While drowning experiences house of God

When I moved to Puerto Rico in 1994, I had no idea that I would live through a near-drowning, even though the island, surrounded by oceans and seas, scared me. I have always had a fear of drowning in deep water. A year and a half after arriving, on September 9, 1995, I was settled in my own home and busy working full-time. I was happy and having great fun with my local companions who had become family to me. One night after work, I gave a ride to some visitors of my friends, whom were visiting the island. I drove them up the west coast where I lived and worked. After some cajoling I was glad to take the drive up along the coast of beautiful Puerto Rico as I drove my local friend and his visitors up to their cottage where they were staying for a week.

It was evening by the time we arrived. I was going to stay the night and then drive home in the morning after shopping and going to the beach. Later that night, Maury and I went for a walk together, down to the beach. He was the handsome brother of the friend who had asked for the ride. We were getting along great. I felt invigorated and blessed, enjoying one of the most enchanting beaches in the world. This is the surfing capital of Puerto Rico and known world-wide by surfers who ride the huge waves along the pristine shoreline. The waves were gigantic and loud that particular night because of the post-hurricane weather, with another hurricane on the way.

We were playing by the shore with the beauty of the night sky off-setting the romantic ocean at our finger-tips; we were lulled into the ocean. While playing in the water, the ocean terrifyingly grabbed us in one wave! We were swept out to sea! Panicking, we struggled together to swim back to shore, but the waves were too big and powerful, plus the rip-tide had a deadly hold on us and we could not swim against it. Personally, I knew nothing of rip-tides or what to do if ever caught in one which is to swim parallel to the shore until out of the rip tide current. I did know I was going to drown that night and would never make it back to the beach. Due to the violent blasting of the waves, Maury and I were forcibly separated three times. He was not able to stay or swim me into the shore. I found myself alone in the middle of the vast, immense ocean, fighting for my life. I was able to prolong survival by timing the waves crashing on my head. I think I was out there for about thirty minutes, although it felt like forever. As the waves washed me under, over and over, I was able to tell when to take a breath, to sustain me underwater, until I swam up to the surface, to take another breath. This went on until I was too exhausted to move any body part.

Eventually the moment arrived when I became aware of exactly which wave would pummel me underwater to my death. As I inhaled my last breath, I felt an all-encompassing peace releasing all fears. The moment had come to get right with God. I was acutely conscious of the knowledge I would not make it up to the surface again. I was having my last view of the beach, the stars and the expansive, blue, dark ocean. As I took the breath that would sustain me for the rest of my life, I timed the wave falling on me. The ocean stilled and became very quiet. Stars began to fall on the horizon and dropped into the sea. When I looked up at the wave, it was suspended above me dripping droplets of water from its crest.

The next moment, I traveled to space. My spirit was taken in an instant to outer space and exploded into pure consciousness! I was acutely aware in my mind that I was traveling and had become an astral being. I was taken into the sky and into space. I was above the beach and to the right of the almost full moon. I was completely conscious of being alive without a body! As I began to comprehend where I found myself, my mental dialogue was the same as when I was in the physical realm. I noticed my mind was still thinking, hearing, and seeing. I tried to figure out where I had been taken. My spirit eyes felt the same as seeing through my body's eyes. My mind told me I was in a holy place. I was a visitor in a house of God.

The next moments were timeless, as I was gently informed about how I lived my life on earth. Completely non-judgmental, yet clear and precise was the voice inside my head. I learned why I was dying and how it would affect my loved ones. More information kept flooding my consciousness as I listened, learned, and understood profound life conditions of the past, present and future. I became my own proof of individual divinity, blessed with immortal life, by the infinite mercy of God's unconditional love. The revelations seemed to go on until I noticed a bubble of light, so to speak, to the right of where I was floating. Inviting and comforting, all my attention was eventually diverted to it. I knew without a doubt it was the entrance to heaven. I was happy to be going there, especially if what I was feeling is the norm. I forced myself to float towards it. When close, all of a sudden in an excruciating moment, I was rudely blasted back into my body!

The last wave had slammed me down hard as I began the descent into the dark, watery abyss to my drowning death. Then I felt a hand! Miraculously I was being rescued out of the last wave at the exact moment I was going to drown. Upon realizing I was being pulled to safety, I died and do not remember being pulled out of the water and laid on the beach. Upon resuscitation when I struggled to wake up, I was shocked to find out I was still alive and much to my chagrin, still in my body!

The only thing I could think about was my near-death experience and how much I wanted to go back to where I had just visited. Plus it made no sense I was on earth. The rest of the night and into the next morning became an extended fight to live. By the time the light of the new day dawned, I had actually lived through the first near-drowning, to almost die again from secondary drowning. Upon admittance to a hospital, I spent a long week in the Intensive Care Unit. Upon being discharged I went home a different person than whom I had been before that fateful night up the western Puerto Rican coast. 

