I was five months pregnant and already dilating for unknown reasons.

The emergency room staff rushed me to have an emergency cerciage placed on my cervix. After the cerclage was placed via surgical stitches, I was told everything would be okay. The next day my water bag broke in spite of the surgery.

I was rushed back to surgery to have the cerciage in order for the baby to be delivered. I was taken to another hospital for the surgical removal of the cerclage. Everyone waited for the baby to arrive. He was born but his lungs were not developed so he was stillborn.

I was losing an enormous amount of blood, as the placenta had not come out. On the third day of massive blood loss, I was rushed into emergency surgery for the third time within a three-day period. What I experienced during the surgery was death. How wonderful it was!

I am not a suicidal person. In fact, ironically I have always enjoyed life and lived it with an attitude that is somewhat carefree, which is why I feel strange when I say "I preferred my presence in death over my past and present life here in this world."

However, since my experience, I can justify why I have always been so carefree. God’s message to me was that he is in control of everything. He also told, me not in words but through a kind of direct understanding, that all of the bodily feelings, events and emotions like anger, embarrassment, grief, stress, and the many disappointments that occur in one’s lifetime are totally small and irrelevant in comparison to the afterlife feelings and experiences with him. They are merely small events to form the makeup of life while you are in the flesh.

My experience:

I was drawn into a light. Everything went totally black. When I became alert again, I was in an extremely bright atmospheric presence with no boundaries. This presence had no shape or form; it was just everywhere like the air you breathe. However, off to the right was a more definite presence that seemed to have a more direct relationship with me.

A smaller section of the presence had a more direct personal relationship with my spirit as far as understanding why I felt the way I felt in the midst of the greater presence. It was like he chuckled at my joy and overwhelming "wow" reactions. It is like the smaller spirit shared my human joys and understood them. The greater presence I knew was God. The smaller section off to the right of the larger presence was indeed "Christ" and he was the one who led me there.

When I realized it and began to take in my surroundings, I noticed that I was blended in with this large, atmospheric being. He gave me understanding not in words but in a direct, way. All I remember saying constantly was "So that is what life is about?" He just kept on clarifying questions that I had in my mind about life but never asked. I was given an understanding to questions that left me totally satisfied..

The divine presence was so calm I had a feeling that superseded peace. The feeling was what everyone searches for in life through money, religion, marriage, and everything else. This was it. Then I started understanding why people are constantly searching and are never satisfied. It is because what we long for is not here on earth. The word doesn’t even exist in our vocabulary to describe this immersion in God.

The only word that may come close to this presence is God. I was then shown different events in my life that I had no memory of until he showed them to me, like the time when I was in kindergarten humiliated and embarrassed for not knowing the answer to a question. He showed me how embarrassed I was, I mean I was literally over embarrassed at that time. We all literally laughed at me.

I was shown how important and deep that embarrassing moment felt at the time. He showed me many other moments that seemed so important at the time, times that I did not now even remember. He brought them to my memory, like showing a movie vividly before me. But now those moments meant nothing.

He also showed me a moment in my life when I was about sixteen and I was frying chicken. It had absolutely no meaning to me. But it was one moment amongst many unimportant moments in my life that I took very seriously at the time. Then all of a sudden my whole life seemed composed of a string of these silly and truly unimportant events.

All my life I had overrated all the events in life and he showed me that life consisted of just a bundle of events. The understanding he gave me for these showings of myself was to illustrate for me that they happened, they passed, andthey are no more and they now mean nothing in the larger scheme. He is forever. The life that he showed me in death was divine.

I wondered where were the earthly negative feelings and disappointments, letdowns, struggles and cares of the world. Then I said with confirmation "You are in control and that's all life was about." I just kept saying, "You are in control so that's all life was about." Unbelievably saying, "You are in control." I started to feel like life was so worthless compared to this existence - then I heard somebody screaming.

I was going back towards a light away from the bright being and I began to say "I don't want to go back; this is where I want to be, and I heard the smaller section of the presence say "but you have a husband who loves you very much" I was sooo disappointed and angry. I said who is that screaming.

I kept saying who is that screaming. I started seeing lights and I looked down and saw my body like I was looking at somebody else. I never saw myself in such a full distant view like this. I said "that's me" but why am I screaming" then in one split second. I was back in my body and realized why I was screaming. I was still in surgery and had begun to feel pain.

I feel guilty a lot because I feel like I chose my husband over God and I never would want to do this. He doesn’t know it but I sometimes feel resentment for the decision of "whoever" to send me back. I think about what I was told when I came back to my body, "You have a husband who Loves you very much," and I feel a lot of resentment.

I now spend a lot of time daydreaming, trying to recapture the events and the feelings I had while in the presence. The longer I am here on earth, the more I fear the memory of this experience will fade. I don't want it to fade. The experience was more than euphoric.

When I used to go to church, I was in awe of the pastor and the stories he told about Jesus and God. Now the pastor's sermon seems boring, overrated, and monotonous. I used to be afraid to speak out against a pastor who I felt was not genuine.

Now when I go to different churches I can identify and call out the true anointed pastors. It's like something is showing me the ones who are teaching truth from the ones who are not. These things I somehow know clearly. I don't take the events in my life so seriously because I now know now that life is so, so temporary and so, so short.

This experience happened a long time ago when I was still a child of 12 or 13. (I am 46 now). We had a large granite boulder in our back yard that I liked to sit on and contemplete my short life and think about the many possible futures available to me. (This was before I had heard of TM or Meditation). My mother had saved this boulder from a neighbor's yard, where it had been dug up by a contractor. She and I had a special affinity for this rock - I don't know why.

One night, I was sitting there alone on the rock in semi-darkness. I looked up and to my left and saw a very bright blue-white light in the sky. I continued to look at this light, and it began to approach me until it became all-encompassing to my field of view.

