The light was love and understanding. I was home.

I had a bad asthma attack which landed me in the hospital. They gave me something which seemed a lot like the general anesthesia I was given for two surgeries later in life. It helped me to breathe, but I was tired, slipped away to sleep, and stopped breathing. I felt the sensation of some time passing. I also felt as though I was dreaming of seeing someone in a bed who was surrounded by doctors. But, there was a strange physical sensation as well, which is hard to describe. It troubled me and I could not wake from this dream.

I was floating above a person and didn't make the cognitive connection at first, that this was my body. I could see my mother in the corner of the room and became worried for her. It was about this time, when I realized this was not a dream, that I just wanted to go home. The next thing I knew, it was nighttime. I was outside the house and looking in the kitchen window. I could not get inside the house and I couldn't attract the attention of my family inside. This horrified me and some time passed. I was wandering around in the dark and eventually found others who were similarly confused as to where we where and what was going on. This is hard to explain, but we didn't really have a physical presence. I remember getting to know and understand these people as we were all going through this same experience together. It was like we were in a group and the lights were turned off. We knew that we were all still there but could not see one another. I guess that's the best way I can describe it. Some time passed here as well, but I was determined to find a way out for all of us which was probably absurd since I didn't know where we were.

From here on, all linearity kind of ends. I remember things, but it's like they all happened at once. Time ceased to exist. People have asked me if I remember a tunnel, and my answer is 'No, not exactly.' There was a light, kind of dim and from a distance. The light got closer and more intense. I felt a Love that brings tears to me as I write this. I wanted so much to go back and bring all of the others with me to this place, but I didn't really have control of it. As wonderful and amazing as this place felt, I was pretty much along for the ride. I don't know how much of this I can put into words of accurately describe. The light was love and understanding. It was outside of me, through me, and in me. It was home. I've never felt a love like this since, though there have been very brief moments of kindness and acceptance that I just live for. It's hard to see the computer screen for the tears in my eyes. I want so much to use all my will to reach back and pull those people in the darkness here to just be here, but I don't know how.

It's hard for me to describe what happened next. I was- and it was as if something else in side me, was speaking an a strange language but I understood it to be a recounting of this and past lives, kind of like and introduction to someone else. There was a life review where it was like a re-living of certain moments in my life up to this point. I felt with complete clarity how I felt and how the other person felt through my actions, my words, and my thoughts. These were times when I probably should have acted differently, used better judgement, not gotten caught up in emotion. This was a very humbling experience. To think I had only been here 7 years in this life- it concerns me what the next one will be like, because although I'm more aware of how I affect those around me; I still get emotional, I still screw up, and I'm well aware that this experience has not made me perfect...maybe more aware of how imperfect I am more than anything else, but it has not prevented me from being stupid, insensitive, egotistical, and uncaring. If anything, it has driven home the point of trying to be more mindful, but all the while realizing that I'm far from perfect, and it's something that requires constant effort and attention.

At a certain point I met someone who seemed to be there to assist me in deciding whether I should come back in this life or start all over in another. I would call this person my guide, and although I'm not really aware of them having a physical presence, I felt a feminine energy about them. I wanted to know more about them and this place I was in. But, it was clear that this experience was not about them. It was more like going to a guidance counselor. I was young, but emotionally invested in the people of this life. Starting over and not really knowing what that would be like was hard for me to accept. I was shown parts of my future life, like going up to a screen and suddenly being in the moment experiencing it. It was as though I were there at that moment, feeling how I would feel at that time. I was shown parts of my future in this life if I chose to go on. You would think I could predict the future with what I was shown, yet it could be due to the fact that I don't deal with detailed information really well. I tend to look at the global perspective and see the forest but not the trees. But there was a clarity there in that place, which doesn't seem to exist for me here. It was simple to understand so much more than I can here. Although I do get feelings about people and things here once in awhile, it's not like I remember feeling there. As these moments unfolded in my life here, after this NDE, there would be a sense of familiarity about some things. Sometimes it can be about people, even though I had not met them before.

