My story starts where most stories end – in the present. My
near-death experience (NDE) was an event that I did not even recall
until November of 1999. Yet looking at it now, and recalling it
clearly, I can see how much of an impact a few minutes of life and
death have had on the person that I am in the present, and how it has
impacted my life in the way of attitudes, decision making, emotional
responses, and even my dreaming life.
In November 1999, while trying to go to sleep, a complete memory
returned to me. It was not a dream, as I was wide awake at the time.
The memory consisted of a series of events that I had dreamed about
repeatedly since as far back as I can remember. Prior to this
particular night, the dreams I had about the event were basically
snippets of the whole sequence, which I was now remembering in full.
In a lifetime of seeing these pieces of memory in dreams, out of
sequence, I now saw clearly the entire span of events. In the matter
of only a few minutes of remembering, suddenly everything made sense
to me. About my childhood. About my behavior. About my experiences.
Here is the memory in its entirety:
I am standing next to a pile of boxes. One of my brothers is with
me, and my mother is in another room. I cannot tell whether I brush
up against one of the boxes, or if the box brushes up against me,
but I feel myself falling backwards, tumbling, bumping and banging
my head as I fall. The pain in my head is staggering and I am trying
to scream but I feel the air rush out of me.
There is a whirring noise, and I feel like I'm being sucked into
a dark tube. The whirring noise suddenly sounds more like many
voices all speaking at once. I am in this tube and hearing these
voices, yet I am floating just above a stairwell. There is someone
lying at the bottom of the stairs, in a heap. It's a child. The
child isn't moving. At the top of the stairs, I see my brother. He
is scrambling down the stairs towards the child. He's upset and
yelling. No one answers, and he runs back up the stairs,
disappearing for a moment. The child at the bottom of the stairs
still isn't moving.
Suddenly my mother appears at the top of the stairs. She's upset,
and runs down the stairs. She picks up the child.
As this is happening, the tube becomes a dark, open space. I can
still see what's happening, but only as if it's in the periphery of
my vision. The room I am in has a purplish glow about it. It becomes
very quiet. I am not afraid, just calm. It feels like I am part of
the dark room, and the dark room is part of me. I catch a brief
glimpse of my mother carrying the child, who still isn't moving, up
the stairs.
The whirring noise begins again. And there, the memory ends.
It was not until I re-experienced the entire sequence of events in
this flash of memory that the reality of the situation became clear.
Obviously, the child at the bottom of the stairs was myself. For
nearly 40 years, I believed that child was someone else. All my life I
have had a phobia about stairs, which I was never able to explain. At
first, I could not believe it. A few weeks went by while I worked at
sorting the memory out. Was I remembering correctly? Had I added
anything, over the course of seeing pieces of the memory while
dreaming, that might have altered the memory?
After determining that I hadn't added anything, that the whole
memory was essentially the same as the pieces that I'd seen in dreams,
I decided to ask my family. Unfortunately, the person who would be the
most credible witness, my mother, was no longer alive to confirm or
deny the story. My father had a vague recollection of the event,
although he was at work at the time that my fall down the stairs took
place. The only other witness that I knew of was my brother. When
asked about it, he confirmed that yes, it did happen. Exactly as I
remembered it. He was only four when my tumble down the stairs
happened, but he clearly remembers the feeling of helplessness he had
when he ran down the stairs after me. If he was four, I would have
been just barely two years old.
While there is no medical proof of the event – I was apparently
breathing again, and put to bed to recover from the fall – I have
every reason to believe that during some period of time I was either
dead or well on my way, apart from my body, watching myself from
above.
Once the memory was established, and verified, things in my life
suddenly started making some sort of sense, where before I could not
make sense of anything.
During my early childhood, my parents observed that I was unusual.
It was obvious even to me that I was very different than other
children my own age. My father remembers that even when no one else
was around, I was talking to someone, someone only I could see and
hear. My parents accepted this as part of the child I was, and never
reprimanded me or tried to correct my behavior. It was apparent that
it was not harming anyone; I would not talk to my "imaginary
friends" when I was in the company of other people, only at home
or when no one but my family could hear the conversation.
My parents used to tell me that I was born old. I was always
responsible beyond what was normal, paid close attention to the
sensitivities of others, and had a strong spiritual impulse. In truth,
I can't remember any time of my life when I was not keenly aware of
the spiritual significance of life events, even before I had any
spiritual training at all. I was raised in the Catholic Church and as
I got older, I found myself spending more time alone, immersed in
contemplating what I would learn within the context of Catholicism and
trying to reconcile that training with what I somehow knew, deep down,
was the truth about spirit and life.
At the age of 5, I was awakened by bursts of colored light that
appeared above my bed. More annoyed than afraid, I ran to my parents'
room and asked my father to chase the lights away. While I waited, he
went to my room to take care of the problem. He then took me back to
my room to tuck me in, only to hear me complain that the lights were
still above my bed. He told me to close my eyes and ignore them if
they were bothering me. Naturally, I couldn't just ignore them, and
the light continued to burst in bright colors until just after
sunrise.