I cannot tell you how bright the light was, but it was overpowering, yet I had no trouble looking at it. I began to sense that the light was alive, and felt that it was radiating Pure Love.

(A Christian would probably call this entity Jesus, but although we attended a mainline Protestant church regularly, I did not associate the light with any particular religious figure or belief system). I felt a sense of belonging and complete acceptance, and I felt great love for the light in return.

After gazing at this light for a short while, I suddenly found myself up in the air, looking down at my house and the town around me. I no longer felt the presence of the blue-white light. Since it was dark, all I could really see were the lights coming from houses and streetlights.

I don't remember if I could see myself - probably not, as my body was in darkness down on the rock. I do remember looking down through the telephone pole wires, which ran along the hedgerow above the rock (they were visible as dark lines in front of the lights of the town). I recall being momentarily puzzled by this view, which I had never seen before.

I slowly realized that I had no physical body, yet I could see everything around me just fine. The only emotion I experienced was exhiliration at being free of my physical body - like getting out of jail after being in solitary confinement for ages.

The feeling I had (and still have) was that this experience was much more real than normal reality, and that this is what I would return to after my physical life on Earth ended.

After a short while I realized that I could will myself to go higher or lower in the air, and did so. I recall feeling very alive and exhilirated. I could also move horizontally, but I did not go very far before returning to my starting point over my physical body. I did not see any "cord" between myself and my physical body, as others have spoken of.

I have no recollection of returning to my physical body. I do remember telling my parents about it later. They just looked at me as though I had two heads. I tried many times to have this experience again, without any luck.

I believe I gained useful knowledge from this experience, namely:

1. "Reality" consists of much more than what we observe (or can observe) in this physical life. Our normal reality is but a shadow of what really exists. The world, and in fact our universe, is very real and incredibly detailed, but it is not everything.

2. We are here in order to learn how to love and accept each other. In some sense, we are in a kind of school. That is, we choose to live this physical life in order to learn something that will be valuable to us in the "greater life". What we are to learn is not always known to us.

3. We existed before our physical bodies did, and we will continue to exist in some form after our physical body has died.

4. Death is not something to be feared - it is only a doorway into another part of our existence, just as our birth was a doorway from another place.

5. Nothing matters in the long run if we don't have love in our lives. It is more important to love and accept others than to be loved. (But it's a great by-product!)

6. There is no "Heaven" or "Hell" but the one we make for ourselves by our actions and beliefs.

Having this experience was one major reason I became a scientist, although I probably would have become one anyway, as I was always very curious about nature. In some sense, it has caused me not to be as curious and scientifically productive as I might have been, since I now know that "nature" is but one tiny part of a much greater whole. In other words, it is much more important to me to be a loving, accepting person than a great scientist.

Even knowing this, it has still been a struggle for me to love and accept others in my daily life, but I am always learning. The biggest struggle for me has been with my own family members. I am just now becoming aware of how much more I need to love and accept them as they are, and not as I wish they would be. I think this may be the one "Truth" I was supposed to gain from this life.

Posted: September 7, 2001
Editor's Introduction

Size Mick (pseudonym) earned an M.S. in Geophysics in 1980, after a B.A. in geology degree, and is currently employed as a Seismologist in California.

He has been a Project Manager in geophysics with a leading geotechnical consulting firm. This experience happened in 1967 or 1968 in the back yard of his boyhood home in New York state. He has had no other transcendent experiences.

Tome's note: When you have read literally hundreds of accounts like this one, it changes you; I don't need to experience my own NDE to understand the love they feel and neither do you.

A guy heard a knock at his front door. He opened the door and saw only a snail on his welcome mat. He picked it up and hurled it across his front yard.

Two years later, there was a knock on his front door. He opened the door and again there was a snail sitting on his welcome mat. The snail looked up at him and said, "What was that all about?"

"I" thought it was cute. Here's a quote. We must not be so openminded that our brains fall out! Love to all

Ann of Hearts, one of the wisest of our many wise bloggers, the young woman who says, "I like everybody," and "there is no such thing as an ugly person." She is two steps ahead of many of us. Great going, girl! Tome

In 1978, Greg was returning from a three week vacation in northern Wisconsin. His family had rented a cabin in the woods with two private lakes. While his family slept in the cabin, Greg always slept alone in his tent in the woods.

He spent most of the week wandering in the woods, fishing and meditating. During this time, he would have spontaneous astral projection experiences.

My brother was driving the car as we headed south on highway 45. I was suddenly seized with the knowledge that I was leaving. I simply knew I was leaving this world - period. I began to disengage from all I was attached to. My friends, family, the place where I grew up, everything. As I thought of each thing I let them go.

The last thing I remember giving up was the concern that I might seriously startle my brother by disappearing. I wondered how he would explain my being gone.

Then everything changed. The world changed. I no longer had use of my mind. Try as I could, I could not form a thought. I saw the world with eyes that were not the eyes of man. I perceived directly and realized that I had before this moment seen the world through words, which led to only relative knowledge.

I laughed out loud as I saw each thing as it was. It was pure joy. Everything was alive with the shiny energy of God; a total flowing and pure expression. I have no idea how long this went on but when I turned my attention back to my body I noticed it was in some type of distress.

There was a knot in my stomach and I was trembling. I told God that I could not take it (the extreme joy) any more. The experience subsided and I vowed to return as soon as I could. I never mentioned this experience to anyone for three years. I began to read books to find out what it meant.

I simply abide in the present now and now and now. Beginning in late 1994, I began to become aware of moments when my mind was unusually quiet. Most often in the evening before I went to bed.

All thinking would be gone and I would simply remain aware. It seemed the room was "full" of this silence no matter what was going on. There was only contentment. No questions, nothing to say.