The things I was shown have been more like choices that were made when the options were fairly limited. The feeling at the time of the choice was simply 'This feels right. This feels like the right thing to do.' With that feeling is a sense of peace, and calm. I was told that if I were to continue in this life, that it would be unlikely that I would reach my potential. However, it seemed clear that starting over was a wild card and I was not shown anything about that. I remember meeting other people, and I get the feeling that these were people who had lived here and were there to help me decide what to do. I was shown details of my future that I don't feel really comfortable divulging here. Some things were embarrassing. There was a total and complete clarity there, and it had nothing to do with my sense of self, or ego, but everything to do with what I came into this life to do, to learn, and to experience and grow.

I can see that I am running out of room here, so I will cut it short...When I returned to my body, I really missed that place and I still think about it today. We are here to grow as spiritual beings and to experience certain things. I remember things from before and during my birth. I remember choosing my parents for their personality and kindness. On a certain level I'm pretty sure I chose to have asthma to keep me from making the mistakes of another life. I may have chosen my NDE to keep me aware of why I'm here.

NDERF.org

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Look away beyond the blue.

 

I've got a home in glory land that outshines the sun,

I've got a home in glory land that outshines the sun,

I've got a home in glory land that outshines the sun,

Look away beyond the blue.

 

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me,

Look away beyond the blue.

 

Johnny Cash sings “Do Lord”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plA2vi7mWc0

The dead may not know initially they are dead

"The idea that the dead often don’t initially realize they are dead is universal. While many near-death, out of-body, and postmortem narratives describe the newly dead person floating off almost immediately into other dimensions like the Reverend Bertrand did, others linger longer on the old familiar earth, or what at least feels like the old familiar earth. In these kinds of narrative, the individual wanders about the earthly world, going through doorways, walking down roads, only gradually finding him or herself in a world that, though it still looks familiar, is clearly no longer the exact physical world they were in while alive.

"When, exactly, does the world the individual is moving it shift frequencies? It’s an all but impossible question to answer from our perspective, but the concept of the imaginal allows us to conceive of a consciousness that seamlessly transforms from the earthly to the transearthly, filling in the perceptual picture in essentially the same manner thar our minds fill in the picture in ordinary life. Everyone knows the experience of seeing an object that one thinks is one thing only to then discover that it is something else. Driving along the highway, we see a small brown animal, struck but not killed by a passing car. The closer we come, the most details of the struggling animal we see—and the clearer it becomes that it is indeed just that . . . until we are so close that the object resolves into what it really is, and has been all along: a brown paper bag, moving from the wind created by passing cars.

"Experiences like that remind us that our minds are constantly creating our reality, constantly taking creative/interpretive liberties with the raw material coming in via the optic nerve and the rest of our senses. So, to see this process of collaborative creation continuing all but seamlessly as our consciousness shifts vibrational levels is really not so far-fetched at all. Oblivious to the fact that they are no longer in their physical bodies, the newly dead proceed through the outskirts of the afterlife landscape as if they were still alive—only gradually coming to realize that they are no longer fully part of the physical dimension."

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 216-17.

 

Multiple after-death bodies are transitional

“However many or few spiritual bodies we may actually possess is not so essential a question as it may first seem, if we remember that the extraphysical dimensions can appear differently depending on who is looking at them. A spiritual tradition that describes the human being, for example, as having eight bodies (as a number of North American tribes do) is looking at human extraphysical experience form its particular earthly perspective, with that perspective’s particular assumptions and traditions. But whether four in number, or five, or eight, these extrapysical bodies always convey the idea of a central being who manifests through a number of more exterior bodies, each of which is appropriate to a particular level of the multistoried physical-material universe.