NDERF.org #7516

"God experiences itself through its creation."

When I was younger, my parents were both working full-time jobs. My father was stationed at Fort Bliss and my mother worked various defense or education-related jobs. Thus, I was placed into a summer youth program. I was one of the younger, if not the youngest child, in the program. One summer day, they took us to a public pool. Most of the kids, being older and more experienced with swimming, were at the deeper end of the pool leaving me alone. I remember wanting to join them and went under the floating barrier to swim towards them. I remember not being able to feel the bottom of the pool with my feet and slipping under the water. I felt fear. I remember reaching towards the light of the sun, shining through the water and then suddenly being above the water.

I could see myself under the water and I remember feeling no attachment to the body. I floated higher and higher above the scene and could see a great part of the city below me. I still had a human form while floating up, it was like a 'ghost body'. I remember looking up into the sky and then being somewhere else. This place was like being in space except with no stars. Wherever this somewhere was, I had no human form. I was like a small ball of yellow light. Though in darkness, I knew I could see in all directions at once. Around me appeared other orbs of light. The orbs were other people who had passed away. We all glowed with different shades of light. Some were more pink, some were blue and I was yellow. I remember that all of our thoughts flowed into and out of each other simultaneously. Despite this, I could still process my own thoughts. I knew that the lady near me was in her 30s, that she had died in a car accident leaving behind children but she was at peace with the fact that her husband would care for them.

I remember a great light appearing before us, like the sun but smoother and cleaner in its light. It did not hurt to look at and regardless we did not have physical eyes. There was the greatest feeling emanating from it. It was the greatest form of love I have ever felt. Greatly beyond that of any parent, lover or child. It was like every expression of love combined. I remember being drawn towards it, moving faster and faster but on the other side and moving at the speed we were. There was no real wind, just the softest of breezes. I remember knowing where I was at the time but we do not have a word for it here in the life side. I remembering feeling at home, like I had returned and I was happy. There was a sound like music, but not music like what we have here on Earth. It was like the sound between the ringing of chimes.

Some force moved through my soul and stopped me from proceeding forward. There were no words, but this kind of knowing that came into me. It said I needed to turn around. I remember saying that I did not want to turn around and that I was tired of having to go back so many times and ready to stay here. It said that I had not accomplished what I needed to do. Before I knew it, I was tumbling through darkness and was suddenly back over the city and drifting back towards my body. I was out of the water. I remember several of the other kids out of the water; some crying and the female lifeguard was working on getting me back. I remember having my ghost body back and the feeling of hands pushing me on my back, back down into my body. The re-connection was painful. I remembering feeling confined in my body.

For years after this I was depressed and wanted to go back to that place. My childhood was not the smoothest as far as my family life was concerned and I knew if I took my own life I could go back there.

The biggest thing I learned from the experience is that 'God' experiences itself through its creation. That is, we are all expressions of 'God' simultaneously. I have felt in life a deep and instant connection with certain people, especially one of my friends who I also love deeply and who is currently missing. We both have talked about perhaps having met in a past life and joked about how we would meet in future lives. Though I hope my friend is found, I am confident that either way, our paths shall cross again. 

NDERF.org #7737

Survivor foresees the consequences of his life

I was 4 years old. As I recall it was in the summer or fall. I had been having difficulty breathing and in the evening I was taken to the emergency room by my mother and father. This wasn't unusual; I averaged a trip to the hospital at least once every two weeks. On one occasion I distinctly remember listening to a doctor advising my parents to stop caring for me and to let me die, telling that I was not worth taking care of due to the extremeness of my asthma and would be dead by the time I was age 9.

Anyway, I was laying on an examination table, my parents were to the left of me. The door to the room was closed and I was in extreme pain. Every breath felt like burning razors were tearing through my lungs and throat. I don't remember the moment, I stopped breathing; only, all of the pain stopped and I found myself in a vast place.

The air, if you could call it that, was filled with an unearthly white light. The place seemed to expand for all eternity. I do remember a being of light, God, standing near me. It was looming over me like a great tower of strength, yet radiating only warmth and love. Its first words sent a shock through me, 'Bobby, I'm sorry for the pain this meeting will cause you. When I created the Universe, I put rules and limitations in place. Every time you come here, it changes you, because this is your second time here. You will remember more than you're supposed to, and it will cause you more pain than you know. You will suffer as no one in your family ever has, and I can't change that.' As those words were spoken, if that's what you could call them, I caught glimpses of my life and felt pride, love, joy, and sadness, all pouring into me. Each images was of me, but from the standpoint of a being standing with me or looking on.

