The Written Account of my NDE

              In October 1985 I had a head-on collision in a car. It was Columbus day, a holiday, and I had spent the day chilling out and watching videos. This was back when we all had VCRs, and we bought or rented videos from a store. There were no cell phones, no modern-day computers, no Internet (ha, ha! The Dark Ages!)

                I had just returned the videos to the store, and I was heading down the road to the grocery store. It was dusk, and I was just about to enter an intersection with a green light. The only other car on the two-lane road was also about to enter the intersection from the other direction. At the last minute, with no warning, he turned left, crossing over into my lane. I had enough time to think, “Omigod he’s turn….” I had no time to finish the thought. I do not think I even got my foot up off the accelerator, let alone moved it to the brake. I do not recall the actual collision, and I felt no pain. I just had that thought, “Omigod he’s turn….,”and I suddenly found myself floating in the air about 15 feet up, looking down at the top of my car. It took a minute to understand what had happened, and what I was looking at.

                I was fortunate because, even though there was very little information available in 1985, I had read about out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences.[2]  I had wanted to experience being out of my body and had tried, unsuccessfully, to do that. But suddenly, with no effort on my part, I was literally out of my body! I was actually excited about that! I looked down and saw the two cars crunched into each other, and I saw the man from the other car get out and walk over to my car. I thought he was walking over to see if I was all right. He reached in through the open window on the driver’s side and he turned my headlights off. I thought that was strange, but I lost interest in what was going on.

                Being out of my body was an amazing experience! I suddenly realized that if “I” was hovering above my car, while my body was inside the car, unconscious, then my whole idea and belief of who “I” was, was totally wrong! As most people in our material society do, I had identified my “self” with my body. I believed that “I” was my body, that my body was, in fact, who I am—all of who I am. But suddenly, I knew without a doubt that was wrong. “I”—my consciousness, the part of me that can think and feel—was no longer in my body, so it seemed obvious that my body is something that “I” occupy, rather than being what “I” am! And as I really came to terms with that concept, I realized that “I” was so much more than I had ever imagined. Being out of my body felt like I had been released from tight restraints that I had worn for a very long time. I felt totally free for the first time in my life. At the same time, I felt like “I”—the All of Who I AM—was much bigger than I could comprehend; that I was a vast, expanded Being, that had merely been pretending to be small and limited. Without a body, I could “see” in every direction simultaneously, even without physical eyes to see. The sudden loss of my body was not a hardship; being IN my body had been the hardship, and now I was FREE!

                It suddenly occurred to me that most of the people I’d read about who had had near-death experiences reported seeing a great Light, often in the form of a wormhole or tunnel, and I wondered where the Light was. As the thought entered my mind, I felt rather than saw the Tunnel of Light. It was as if the air itself was suddenly disrupted by an amazingly wonderful energy, a feeling of amazing love and joy. The Light itself was bright and inviting and I effortlessly moved toward it. The closer I got to the tunnel, the more wonderful the energy felt. It felt alive, sentient, and it knew who I was. I felt it pulsing with Love, and it called me, drew me, pulled me, and beckoned me… Home.

                I moved through the tunnel very quickly, arriving in a “place” that didn’t seem to have anything that would identify it as an actual location. It was like being in a giant room filled with amazingly bright Light. It was so bright that if I had still had physical eyes, I would not have been able to keep them open. But at the same time, it was not Light at all, but actually Love, Love that was at once alive, sentient, all-knowing, benevolent, and very, very personal. But it felt normal, as if I had finally arrived where I belonged, and it felt the way everything should have felt all along, on planet earth, but never did. There were no limitations, no gravity, nothing holding me “back,” and nothing to “work against.”

                It was like being in the Heart of God, totally embraced in pure unconditional love and joy! I felt myself laughing with joy in every fiber of my Being—every fiber of my vast, expansive Being. It was all just pure LOVE and pure JOY! And like a fish kept too long out of water, I basked in it, reveled in it, and soaked it up, feeding myself on the sustenance that I had felt starved of for so long.

                I knew suddenly that I was back inside  God, where I truly belong, where all of us truly belong. I realized, or remembered, that God is not a person or personality, even though humans like to portray “Him” as that. Humans project their personality traits—the judgment, the condemnation, the need to be worshipped and obeyed, the need to lash out and punish those who do not do what we want, etc., etc.—onto God, in essence making Him in their image, rather than the other way around. But that human tendency makes God small, perhaps small enough for our human minds to comprehend. The God I was experiencing is All That Is…. God IS Everything[3]…. including each one of us. God is the Creative Force of all the Universes, a giant ocean of LOVE, from which all matter is created. And I was a little drop of that ocean, that once had been separated and was finally back where I belonged. 

                Everything around me was permeated by a feeling of total unconditional love and peace and joy and bliss. There really are no words to describe it, because there is no such feeling on earth. It was a feeling of being totally loved and accepted for exactly who I am, exactly as I am, warts and all! All my cares and worries and woes, all guilt and anger, all self-judgment and self-doubt, all to-do lists, and all need to do anything at all had simply fallen away, and I was just BEING. And I was loving myself and being loved very, very deeply. I would say I felt that love deep in my bones, deep in every cell of my body—it was that kind of feeling—but I knew I did not at that moment have a physical body!

                If returning Home to bask in that Love and Light again were not enough, I was astonished to realize that there was also great Love and Joy throughout All That Is that I was back! I had yearned and ached all my life because of the perceived separation from Home that I experienced as a human. I had yearned and ached to be back where I belonged—even though I didn’t exactly know where that was—and I had finally returned there. And oddly enough, I could actually feel that the All That Is had felt even more heartbroken and more yearning for ME when I was off on planet earth pretending to be human than I had felt for IT (and that was saying something)! And I was truly received back Home like the Prodigal Son, with infinite joy and love and celebration!

                It is a sad statement that many of us, including me, never experience what it feels like to be totally loved and appreciated by our families. Human families, perhaps more in the past than now, are not set up for unconditional Love. They are set up for conditional love, and children grow up with the idea (that is reinforced over and over by friends, teachers, relationships, employers, etc., etc.) that they will be loved and accepted only if they act in certain ways to please others. Worse, some are "taught" that they must look a certain way to be loved. Most of us never get to feel that we are totally loved no matter what, and no matter how we act or what we do, simply because we are alive or because we are who we are...  (see the PDF for the complete story)