“What all these perspectives have common is the insight that, no matter how few or many of these bodies there may be, once each has served its purpose it is no longer a tool but an obstruction, and the core identity seeks to escape from it with the kind of immediate intuition of its uselessness that the Reverend Bertrand so vividly displayed that day in the Swiss Alps. Each body is first a tool and the, if not discarded, a hindrance and an anchor, holding back from where we are supposed to go and preventing us from becoming what we are not supposed to be.

 

“To leave one body behind is, again universally and regardless of the fine points, to undergo a death that is, at the same time, a birth. When, on the earthly plane, we see an animal emerge from a shed skin, or a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis, what we are seeing is the earthly version of a process that continues to occur in the dimensions beyond this one, an idea that Henry Corbin explained by saying that the world beyond our own symbolize with this world. What this means—and it’s an idea that while at first seemingly alien actually makes a deep intuitive sense—is that the stuff that goes on in the dimensions above this one bears similarity to this one, even when that stuff appears at first glance to be completely unrelated to it. Different as the worlds are, they are levels of one single cosmos, so that what first appears strange will, if we linger with it, eventually cease seeming so.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 212-13.

Would the dead be dressed as they choose?

"The fact that the newly disembodied dead seemed often to find themselves not only dressed, but dressed in items of clothing they’d possessed in life, early on struck critics of this kind of narrative as final and irrefutable proof of their absurdity. For consciousness to survive death in any form is, from this perspective, absurd enough. To survive it personally, with one’s entire earthly sensibility intact, is more so. But to survive it in one’s favorite slacks and T-shirt is the last straw. As psychologist David Fontana, in a discussion of the related phenomenon of apparitions appearing in familiar clothes to people in this world, writes: 'people often seem more surprised by the references to clothes than they do to the references to the apparitions themselves, and use the idea of clothes as a reason for dismissing everything as the observer’s imagination.'

 

"Like it or not, though the clothing issue is just too widespread to be ignored. Scientist Robert Crookall, who wasn’t one to look away from a consistent theme in afterlife material no matter how ridiculous it might strike others, even devoted an entire monograph to the subject (titled, appropriately enough, ‘Ghost Clothes’). He there writes the following: 'If the physical body has an objective etheric double, then presumably all other physical objects, including of course clothes, must have etheric doubles.'

"Etheric derives from ether, a word that, before its modern use in organic chemistry, referred to a mysterious intangible substance that ancient philosophers hypothesized permeated the entire universe. The spiritual body closest to the physical body (the one described in narratives like the ones above, that acts as a kind of battery supplying transphysical energies to the physical body before the “cord” connecting the two is severed) is often called the etheric body.

"By positing the existence of a world just as real as or even more real than ours, but more susceptible to our unconscious perceptive/creative abilities, the imaginal can help us see that the world we enter at death might hold not just things like ethereal, semiphysical cords and threads but far more familiar and personal items as well. The basic idea here (and it is an idea stated again and again in postmortem literature both ancient and modern) is that when we die we remain, first and foremost, ourselves—with our same habits and limitations, our same quirks, and our same strengths. We have bodies, we have perceptions, we are capable of movement and decision and indecision . . . And, because the doors of the fantastically intricate treasure house of earthly memory are thrown open, every object we ever came into contact with while alive is capable of being resuscitated.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 209-11.

An afterlife of specific things and particular people

We tend to assume that, in the highly unlikely event that there really is a world beyond this one, it is airy and misty, not solid and concrete. But why is this necessarily the case? The widespread traditional idea that we live in a graded universe that moves form the material up to the immaterial (a perspective that, in a degraded form, has given us our cartoonish modern idea of a heaven of clouds above the earth) does not necessarily carry with it the idea that the higher you go in these worlds the vaguer they are. In fact, for most of the authors who describe these ascending realms, what is lost as one moves up is not concreteness but density. The objects one encounters in the worlds are still objects, and the persons one encounters are still persons, but they are so in something like the way a tree in a Cézanne painting is a tree. Through Cézanne’s ability to present the tree in terms of its multivalent inner core, the tree has become more than the single image that appears to the ordinary, mundane eye. And yet . . . it is still a very specific object. An object that, while remaining itself, has opened itself so that its inner, essential being unfolds for whoever views it with the proper eyes. 