I remember the conversation going on for an eternity, but in reality it only lasted a minute or two at the most. I remember a white light that seemed to pulsate and understanding that it was some kind of extension of God. It stored the moments of every moment and life. It allowed a mortal to experience them. If I was to label this, I would call it the Book of Fate, that contains all that has, is, and will be.

Somehow I felt the light from that device and God merge to become one with me. I saw my life, all 128 years of it. I saw my mother die, and me being unable to do anything about it as I had moved away. I saw my sister struggling with depression and worse due to a rape she experienced in her mid 20's. I saw my father die a few years after my mother. I saw a home I'd built for my family, in a place halfway across the country,. This home was far away from my home. I also experienced the final moments of my mortal life. I was in a bed, I don't know where, my children and grandchildren were there with me. I remember thinking, 'It's finally done.' I remember feeling a horrible wave of sadness rip through me as I thought of my daughter who had died before me, and then I remember thinking of my wife. (Keep in mind I was 4 years old while experiencing the life experiences of an 128 year old man) I remembered the night we were married, the room was dimly lit and she was standing in front of me getting undressed. I remember seeing a strand of gray in her hair and then looking back on that moment, realizing how in that moment I had been reborn and everything was worth it. Then I realized I'd be able to see her and my daughter again, and gave into death for the final time.

That wasn't the end though, I was shown the consequences of my life, thousands of people that I'd interacted with and felt what they felt about me, saw their life and how I had impacted them. Next I saw the consequences of my life and the influence of my actions. I saw people reading my books, teaching lessons to children that I had taught them.

I remember waking up confused and trying to deal with everything. For a long time afterwards I struggled to deal with what I saw, every time my mom got sick, I wondered if it was time for her to die. I tried to always be strong, and in time eventually came to blame myself for my mother's oncoming death and sister's oncoming rape. I couldn't deal with the things I had experienced and it took nearly 29 years after this before I could begin to stop blaming myself and accept that I had nothing to do with those things. 

NDERF.org, 8010

 

Survivor gives thanks for being in God's presence

I was 8.5 months pregnant and suddenly developed toxemia poisoning. This was my 5th pregnancy, but only second birth. I had lost 3 other babies. I had a 5 year-old-son of my own and a 2-year-old that we had adopted as a baby when I kept miscarrying. I was rushed to a hospital emergency room when my blood pressure went way out of control. My face was so swollen that I could hardly see out of my eyes. The rest of my body swelled to the point that the doctor on call, mistakenly thought I was an obese person and yet I only weighed 135 lbs! Everything happened so very fast, such that I suddenly could not breathe on my own. I lost consciousness at some point. That is when I experienced being outside of my body and was watching how frantically they were working to get me to breathe on my own.

My next realization was that I was no longer frightened about not being able to breathe on my own. I was at peace and very aware of the steps the doctors and nurses were taking to save my life. I understood all the terms they were using and could comprehend that I was not alive as far as they were concerned. I became aware of is the state of each person's relationship with others in the room. There were suddenly no secrets and yet, there was no judgment on my part, but rather an unconditional love. I felt very much loved at this time and I wanted to extend that to the others in the room. But they could not hear me. I could hear and see everything! It made me think of the scripture that says, we 'will fully know as we are fully known.' Oddly, this ability continues today in terms of knowing the truth about people's relationships with others.

I was not allowed to stay in God's presence, which was so full of light and love. I was told, not in words, but rather a thought that I had to come back and continue to be a mother to my sons.

I suddenly became aware of being rushed to the delivery room and being guided through the birth which was so fast! Then I was sent to the recovery room and I wanted my bible because I didn't want to lose that incredible sense of love and light that I had experienced. However, the recovery room nurse wouldn't let me have my bible! She said I needed to rest. I laughed and had the boldness to tell her that she had no idea what true rest was. I told her I had just been in God's presence and discovered a rest and peace, that no amount of sleep would ever bring. She didn't comprehend what I was saying but did acknowledge that I must have gone through a frightening experience since they 'lost me for a little while'. I tried to explain that I wasn't lost at all and that I felt more alive than I every had felt. I suddenly understood what 'living in the spirit' meant. I also came to see that we put so much effort into our physical being, when in fact life through the spirit is far more powerful and satisfying. Words cannot adequately describe the incredible life and power that I had experienced from being in God's presence. I feel at loss to help others understand that the reality we live in our physical lives is nothing compared to life in the spiritual realm. Words cannot describe adequately what it is like to be in God's tremendously loving presence. I did learn that I can give the same unconditional love to others as though it is flowing through me from God.

