During her NDE, she says, she was "home"

I went into this abortion clinic in Austin, under the strong impression that the baby growing inside of me was not meant to be born. How on Earth I knew that being the peaceful, ultra-sensitive, loving girl I was is a mystery. Never in a million years would anyone have guessed me as someone who would abort unless it was dire. In my unique case, the baby had detached from my uterine wall and was barely hanging on. Apparently, all the stress caused spikes in my blood pressure and tonsillitis in the first month, making my body inhospitable. My decision to have the baby removed was a certain decision, and later I would find out why.

I went with my mother who has been a pharmacist for over twenty years, for support. She waited while they lead me back to the room. I laid down on the table, and they put the IVs in and put the gas mask on my face. I took slow deep breaths and closed my eyes. It felt like they were administering too much, so I tilted my head to allow the mask to fall off prematurely. The next thing, while still inhabiting my body, I went into a timeless dimension, which didn't scare me because I had experimented with X-tacy and Acid in high school. I relaxed and welcomed the Deja vu-like feelings. I heard the door creak open, and I knew it was going to happen before it did. I knew what the nurses were going to say before they spoke. I was aware of so much more. Everything was telling me 'This experience is meant to be.' So I relaxed deeper and went with it.

Toward the last part of the procedure, I was still under, but felt the surgeon apply pressure. I wasn't painful, just a jolt of pressure, and I consciously decided to respond with a bodily twinge. I did this to let him know I could feel a little bit. Well, he and the nurses took that as me being in pain, so naturally they turned up my anesthesia. I felt it go into me, and before I knew it, I had left.

All went dark and weightless, an infinite bluish purple perhaps, and amazing sparkling particles connected everything. I was home and I was so appreciative of how real human life seemed! I zoomed to the ceiling and 'faced' all directions simultaneously. I was aware of my body below and felt zero remorse, attachment, fear, or sadness for leaving. I became one with all in existence, yet, I had a firm knowing that I was me. All was okay, all was love, and the purpose of human life is solely for experience and expansion. I was one with the doctor, the nurses, my Mom down the hall, the equipment, the sound of the flat line, and all the space in between. I could have raised the doctor's arm up if I wanted to. But here's the important thing: I had zero desire to manipulate his free will. None. I knew I was capable of controlling the entire situation, it just wasn't in my best interest for me to do so. They were me and I was them. Murder, rape and cannibalism, they are all okay. Just experience to grow from. I knew everything that had ever and will ever exist in the universe. There was perfect infinite timelessness. Linear time is an illusion, just like our skin and bones and five senses. Our carbon-based senses were designed to perceive carbon-based reality, and it is really a spectacular illusion! My true nature is one with all, and I am God. And so is everyone and everything else.

The next thing I remember was hearing my name being screamed very loudly, twice. 'Robyn! ROBYN!' I took the biggest, deepest breath I have ever taken, like my very first breath! I was back. Heavy, but so empowered, so refreshed, I knew everything now. No one can ever lead me astray, and I would never again, for as long as I live, fear death. Because there is no death!!! We are meant to come here and play. That's it. Just be and play and experience this grand illusion of physical reality.

The sensitive details of what I experienced outside my physical body are challenging to describe in written or verbal language, but I did my best. Remember that my brain is merely trying to interpret such a high vibrational experience and decrease it enough to fit into human language according to my brains knowledge and journey. I had an expansive spiritual life before this experience so I can go into more detail sometimes. But people will always be limited to explaining their near death experiences through they're human understanding of God, which is not universal, but subjective. Keep that in mind. Sometimes the less knowledge a brain has of religion is best to keep the translation clear. That's my perspective anyway. 

NDERF.org, #6636

 

Jeff Olsen describes his near-death experience

I left my body at the scene of the accident and visited another realm of light, where I was told by my own deceased wife that I must return to my oldest son who also survived the accident. As I returned to my body, I had profound experiences with the living people I encountered. All judgment was lost as I saw others for who they really are through God's eyes. 

I re-entered my body but barely survived the following 5 months and 18 major surgeries with one foot in this realm and one in the next. During that time I was gaining profound insights, had visitations, and learned new truth.

