Near death experiences
jedijudy
Heaven Host
in Epiphanies
About thirty years ago, I had an experience that affected me dramatically. I don’t think I was near death, but who knows?
Earlier that day, my hand was sliced very deeply through the carelessness of another person. The person took me to a walk-in clinic to have the cut tended to by a doctor. The doctor and his assistant were injecting the wound, which was already extremely painful, with something to help with the pain so they could suture it closed. During this process, I was lying on an exam table and felt myself getting ready to faint. I told them that’s what was happening, and they said I couldn’t faint since I was lying down.
Believe me, I know when I’m going to faint since I have done so many dozens of times while growing up because of very low blood pressure.
Suddenly, it was as if I was lying in a grassy place and I was looking up at a person, I think it was a man, who was smiling at me. Even more startling was the quality of the light and the brilliance of the colors in that place! All I felt was that I was home and felt intense love.
It was then that the assistant used smelling salts to bring me back to consciousness. I remember feeling so sad and disappointed to be back in what looked like a dreary place.
Now, of all the times I had fainted, not once had I had an experience like that; and I didn’t tell anyone about it for many years.
Since then, I’ve heard stories and read about other people experiencing similar things. Not everyone had the same vision, or whatever it was. Many people wrote about an experience of going through a tunnel, including one of my aunts who was in surgery when this happened to her, and told me about a beautiful blue tunnel she was going through.
So, has anyone else on the Ship had anything like this happen to them? Or do you know anyone who has been to another similar place? Was this a sneak preview of Heaven? I hope it was, because when I’m having doubts about what happens after we die, this encounter gives me hope.
I look forward to your thoughts.
Earlier that day, my hand was sliced very deeply through the carelessness of another person. The person took me to a walk-in clinic to have the cut tended to by a doctor. The doctor and his assistant were injecting the wound, which was already extremely painful, with something to help with the pain so they could suture it closed. During this process, I was lying on an exam table and felt myself getting ready to faint. I told them that’s what was happening, and they said I couldn’t faint since I was lying down.
Believe me, I know when I’m going to faint since I have done so many dozens of times while growing up because of very low blood pressure.
Suddenly, it was as if I was lying in a grassy place and I was looking up at a person, I think it was a man, who was smiling at me. Even more startling was the quality of the light and the brilliance of the colors in that place! All I felt was that I was home and felt intense love.
It was then that the assistant used smelling salts to bring me back to consciousness. I remember feeling so sad and disappointed to be back in what looked like a dreary place.
Now, of all the times I had fainted, not once had I had an experience like that; and I didn’t tell anyone about it for many years.
Since then, I’ve heard stories and read about other people experiencing similar things. Not everyone had the same vision, or whatever it was. Many people wrote about an experience of going through a tunnel, including one of my aunts who was in surgery when this happened to her, and told me about a beautiful blue tunnel she was going through.
So, has anyone else on the Ship had anything like this happen to them? Or do you know anyone who has been to another similar place? Was this a sneak preview of Heaven? I hope it was, because when I’m having doubts about what happens after we die, this encounter gives me hope.
I look forward to your thoughts.
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I was in the hospital for three days and was discharged. I had the rest of the week off from work.
During that time three girls and I decided to climb a 500 ft rock wall to see if we could do it. About half way up a thunderstorm came up and we hunkered down waiting for it to pass. After it had gone, we finished the climb. When we got to the top of the rock wall, we were overlooking the canyon we had climbed out of. Beside us was a 100,000 volt electrical line that came out of the canyon. Little did we know, the storm that had passed over us caused some of the wires to cross over each other which charged a guide wire coming down from the pole. There was no indication anything was wrong until I reached up and grabbed the guide wire. It was estimated I received 50,000 volts. I do not know how long I was in contact with the line, but I do remember what it was like to receive the electrical charge. Felt like my brain was frying. I also remember trying to tell the girls not to touch me. Then I blacked out and somehow the electrical charge was broken. When I came too, I was alone. The girls had decided to run to the nearest farmhouse to get help. Once I regained consciousness and oriented, I also started toward the same farmhouse. The farmer, his wife and the girls were coming out to find me. I think they were thinking they would find a dead body under the electrical pole. I met them about halfway between the farmhouse and the electrical pole. They transported me by a station wagon to the same hospital I had been discharged from a few days earlier. I had third degree electrical burns on my right hand, right elbow and the calves for both legs. I had been wearing rubber soled boots for the climb. The electrical people said that probable saved me. If I had been wearing hobbled (nailed) soles the electrical charge would have had an easier path to the ground. To this day, I still prefer rubber soled footwear, some 55 years later.
Just this last year I had a flashback when I came across a communications line that had been snapped by a passing truck and became wrapped around a corner pole's guide wire. I immediately called the local fire department who secured the area. Fortunately, the communications line was not charged, but it was a matter of being safe in my book.
