Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 erpete. On the night of 6/12/2018 my wife and I were in our living room watching TV when, to her shock and horror, she noticed that I was dead. I was sitting upright, eyes slightly open, unable to hear or respond to her. She checked my pulse and there was none, so she called 911 and began CPR. The first responders continued attempts to resuscitate me, as did the Kaiser Permanente (on Morse Avenue in Sacramento, CA) emergency room doctors. At some point, after being flat-lined for at least five or ten minutes, possibly longer, they revived me, but I “coded” again at least once, before they got my heart more or less steadily beating. I had suffered a sudden heart attack due to a plaque-filled coronary artery. I did not regain consciousness, and they put me in a medically induced coma for over a day. Coming out of the coma I was weak, in pain from the CPR damaging my sternum, and completely out of my head until the coma-inducing drugs wore off. I kept trying to escape the hospital and had to be tied down by security. Eventually, the good doctors performed a procedure to clear my artery with a kind of roto-rooter apparatus and then inserted stints. Basically, I endured the kind of medical ordeal that is all too common for elderly people; many of my friends have suffered far more than I did. Before I was released from the hospital, my cardiologist informed me that I was incurably, terminally ill with congestive heart failure. But we are all terminally ill… our bodies are mortal. Some 18 months later I am working out and feeling better than at any time since my heart attack.
One instant you can be alive and seemingly well, and an instant later you have no idea what has happened or where you are. Well, Toto, you’re not in Kansas anymore.
I remember very little of what happened when my body was clinically dead. I do not remember ascending to a beautiful Heaven or being cast into a fiery pit. I remember no tunnel with a light at the end, and I was not greeted by God or by my many loved ones who passed on before me. But I remember floating in space and feeling that I had no body… no legs or arms, no pain or physical pleasure. I seemed to be pure consciousness, and I saw before me what seemed at first glance a portal into a colorful garden, which I hoped was Heaven. I knew at that point that my body had died and I feared going to Hell. I started to move toward the portal, but realized that the colors were all wrong, so I stayed where I was. Note that I could see more or less normally, in color, and I was absolutely certain that I had full freedom of movement, unhindered by gravity. I sensed that I could move in any direction at any speed. Aside from fearing what might happen next and feeling lonely, I was in no distress whatever. This part of my experience seemed to last a few seconds, but time is very, very subjective, especially if you have no body and are not tied to the entropy clock.
Later, restored to life in a body, I realized that the “portal” I saw was a computer screen, a patient monitor. The color patterns matched perfectly. I cannot prove that this vision didn’t happen after my heart was beating again and I had regained consciousness. But why did I feel that I had no physical body, and why did I know that the body I used to inhabit had died? All I can say is that I am absolutely certain that I had abandoned that body. In addition to this one clear memory, I also have a vague memory of something like a valley, and I know now that the old gospel song that tells us we must one day walk “that lonesome valley” is true. After leaving the hospital I watched a video on TV, taken from the ISS, and the sight of the beautiful blue Earth from space gave me a flashback. I felt the way I had felt in the hospital. I have no idea if this means anything… maybe I had floated up into space and maybe not. Most people who have clinically died and been revived report having a kind of pseudo-body or “astral” body. I have no reason to doubt them, and British researcher and author Rupert Sheldrake has argued for something he calls a “biomorphic field” in all living organisms, including people, that tells the right kind of cells to develop in various parts of the body. In fact, the development of embryos is almost impossible to explain without such a field, although conventional biologists would deny this. This field might at least temporarily survive bodily death… it would become the “astral body.” I have no idea why my experience was different, but, given my apparent invulnerability to pain or injury, my clear vision, and my apparent freedom of movement, I cannot say that I missed having a body.
Since leaving the hospital I have gradually had seeming revelations of important truths. I cannot prove that these are anything but my own flawed, subjective opinions, but, to me at least, they all make perfect sense. I feel that I experienced much more than I consciously remember, and I suspect that I was given some form of instruction. Traditional societies in the past often had tribal shamans, people who had journeyed to the spirit world (usually by less drastic means than physical death) and returned with knowledge and understanding and often with strange powers, such as the ability to heal people. Regrettably, I have no such powers; I seem to be only a minor or junior shaman. But I think the knowledge I have now is real and could be of value to others.
To begin with, my experience seems to confirm a view I have held for over twenty years and have written about previously. Most people, whether they realize it or not, are philosophical materialists, possibly because our ruling elites have literally programmed us for this. They believe that the primary reality is matter, or, in the parlance of modern physics, mass/energy/space/time… the measurable physical universe. Of course, no one can ultimately define matter; at best we can rather imperfectly describe it. Materialists believe that mind/spirit/consciousness is a mere secondary manifestation of matter, with the brain being a kind of electrochemical computer. If pressed, a materialist may do something like pounding on a table and claiming that it is solid and real because he can see and touch it.
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