I had other visits to the other side during that time and experienced profound dreams and visions during my nearly yearlong ordeal. I gained deep spiritual insights. I learned to love at a very deep level and experienced the unconditional love of God in a way that revealed, not only the divinity in myself, but in all of us as God's children.

 

Jeffrey Olsen, I Knew Their Hearts: The Amazing True Story of a Journey Beyond the Veil to Learn the Silent Language of the Heart (2012)

NDE reports do not clearly identify a "place"

Bruce Greyson writes: On the day after her thirty-fifth birthday, without any warning, Róisín Fitzpatrick suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her in a life-threatening situation in the intensive care unit. She described for me the near-death experience she had in the ICU: “I became pure energy and realized that ‘I’ still existed even though I was no longer an individual person in my physical body. Instead, I had merged to become one with a greater, light-filled consciousness. 

“There was no beginning or end, no start or finish, no life or death, no ‘out there’ or ‘in here.’ It made absolutely no difference if I was in my body; it was not even relevant because I had become at one with this incredibly potent, highly charged field of energy. 

“Surrounded by a hushed silence, I became enveloped by undulating waves of opalescent and crystalline light. Simultaneously, there was a feeling of love and bliss that extended on to infinity. From this place everything was possible because only love, joy, peace, and creative potential were real. My understanding of ‘reality’ was turned 180 degrees when I learned that at our deepest level of consciousness, we are energy beings of pure love and light who are temporarily residing in physical bodies.”

Greyson adds: Because half of the experiencers in my research could not describe a “place” they had gone in their NDEs, and there was little consistency in the descriptions of the other half who did describe a “place,” none of these images can be called “typical” of NDEs.

Greyson, Bruce. After (p. 148-49). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

NDE survivors say experience was "definitely real"

Bruce Greyson reports: "Jayne Smith, who had an NDE at age twenty-three during a bad reaction to anesthesia during childbirth, told me, 'Never, ever did I think it might have been a dream. I knew that it was true and real, more real than any other thing I’ve ever known.' LeaAnn Carroll developed a massive blood clot in her lung at age thirty-one that stopped her heart. She said about her NDE, 'My death experience is more real to me than life. Nancy Evans Bush, who had an NDE at age twenty-seven during a bad reaction to nitrous oxide, said, 'Yes, it was more real than real: absolute reality.' Susan Litton, who had an NDE at age twenty-nine, told me, 'There was no sense of doubt whatsoever. Everything had a sense of being more real than anything that would normally be experienced in the physical world as we know it.' Chris Matt, who had an NDE when he rolled his car over at age twenty-one, said, 'I have no doubt that it was real. It was vastly more real than anything we experience here.' Yolaine Stout, who attempted suicide at the age of thirty-one, said, 'This was more real than anything on earth. By comparison, my life in my body had been a dream.'

Greyson adds: "Their memories of the NDE had more detail, more clarity, more context, and more intense feelings than memories of real events. And that is exactly what people had been telling me for decades—that their NDEs were more real to them than everyday experiences. On the other hand, for people who had come close to death but didn’t have an NDE, their memories of the event were not recalled as more real than other real events. Two other research teams, in Belgium and in Italy, came up with the same results."

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 96-97). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Greyson explains the purposes of his "NDE Scale"

I wanted to bring some logical order to the study of near-death experiences. To tackle this problem, I developed the NDE Scale in the early 1980s as a way to standardize what we mean by the term “near-death experience.” I started with a list of the eighty features most often mentioned in the literature on NDEs and sent this list to a large sample of experiencers. Then, through a series of repeated assessments by experiencers and other researchers, with the help of statistical analyses, I whittled the scale down to a more manageable list of sixteen features.

So the NDE Scale is not a measure of how deeply an experiencer may be affected. It’s simply a tool that researchers can use to make sure they’re investigating the same experience. And in the thirty-eight years since it was first published, the NDE Scale has stood the test of time, having been translated into more than twenty languages and used in hundreds of studies around the world.

Twenty years after this scale was published, and long after it had become accepted as the standard tool of NDE researchers worldwide, I was challenged by two skeptical scholars I didn’t know: Rense Lange, a statistician from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, and Jim Houran, a psychologist then at the University of Adelaide in Australia. These scholars had no previous interest in NDEs but were applying a complicated statistical test to various scales that had been developed by other researchers—and in the process “debunking” some of them. They wanted me to give them the raw responses on the scale that I had collected from around three hundred people who had come close to death and let them carry out their sophisticated statistical test on the data to see whether the NDE Scale was valid. 

