“In the early 1960s, long before Raymond Moody alerted Western culture to the near-death experience in Life After Life, Clark was believed to have died while giving birth to her son. The problem was eclampsia of pregnancy, characterized by severe high blood pressure, edema, and convulsions. She lost consciousness yet remained aware of what was going on. She saw her physical body below; saw a light source streaming toward her; and felt bliss, peace, and love saturating her entire being. All the while she saw the delivery nurse pounding on her chest saying, ‘Come back, Nancy, come back!’ The nurse soon added, ‘You have a son.’ Clark decided to return to her physical body.
“But it was too late. She regained consciousness in the morgue, lying on a cold metal surface with a sheet over her face. She pulled the sheet away and saw another body on a gurney beside her, also covered with a sheet. Then she lost consciousness again. The next time she awoke she was in a hospital room.
Her physician advised her to forget about what she remembered, and she did until, “at age 38, while perfectly healthy and teaching and doing cancer research, she had an almost identical experience. She was standing at a podium delivering a eulogy for a friend who had died, when the light appeared again. Although her physical body continued to perform normally and the eulogy went off without a hitch, at the same time she had the sensation of leaving her physical body into another dimension she calls ‘the Light of God.’ She experienced great beauty, ecstasy, and bliss. Unconditional love poured in, the likes of which she had never felt. She experienced a review of her life.
“Clark ‘felt the illusion of my separate self simply melt away. I loved everyone and everything with an immense transforming consciousness.’ She ‘merged into Oneness with the Light of God, [and] communication took place telepathically.’ She saw her deceased friend, for whom she was delivering the eulogy, standing beside her, holding her hand, letting her know that he was all right and very happy, and that there was no reason to grieve. She had no desire to go back into the body of Nancy at the podium. She did so, however, because she knew she had been given a mission to convey to others what she had experienced. She felt equipped to do so because she sensed she’d been given access to ‘ultimate knowledge. As she put it, ‘I knew everything there was to know, past, present, and future. Every word and every thought that was or ever will be spoke or written down was made known to me.’ She later understood, however, that she was not permitted to remember all of that knowledge, only parts of it. ‘This is what all near-death experiencers report as well,” she wrote. “This is one of the classic, across-the-board similarities in over thirty years of scientific research, revealing this common thread among researchers.’
“After 15 minutes in this ecstatic, idyllic state, Clark returned to her physical body, which was still delivering the eulogy. When the memorial service was over, several people told her that while she was speaking, they witnessed a white glow all over the outline of her body.”
Dr. Larry Dossey, One Mind How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters, 95-97.
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