Sitting With Death (excerpts)

I was a very depressed person. I was not happy with my work, my girlfriend, or any other circumstances. I spent a lot of time smoking pot and drinking.

After not sleeping for 24 hours my mind began to repeat suicidal thoughts. I found my way to a local drug store and bought a family package of Benadryl, 65 tablets or so. I popped them all out of the package and proceeded to down as much as I could. I followed it with a little liquor, stayed on my sofa and thought I would just fall asleep forever. Strangely enough I can remember that moment vividly to this day.

At some point during my hallucinations I sat on my sofa and felt like I fell asleep. I woke up looking into the distance at my wall. At this point I no longer felt that I was sleeping or alive or really awake. I was mostly confused, but I still knew I was in my apartment. From the wall I saw what looked like a black dot coming toward me. It got close very fast and became more clearly defined. As I looked closer, it had skin that was grey/white, like ash skin. It had clothing that looked like a robe that was pitch black and seemed to be deep as nothing. The feeling of nothing is also how I felt looking at this being. As I saw its face it was elongated and sunken in with some features of a skeletal face still with the same ash-like skin.

At first when I realized I was in the presence of a creature--death if you will--I was horrified, excited, sad and happy all at once. Then as quickly as the gamut of emotions, I felt completely at ease and emotionless. Then I was able to see myself sitting with Death.

I saw myself in a bubble-like thing quite impossible for me to really describe. The closest description I can think of may be like my auric bubble that was somewhat yellow. Death began to communicate with me telepathically and our conversation was instantaneous. To this day, I cannot remember what was said. I began to float upward and felt I was leaving my body. Death reached out an elongated skinny finger, not bone-like but just skinny. I sunk back into my body. I can remember Death shaking his head like saying 'no'. I still felt completely at ease while I began to fall asleep again.

As more years pass I have become Atheistic, but with the idea that what may lie beyond goes past our descriptions or definitions. Thus I am an Atheist to the beliefs of religion. The experience of death and the realistic feeling I had of it has taught me there are certainly things we know nothing about, yet one day we will. My NDE made me a better person as I grew beyond suicidal tendencies and began to concentrate on those around me more. I hope this proves helpful to readers.


http://iands.org/experiences/nde-accounts/675-sitting-with-death.html

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The Essence of Life (excerpts)

I was in ICU after a bad car accident with internal injuries and bleeding.... At some point I found myself leaving my body.

My experience was completely mind and space. I didn't have any visions, but rather sensation and awareness. I went up to a dark space (I say dark even though I wasn’t seeing). There were many, many souls passing upward. It was like a train station with a lot of activity.

In this place, I was a highly enlightened being, absorbing knowledge through intuition. I understood that I was in the world of the afterlife where the soul reaches a higher level of consciousness. I dwelled for some time, absorbing knowledge and insight. I thought about many things that had happened in my life and about things that other people and I had done, especially my mentally ill mother who was abusive sometimes.

I was aware of experiencing this without judgement. I was aware that humans judge the actions of others, but that judgment is a kind of human folly. I understood that bad action is inevitable given the lower level of enlightenment of humans. I learned that the hurt from human life was not meaningful in the vast scheme. At the higher level there is no judgement; on the human level forgiveness, understanding how people behave from weakness, is what allows people to move forward.

I learned that what people think of as God is the energy of love, which binds the universe together, all life, all physics. The energy of love is the essence of life. I felt astounded and grateful to experience this state of enlightenment and to know 100% that there is only mortal death, but that the soul continues. I remember being surprised that I had ascended as an intact entity, still “me.”


Over the next 10 days of my recovery in the hospital, I felt a strong presence of one of those unearthly beings beside my bed. Although not Christian, I was surprised at thinking of this being as Jesus. I experienced an infusion of the love energy healing me quickly. I don’t remember telling anyone about my experience at the time. They wouldn’t believe me.


http://iands.org/experiences/nde-accounts/660-the-essence-of-life.html

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These really are fascinating Xan,not to mention moving.Death is a part of life isn't it,we are born...we die.But I find there is comfort in the testimonies,I sincerely hope there IS something after we die,and the thought of meeting loved ones again....my mum and my brother.Strangely I feel the urge to cry though :icon_frown:

More from Mellon-Thomas Benedict:

One of my questions to the light was, "What is heaven?"