 In his book Spiritual Body and Celestia Earth, the French author Henry Corbin described what the Iranian mystical tradition calls the “Earth of Visions,” a world “above” this one that appears to those who travel to it as an “external world” that, at the same time, is not the physical world we know. “It is,” Corbin wrote, “a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul.”

It is this difficult but essential idea that when we leave the body, we “emerge from measurable space” without “emerging from extent” that we need to keep in mind when we come upon the disconcertingly physical details that pervade the "accounts” by modern tellers of the after-death story. They tell us the world beyond this one is crowded with very specific things and particular people. But those things and people are free from the tyranny of the purely physical perspective that material existence forces upon us. In the world beyond the physical, both time and space are recalibrated, so that we can appear as the people we are now, yet also, paradoxically or not, the people we used to be as well, and we can be perceived in such a way that our subjective essence shines forth rather than hiding invisibly beneath our (in this world) all too-solid flesh.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 205-06.

The near-death experience of Rev. J. L. Bertrand

Another mountain climbing narrative with many classic NDE features comes from a clergyman named J. L. Bertrand. While on a journey up a mountain in Switzerland, Bertrand, who was not a young man at the time felt tired and decided to stop his ascent and allow the younger members of the party to pick him up on their way back down.

 

“I sat down,” recalled Bertrand, "my legs handing over a precipice, my back leaning on a rock as big as an armchair. I chose that brink because there was no snow, and because I could face better the magnificent panorama of the Alpes Bernoises. I at once remembered that in my pocket there were two cigars, and put one between my teeth.” Bertrand lit the cigar, sat back, and considered himself “the happiest of men.”

 

Suddenly a kind of paralysis came over him. The match he had lit for his cigar burned down to his fingers, but he was unable to release it. Though his body was immobilized, Bertrand’s thoughts were crystal clear. “If I move,” he reported thinking to himself, “I shall roll down in the abyss; if I do not move, I shall be a dead man in twenty-five or thirty minutes.”

 

Unable to do anything else, Bertrand studied the sensations he felt as his body temperature slowly dropped. First his hands and feet froze, then “little by little death reached my knees and elbows. The sensation was not painful, and my mind felt quite easy. But when death had been all over my body my head became unbearably cold, and it seemed to me that pincers squeezed my heart. I never felt such an acute pain, but it lasted only a minute, and my life went out.”

 

“’Well," thought I, "at last I am what they call a dead man, and here I am, a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by a kind of elastic string, and going up and always up . . ."

 

Looking down, Bertrand saw his half-frozen carcass sitting on the snowy ledge. “What a horrid thing is that body—deadly pale, with a yellowish-blue color, holding a cigar in its mouth and a match in its two burned fingers. . . . If only I had a hand and scissors to cut the thread which ties me still to it!”

 

With the feeling of joy and lucid calm that are also so often mentioned in the context of these experiences, Bertrand felt his vision expand, so that he could suddenly see far beyond the mountain his body was on. He saw his wife traveling to the village of Lucerne—though Bertrand recalled that she had told him she was not going there until the following day.

 

“My own regret was that I could not cut the string. In vain I traveled through such beautiful worlds that earth became insignificant. I had only two wishes: the certitude of not returning to earth, and the discovery of my next glorious body, without which I felt powerless.

Then Bertrand suddenly felt a tug. “Something was pulling the balloon down.” The guide had discovered Bertrand’s body and was rubbing it with snow to shock him back into consciousness.

 

“I felt disdain for the guide who, expecting a good reward, tried to make me understand that he had done wonders. My grief was immeasurable.”

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 197-99.