NDERF.org, #8034

Pathway Program of Shared Crossing Project

Eben Alexander and Karen Newall write: "Hospice volunteer, William Peters in Santa Barbara, in 2010 created protocols via the Shared Crossing Project’s Pathway program, designed to assist others in accepting death as a natural process and specific exercises in how to establish ‘links’ between the dying and their loved ones.

"One such introductory exercise to facilitate this bond goes like this: 'Take a moment to deepen into a relaxed and contemplative state and focus on one particular close relationship. Reflect on a specific event or memory that evokes feelings of gratitude for this loved one. Perhaps this occurred at a time of great joy in your life, or when you most needed comfort. Allow these feelings of appreciation to form a bond across time and space, between you and this special loved one. Allow yourself to sense and feel the presence of this being, with you, now.'

"When practiced with some frequency over time, this visualization creates a link that stretches between this life and what lies ahead. Through a series of increasingly elaborate exercises, participants learn the landscape that leads from this human life into afterlife and choreograph their transitions with loved ones. Participants who followed such protocols have attained a more meaningful relationship with death and numerous long-term benefits. These include increased appreciation for life, decreased fear of death, more manageable grief, and a deeper understanding of their own purpose in life.

"Research reveals that these practices enable a variety of profound and healing end-of-life phenomena that Peters has identified and documented as ‘shared crossings.’ These refer to a kind of communication across the veil that yields a transformative gift, including predeath dreams/visions (where the dying express that they have been visited by a deceased loved one who provides them guidance and comfort); the shared death experience (where loved ones report that they went into the initial stages of the afterlife with the dying individual and experienced phenomena such as a shared out-of-body event, witnessing benevolent beings of light, encountering heavenly realms, and ultimately realizing that their departing loved one is safe, well-cared-for, and happy); postdeath coincidences (where an individual experiences a profound energetic event in which they know that a loved one has died, yet are alive and well); and many more.

"We are spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe. Fundamentally, this spirituality means we are all interconnected through the Collective Mind, and that the emotional power behind our hopes and dreams has a basis in reality that guides the unfolding of events in our lives. The very fuel of that spirituality is love, and the more we can express unconditional love for self and others, the more healing or ‘becoming whole’ we will be. The best way to discover this is through cultivating a means of going within, often described as a practice of meditation or prayer. Any physical, mental, or emotional health must be firmly rooted in spiritual health, and prayer is a most natural means of invoking such overall wellness. As hundreds have shared with us, that sense of eternal connection is truly a life changer. We just need to be open to the possibility."

Eben Alexander and Karen Newall, Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness (Rodale, 2017).

Slave song: "I'm Going Home"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Slave Songs of the United States” by Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison, and William Francis Allen, 1867.

Quantum energy and love binds the universe

A natural result of feeling the infinite love of the universe is to recognize that conscious awareness is the very same force at the core of all existence. Such oneness and dissolution of the sense of self, and complete identity with all of life and the source of all that is, is the pathway toward truth. Indeed, the deepest lesson of my journey was realizing that unconditional love was the very fabric of the spiritual realm from which the totality of reality emerges.

The binding force of love reported by the vast majority of spiritual journeyers over millennia brings to mind the concept of ‘the ether,’ a substance that scientists in the late 19th century postulated might possibly serve as the medium pervading the entire universe through which light waves travel. Light fundamentally connects our entire universe with itself, pervading every bit of the physical universe throughout time.

In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed an experiment to investigate the ether, and they proved that the ether as it was postulated (as a classical medium, like air and water) did not exist. Yet in an amazing turn of events, the most recent work in physics demonstrates that the ether is now the way most modern physicists would describe the vacuum energy, the amazingly powerful source of energy that quantum physics has revealed to exist in the very fabric of spacetime itself. Vacuum energy is a potentially endless source of energy that could revolutionize our society, if we could just determine a way to harness it for our use here on earth. Ether has not resurged as an idea in physics, but it is a relativistic ether that is fully compatible with the ideas of relativity. But the concept of ether, which many would identify as the substance that acts as the binding force of our universe, is almost identical to the infinite binding force of love.

Our concepts of a loving, merciful, and compassionate force operating in the universe (whether from the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam or from other traditions, such as Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, or Buddhism) have originated from human encounters in the spiritual realm. Most of those traditions emerged from individuals who had witnessed extraordinary features of the invisible realm that revealed a much deeper connection with the universe. In essence, this is the most basic definition of spirituality, that we have a connection with the universe that enables us to sense vital aspects of it and to have some influence in achieving our goals and desires.

Eben Alexander and Karen Newall, Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Heart of Consciousness, 2017.