I was given a tour of all the heavens that have been created: the Nirvanas, the Happy Hunting Grounds, all of them. I went through them. These are thought form creations that we have created. We don't really go to heaven; we are reprocessed. But whatever we created, we leave a part of ourselves there. It is real, but it is not all of the soul.

I saw the Christian heaven. We expect it to be a beautiful place, and you stand in front of the throne, worshipping forever. I tried it. It is boring! This is all we are going to do? It is childlike. I do not mean to offend anyone. Some heavens are very interesting, and some are very boring. I found the ancient ones to be more interesting, like the Native American ones, the Happy Hunting Grounds. The Egyptians have fantastic ones. It goes on and on. There are so many of them. In each of them there is a fractal that is your particular interpretation, unless you are part of the group soul that believes in only the God of a particular religion. Then you are very close, in the same ball park together. But even then, each is a little bit different. That is a part of yourself that you leave there. Death is about life, not about heaven.

~

I had a descent into what you might call hell, and it was very surprising. I did not see Satan or evil. My descent into hell was a descent into each person's customized human misery, ignorance, and darkness of not-knowing. It seemed like a miserable eternity. But each of the millions of souls around me had a little star of light always available. But no one seemed to pay attention to it. They were so consumed with their own grief, trauma and misery. But, after what seemed an eternity, I started calling out to that light, like a child calling to a parent for help. Then the light opened up and formed a tunnel that came right to me an insulated me from all that fear and pain. That is what hell really is.

So what we are doing is learning to hold hands, to come together. The doors of hell are open now. We are going to link up, hold hands, and walk out of hell together.

~

I went over to the other side with a lot of fears about toxic waste, nuclear missiles, the population explosion, the rainforest. I came back loving every single problem. I love nuclear waste. I love the mushroom cloud; this is the holiest mandala that we have manifested to date, as an archetype. It, more than any religion or philosophy on Earth, brought us together all of a sudden, to a new level of consciousness. Knowing that maybe we can blow up the planet fifty times, or 500 times, we finally realize that maybe we are all here together now. For a period they had to keep setting off more bombs to get it in to us. Then we started saying, "We do not need this any more."



The whole experience in his own words, totally amazing:

Mellen-Thomas Benedict's Near-Death Experience

Before his near-death experience, Rev. Howard Storm, a Professor of Art at Northern Kentucky University, was not a very pleasant man. He was an avowed atheist and was hostile to every form of religion and those who practiced it. He often would use rage to control everyone around him and he didn't find joy in anything. Anything that wasn't seen, touched, or felt, he had no faith in. He knew with certainty that the material world was the full extent of everything that was. He considered all belief systems associated with religion to be fantasies for people to deceive themselves with. Beyond what science said, there was nothing else.

On June 1, 1985, at the age of 38, Howard Storm had a near-death experience due to a perforation of the stomach and his life was forever changed. His near-death experience is one of the most profound, if not the most profound, afterlife experience I have ever documented. His life was so immensely changed after his near-death experience that he resigned as a professor and devoted his time to attending the United Theological Seminary to become a United Church of Christ minister.

Too long to quote here, but too wonderful not to read:

Saved From Hell
Rev. Howard Storm's near-death experience

I sympathize with this so much. When I start getting too homesick I try to think about how much time and effort I probably spent preparing for and anticipating the journey to earth, how much I must have looked forward to all the joy and the sorrow and the challenge of being here. And what an honor it is to simply be alive and breathing.

Then I go eat a piece of chocolate, and remind myself that there are some things you can't do when you're dead.

LOVE it :D

NDE's almost always tell of the tunnel of light. Perhaps in some cultures this is already a pre ordained belief. The Tibetan Book of the Dead which is read aloud to a person dying or who had died instructs and advises the deceased in the initial journey into the afterlife. Part of which says to "follow the light" if I'm not mistaken.

Death is birth & birth is death. Wakefulness is Sleeping & sleeping is wakefulness. When sleeping we are dead to the world of wakefulness. When are born we still can`t yet remember or have any conscious idea who we are. From birth to as far as we can remember our childhood days is what we call dreaming. Because our childhood experiences as we remember them is actually a dream then later made manifest as reality when we have grown up. The wakefulness we experience & perceive around us today is the result of what we were yesterday. The future is not made manifest until we do something today & the present we experience becomes the past, the future the present. Birth & death is but wakefulness & sleeping. When we sleep we die but awake in dreaming. In other words, if you can remember your dream last night note it down completely the scenario. That scenario is your future. If its a nightmare it can be remedied. Just do today what you postpone for tomorrow.