Did you see the bright light or a tunnel or look down on yourself while you were in the hospital?
Very cool!!
In 1998 I was pregnant with what we hoped would be our third child. At 12 weeks I started bleeding, and a scan confirmed that there was no heartbeat. I was admitted to the maternity miscarriage / stillbirth ward. Not realising how bad things could get, we agreed that my husband's priority was to be at home with our children, then aged 4 and 2.
I was being moved in a wheelchair into a room when I passed out. While unconscious I thought I was in an airplane crashing; I think my brain was trying to make sense of the oxygen mask going on. I came to lying in a pool of blood on the floor and was told I had miscarried.
Oddly enough I still have the memory of being in a plane, sitting next to my husband, when the oxygen masks dropped - an entirely false memory.
The hospital staff got me cleaned up and into a bed, on oxygen and a drip, but I was still bleeding. Everything seemed bathed in a golden glow, and I felt very relaxed and peaceful. I kept looking at a framed photo of my children on my bedside locker, knowing how much I loved them. Apparently this is another false memory because I had not taken a framed photo of the kids with me to hospital!
There was a point in which I realised that the doctors were very worried and that everything was going badly wrong, but I wasn't worried in myself IYSWIM.
That sense of everything being golden and peaceful is my last memory before I went into shock through blood loss. Unbeknownst to me I then had an emergency ERPOC at 1.30am and came to several hours later.
I know that if I hadn't had the ERPOC that sense of golden peace would have been my last conscious awareness before I died. I haven't been scared of death since.
(A book I've read on the subject is Proof of Heaven by the neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander, which I found fascinating.)
Never got to that point.
@North East Quine, yes! I love your description of the feeling of peace and the golden glow!
You've reminded me about a story my mama told me and my siblings often. Her grandmother was sitting in a chair on the porch, and mom and her sister walked out of the house to join their grandma. She fussed at them and said that they had scared away the angels that were singing to her! She died that night.
I'm going to look up that book to read. Thanks for mentioning it!
Uncritical Care
Oh to be in hospital,
Now that summer's here
But winter's early where I am:
It's dark and cold, I'm grey and old
Too drugged to have much fear.
It's bleak in Critical Care.
So little peace in hospital,
Though light is soft and blue.
They think my heart is up the spout
My lively life is all poured out—
My numbered days are few.
Unless I'm made anew.
How can I rest in hospital?
It is not peaceful here,
And I am trapped, I cannot move,
Like one caught in a snare.
Or, rather, hanging there.
There's no respite in hospital
Though I've got time to spare,
For thoughts disturbed by bleep and bell,
Loud echoes of a heart's death knell.
Whose beats I've come to know so well.
A sombre sound to hear.
And what can keep me from despair?
The kindly staff in Hospital
Efficiently know where,
I should be pierced to thrust the drips,
the tubes and clips (I hope what gushes out is clear).
They put a sponge to my parched lips.
This is the truth in Hospital,
Too often unrevealed.
It is by wounds that we are healed.
It is by pain we are annealed.
But as for me, is my fate sealed?
Such weariness in hospital
Unable to speak or wave,
A Stygian flood washes over me
And I am in my grave.
Is Jesus strong to save?
To find the peace in hospital,
Swamped in a tide of care,
I sink in Him, perhaps I'll find
That my beloved's here.
I have no fear.
In Limbo of eternity.
I touch His hands and feet.
He's mine to hold, I see Him smile
He'll carry me for quite some while--
His words are very sweet:
"I'm with you on retreat."
Now I can rest in Hospital
I've found a peace to share.
It is to know His promises
That God is everywhere.
And we are in His care.
This is the rest in hospital;
this is the peace that's here:
When every bleep's an orison,
Each bell, a call to prayer.
Not me but my mother: when she was 4 years old ( so in 1936) she was on the beach when a big dog jumped up and knocked her over (not aggressive but big dog and small child) and she was severely concussed, possibly from hitting her head on a stone or the hard wet sand as she fell. This was followed by an "odd memory" : she was on the ceiling of the bedroom looking down at herself lying in bed. She was pleased to see that her mother had dressed her in her favourite nightdress. She was shocked to see that the doctor was sitting on the edge of the bed examining her while her mother stood at the end of the bed - in her experience a gentleman would never sit while a lady was standing! She also noticed, from her vantage point on the ceiling, that that doctor was wearing a shirt that was too tight for him and the back of his neck was red from where the collar was digging in. Years later she told a friend of this odd memory: he replied " that's a Near Death Experience you're describing, you must have been seriously ill!" She had never thought of it in that way before, just thought of it as odd.