Apprehensive, I had reservations about working with them. I’d already put years of work into this scale, and it had become accepted by scholars around the world. I wasn’t familiar with the statistical test they wanted to carry out. I didn’t know whether it was a good test, and whether my scale would hold up under it. What if the scale failed the test? Would it cast doubt on all my work with NDEs? Would it ruin my credibility and my career as a scientist? 

On the other hand, if the NDE Scale was faulty, I certainly wanted to know that! How could I refuse to share my data and put my scale to the test? If I was truly a skeptic, how could I be skeptical of other people’s ideas but not my own? I’d met too many academics who called themselves “skeptics” but refused to look at any evidence that might challenge their own beliefs. Could I swallow my pride—and my fear of failing—and expose my data to an independent test? That’s what intellectual honesty required. That’s what a true skeptic would do.

That’s what my father, had he still been alive, would have wanted me to do. I handed over all my data on the NDE Scale, the responses of hundreds of people who’d had near-death experiences and waited for the results from Rense and Jim. As the months went by, I had many fitful nights second-guessing my decision to subject my work to that scrutiny. But each morning, in the light of day, I knew that it was the right thing to do. To my great relief, their analysis ended up confirming the validity of the NDE Scale. 

It showed that the scale measured one consistent experience that was the same for men and women and for people of all ages, across many cultures. NDE Scale scores were the same no matter how many years had passed since the experience. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. My NDE Scale—and by extension NDEs themselves—had been given the stamp of credibility by a team of skeptics who not only had no stake in near-death experiences but would have been happy to discredit them.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 54-56). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

NDE researcher Bruce Greyson: life reviews

Among all the participants in my research, a quarter reported a life review. Some experiencers told me that their entire lives flashed before their eyes, from birth to the present or in reverse order. Others said that they were able to view different scenes from their lives at will. The vast majority described this life review as more vivid than ordinary memories. Some experiencers told me that they were shown images from their past, as on a movie screen or on pages in a book. But many, like Tom, reported that they re-experienced these past events as if they were still happening, with all the original sensations and feelings. 

Three-fourths of those who had a life review said that it changed their ideas of what things are important in life. Half of those who had a life review experienced a sense of judgment, most often judging themselves, about the rightness or wrongness of their actions. And more than half experienced these past events not only through their own eyes, but also—like Tom—from the viewpoints of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 39-42). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Tom Sawyer's NDE life review

Bruce Greyson reports that Tom described, at some point during the NDE that followed, reliving painful incidents from earlier in his life: “I experienced a total life review. The best way to describe it is to give you an example. When I was around eight years old, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds in the yard. Aunt Gay, my mother’s sister, lived in the cottage out back. She was always fun to be with. Certainly all the kids thought she was a cool person to know. She had described to me her plans for some wildflowers that grew on little vines in the backyard. ‘Leave them alone now, Tommy,’ she said. 

“However, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds. Now, I could have explained to my father that Aunt Gay wanted the weeds left to grow in this particular area. Or I could have explained to Aunt Gay that Father had just told me to mow the lawn and said to cut that patch of weeds. Or, I could methodically and deliberately go ahead and mow the yard and cut the weeds. I did that. I deliberately decided to be bad, to be malicious. 

My Aunt Gay never said a word to me; nothing was ever mentioned. I thought, ‘Wow, I got away with it.’ End of story. “Guess what? I not only relived it in my life review, but I relived every exact thought and attitude; even the air temperature and things that I couldn’t have possibly measured when I was eight years old. For example, at the time, I wasn’t aware of how many mosquitoes were in the area. In the life review, I could have counted the mosquitoes. Everything was more accurate than could possibly be perceived in the reality of the original event. I experienced things that cannot be perceived. I watched me mowing the lawn from straight above, anywhere from several hundred to a couple of thousand feet, as though I were a camera. I watched all of that. My life review was absolutely, positively, everything basically from the first breath of life right through the accident. It was that panoramic view. It was everything.”

Bruce Greyson, After (2021), 39-40.