Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (7 page)

I felt that I was sliding deep down into another state of consciousness. That’s to say, my consciousness traveled while my body remained motionless on the bed. I could see my body, but I couldn’t feel it. I was being sucked away, as it were. I entered an extremely dark, long, and spiral-shaped tunnel, which struck me as frightening though not unfamiliar at first. I soared through this spiral-shaped funnel, and the further or the higher I got, the lighter it became. The intensity of the light changed to a deep purple/ violet. “Above” me I saw an extremely bright, radiant white light. I whirled, floated, toward it.

I felt that I was letting go of my body and rising up. Through the roof. Over the hospital. Everything became smaller, and I began to accelerate. Everything around me was dark, with the exception of several stars that hurled toward me and I noticed their different colors. I had no time to look at anything because I was moving so fast. Things slowed down when I saw that I’d ended up in a kind of hourglass and that I was being “sucked” toward the opening. Then I realized that I wasn’t alone because a flow of translucent beings was heading the same way as me and another flow was moving in the opposite direction. When I thought about reincarnation, it later dawned on me that it could well be this flow. Once I got through the opening everything began to change. First off, I got this feeling. It was so emotional that I can’t possibly describe it. I was overcome with a feeling of peace that I’d never known on earth…. An overwhelming feeling of love came over me, not the earthly feeling I was quite familiar with, but something I can’t describe. Above me I saw a bright light, and on my way there I heard beautiful music and I saw colors I’d never seen before. As well as the feelings I just described, I had the impression that this was a different dimension altogether. And if anything was missing it was our earthly conception of time! I had what you might call an enhanced vision of this other dimension. On my way up, toward the all-encompassing light, I saw numerous other “beings” who were also heading there. When I had nearly arrived at this light, a kind of membrane in front of it stopped me from going any further….

All of a sudden I knew that I was dead. This realization struck me as odd. I hovered about twenty feet above my body, which was still on the operating table. I was surrounded by doctors who were talking to one another, but I didn’t hear their voices. I also saw my husband waiting on a bench in a darkish room somewhere in the hospital. He was nervous. He was rolling a cigarette. From one moment to the next I found myself flying through a tunnel. It was extremely long, and I flew through it head-first. The tunnel was virtually horizontal, but at a slight upward angle. It was about 10 feet in diameter. I heard a whizzing sound, like wind blowing past my ear, and in the distance I saw a bright light, which I was being sucked toward, but which still seemed a long way off. And all this time I felt scared, powerless, and lonely, because nobody knew that I was aware that I was dead. I wanted to either return or not be aware of my death. But I clearly had no choice in the matter…. The light that I was now approaching was of a kind that I’d never seen before and that differs from any other kind such as sunlight. It was white and extremely bright, and yet you could easily look at it.

Suddenly I stopped in this dark tunnel and began to fall at enormous speed, faster and faster and faster. Like I was literally hurled down, head-first, into this black hole. It was pitch-dark; I couldn’t see a thing. And as I was falling, I began to hear screams, shrieks, heartrending, dreadful, terrible laughter, and the most disgusting stench you can imagine, and then the blackness changed to fire…. And there were all kinds of ghastly looking and terrifying creatures, some worse than others, who were snatching at me…. I begged for God’s mercy…. And suddenly I was woken up by the voices of female ER doctors who had resuscitated me….

We were moving again. We had left the Navy base with its circumference of seedy streets and bars, and were now standing, in this dimension where travel seemed to take no time at all, on the edge of a wide, flat plain…. I could see no living man or woman. The plain was crowded, even jammed with hordes of ghostly discarnate beings…. All of these thousands of people were apparently no more substantial than I myself. And they were the most frustrated, the angriest, the most completely miserable beings I had ever laid eyes on.

“Lord Jesus!” I cried. “Where are we?”…

Everywhere people were locked in what looked like fights to the death, writhing, punching, gouging….

Although they appeared to be literally on top of each other, it was as though each man was boxing the air; at last I realized that of course, having no substance, they could not actually touch one another….

If I suspected before that I was seeing hell, now I was sure of it. Up to this moment the misery I had watched consisted in being chained to a physical world of which we were no longer part. Now I saw that there were other kinds of chains…. These creatures seemed to be locked into habits of mind and emotion, into hatred, lust, destructive thought patterns.

Even more hideous than the bites and kicks they exchanged were the sexual abuses many were performing in feverish pantomime…. Whatever anyone thought, however fleetingly or unwillingly, was instantly apparent to all around him, more completely than words could have expressed it….

And the thoughts most frequently communicated had to do with the superior knowledge, or abilities, or background of the thinker….

What was it going to be like, I thought with sudden panic, to live forever where my most private thoughts were not private at all? No disguising them, no covering them up, no way to pretend I was anything but what I actually was. How unbearable….

Perhaps in the course of eons or of seconds, each creature here had sought out the company of others as pride-and-hate-filled as himself, until together they formed this society of the damned….

I didn’t know. All I clearly saw was that not one of these bickering beings on the plain had been abandoned. They were being attended, watched over, ministered to. And the equally observable fact was that not one of them knew it.
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What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn’t actually name. It all looked hundreds of miles away. And yet I could see everything in detail—even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight. It was both far away and close. Exceptionally beautiful. The best way to describe it would be: a heavenly sight.

I arrived in a royal realm, or at least that’s what it smelled like. The atmosphere, insofar as you could call it that, was divine, a flowery, sweet-smelling environment, which was completely three-dimensional and about a thousand times more beautiful than my favorite holiday destination in spring.

During my NDE following a cardiac arrest, I saw both my dead grandmother and a man who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know. Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who’d been deported and killed in World War II. My mother showed me a photograph. The unfamiliar man I’d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.

At the age of sixteen I had a serious motorcycle accident. I was in a coma for nearly three weeks. During that coma I had an extremely powerful experience…and then I came to a kind of iron fence. Behind it stood Mr. Van der G., the father of my parents’ best friend. He told me that I couldn’t go any further. I had to go back because my time hadn’t come yet…. When I told my parents after waking up, they said to me that Mr. Van der G. had died and been buried during my coma. I couldn’t have known that he was dead.

Suddenly I recognized all these relatives. They were all around thirty-five years old, including the little brother I’d never known, because he had died during the war when he was two years old, before I was born. He had grown a lot. My parents were there too, and they smiled at me, just like the others.