But the mind is a great synthesiser and just because something appears true doesn't mean it is. Bit like ChatGPD in that respect.
@Firenze, like you I've had those very real dreams of flying. They're mostly enjoyable, except when someone is chasing me and I can't get altitude fast enough to get away! It had been a long time since one of the flying dreams happened, but strangely, two nights ago I had another one.
I usually hover in mine, but maybe this would be a good topic (dreams) for its own thread in All Saints.
The “visitors” were the people who, when someone was dying, came over from the other side to escort their dying friend home.
I had written a full account of how this was taken for granted by nurses in hospitals and hospices, and how they would say “Mrs Brown at the end of the ward has had her ‘visitor’, so she’ll be away before long,” and they would make preparations for an early empty bed.
This is outside my own experience, but Duncan considered it to be factual and well-supported.
I just am not convinced that they indicate that after this life we go on "eternity leave".
What would convince you? Well, perhaps 'convince' is the wrong - too strong - a word, but give you pause for thought?
All experiences, emotions, all thoughts can be dismissed as the biochemistry of the brain.
Those accounts did give me pause for thought, but I was not convinced.
To repeat: what would?
One evening, she was sitting by the fire with her baby (my mum) when the curtain in front of the front door was pulled back - grandad was standing there (he was supposed to be at the other end of the country). She said he looked at her, and the baby, and then let the curtain fall and disappeared.
When the telegram came a couple of days later to say that he had died, she was expecting it.
I was a nurse from the late 1980s and have cared for many dying people (I currently lecture in death studies) but there was not an expressed culture among the nurses of expecting visitations before death. But several nurses would open a window after death to let the spirit out. And I could understand this, as the absence of life in a body is as if the spirit is gone.
We don't have any way to completely know what happens after death. We can read Jesus' story about Lazarus. We can wonder about the visitations some folks have right before dying. But there isn't hard proof in my opinion. However, personally, I take my experience as comfort that there is something after death and that it is glorious.
Sometimes, when doubts creep into my mind, I feel like the children of Israel forgetting the miracles they experienced during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, and then deciding they should create and worship a golden calf.
My grandmother had a similar experience when her son died in the same war.
Some (Buddhist) Vietnamese have a
belief in Hungry Ghosts of people who have had an unhappy or violent death e.g. soldiers of the American War in Vietnam.
Many cultures look to the spirit world of ancestors.
Judaism had an understanding of a person going down to sheol after death - the spirit given by God to person would not remain with them forever.
It seems to me that the idea of continuing after death is a comforting idea. It's nice to think that your family who have died are looking down on you and looking after you.
Some try to contact the dead using Ouija boards. The OT has a tale of Elijah being annoyed by being woken from Sheol. In the NT the Messiah was expected to be preceded by Elijah, for that era it was tentatively said that John the Baptist could be seen to be Elijah, but a new Elijah,not the old one returned to life.
So these things seem to be reflections of the human personality/society as a way of dealing with death.
Amen.
As may be expected, I’m in the “yes, the Christian notion of the afterlife is true, and at least some near death experiences are of genuine spiritual things and not biological illusions,” and even “yes, there are ghosts” camp(s).
I don't know. I've been told my experience of everything being bathed in a golden glow prior to going into shock through blood loss is a known side effect of lack of blood to the optic nerve. (I think that's what I was told. It was a while ago.) "Lack of blood to the optic nerve" doesn't explain the feeling of peace, though that might have been a side effect of lack of blood to somewhere else.
But even if it was biochemistry of the brain, it has had the spiritual effect of convincing me that I am not afraid of death. The two are not mutually exclusive for me.
Good question. One of the best intros ino this question is to be found in C S Lewis's 'Miracles', and the chapter called (from memory) 'The problem with naturalism'.
Lewis usefully makes a distinction between 'cause and effect' and 'ground-consequent, where there is also a logical, or extra-causal, connection.
I’ll confess I don’t spend much time thinking about what happens after death. I’m happy to trust the traditional Christian witness on the topic, but it’s not something I seek evidence for. My bottom line is trusting that nothing in life nor death can separate us from the love of God. That’s enough for me. I’m okay with however that plays out.
I'm not really sure where this idea came from, that to be really truly a God thing, it has to leave no physical traces behind. To me, the question isn't "Is this a God thing, or is it physical"? Rather the question is, "Is this a God thing, or is MERELY physical"--something that has no correspondence to reality on any level.
Ahem ... I think you'll find that was Samuel not Elijah.
The 'Elijah to come', a new Elijah is a different thing and relates to Messianic expectations and fulfilment etc etc.
And Moses and Elijah we are told appeared at the Transfiguration of Christ.
So, now, the OT doesn't have an incident where Elijah is annoyed at being disturbed from Sheol. That was Samuel when King Saul consulted the Witch of Endor.