgment while loving others.
• Attain knowledge. Never stop trying to learn, your whole life through—because, as all that you know increases, so will your limited understanding increase, and as your understanding grows, so will your limited wisdom slowly grow. Thus acquiring increased understanding will enrich your life, and acquiring increased wisdom will help you do a better job of loving and helping others.

I long ago adopted these three simple mandates as my own life standard of values and behavior. Life offers many temptations to fail to live up to them—especially in the mind’s private judgments about self-serving politicians, investment bankers and congenital troublemakers who constantly make trouble where there was no trouble. But I keep the mandates before me, trying to live up to them, and I recommend them unreservedly for others’ adoption as their own life values. I didn’t learn them in any church or science class, and though they’re not far afield from values one hears in some churches, they are blessedly uncluttered from all that doctrinal folderol churches (and synagogues and mosques and temples and “holy men” of every stripe) invariably hand out when they want to tell you what they think your values should be.

Be reminded, these three simple mandates come directly from God (or sometimes elder spirits) via people who died or nearly died and somehow revived to tell about it. Thousands of NDE survivors all, in their own words, tell the same things. They come from every walk of life, every station high and low, including formerly convinced atheists who were changed—and became convinced of spiritual reality—by a personal experience they say is more real than real.