When I was 8 years old, my first experience with death and loss was
initiated by my mother, who told me – on my way home from school –
that she was gone, but that she was all right. Although she had been
ill for some time, I had been told that she was getting better, and
had no idea what death was at that time. I believe my mother visited
me when she did so I would be prepared to be a support for my father,
who took her death very hard. I remember telling my father that I knew
she was gone, but he did not believe me.
The older I got, the more acutely aware I was of how other people
were feeling. I was constantly picking up other peoples' feelings,
confusing them with my own. Rarely did people need to tell me what was
going on with them; I just knew. Sometimes, much to their chagrin, I
would blurt things out, personal things about them. Over time the
awkwardness of their reactions taught me not to blurt things out.
Sometimes I knew if they were ill before they said anything, sometimes
before they knew themselves.
Always I was aware that I was trying to connect with Spirit on some
level beyond the level I saw in other people. Unfortunately, this
created a lot of confusion for me. Catholicism seemed to be setting
limits on too many people, myself included, in what I could become. I
began to believe that I could not be happy spiritually, that spiritual
fulfillment was something only others could experience. My religious
life, as a result, went haywire. As I reached my teens, I felt so
spiritually disconnected that I was grasping at anything I could find.
The more I learned, the more pain I experienced, and the darker my
thinking became. While I struggled through learning and experiencing
various religious ideas, I felt myself being dragged backward.
Ultimately, I felt rejected by Spirit.
At 18, I became a born-again Christian and a member of an
evangelical church. In my mind, I felt certain this was what I needed
to re-connect with Spirit. For a while I felt a sense of release, but
the more time I spent with other Christians, in Bible study, and in
prayer, the more concerned I became that I could never measure up to
what God wanted me to be. Over the next fourteen years my life seemed
to unravel. Every time I felt I was taking a step forward, learning
about life and myself, I would find myself taking six steps back. I
began feeling like a hypocrite. Finally, at 32, I left Christianity
for good. I simply could not reconcile what I had learned as a
Christian, either as a Catholic or as an Evangelical, with what I felt
in my heart to be true. Yet I still could not tap into the truth
inside me in a way that would make the truth make sense.
Suddenly I found myself completely alone. I was trying to please
someone, be someone, become someone other than who I was. More than
anything I had developed a fixation with getting there the right way.
Deep down I knew that it wasn't that I wanted others to approve of me;
it was that I wanted others to approve of the way in which I actually
got there – to me, that is. I was more enamored with the
method of getting there than I was with actually reaching the finish
line.
Over the course of the next year I had internalized so much anguish
that I became ill. For eight months I became housebound and was unable
to eat. Looking back now, I understand that this illness happened for
a reason. I had caused it by constantly judging myself, by feeling
pain and never being able to adequately express it, stuffing it down
inside myself. Now the illness was causing me to stop and take pause,
to re-evaluate my entire life.
Towards the last month I was ill I had an unusual dream. The
imagery of the dream was so powerful that it forced me to take notice.
Here's the dream:
There is an open, arid place with a large, round building in
the center. Lines of people are entering the building; the lines
stretch for miles. The people walk into the building and leave the
building completely renewed.
I immediately knew what the dream meant. There was nothing special
about the building. The building represented humanity. It represented
the inner self of each human being. It didn't matter how they got to
the building, only that they got there. Each person was responsible
for getting there on his or her own. The core message of the dream was
that each human being is responsible for him/herself, and has to go
into him/herself to be renewed, to change, and to grow.
It no longer mattered what method I used to get to where I needed
to go. There was no need to be angry with people, religion, or God.
All that mattered was getting to myself.
I quickly recovered from my illness, let go of the anger and
frustration, and starting looking inside myself. I developed an
interest in Paganism, finding that it helped me with the deep inner
work I needed to do. Because I was genuinely interested in getting to
the truth within myself, memories started coming back – childhood
memories, and memories of lives I had lived before this one. The
memories were not always pleasant, and some of them could have
potentially destroyed me. But I worked through the implications behind
them, sorted them out, started piecing together the puzzle that was
me. As of today, I'm still working on it.
One of the feelings that surfaced after remembering my NDE was one
of rejection. I've been dealing with feelings of rejection throughout
my life, for reasons I could not explain, up until now. I had been
rejected by death as a child. Because I became an unusual child, I was
equally rejected by life. It's hard to determine how much this
influenced my thinking as a child, how I processed this information,
and how much it altered my perceptions of others and myself. What I do
know is that it did give me a skewed view of life and death. I
constantly felt I was being watched and judged. It's no wonder that I
took those feelings and applied them to myself over time.
Now I know where these feelings of rejection originated. I also
know that I have a choice to allow them to control my life or to let
them go. When I began to recognize my personal responsibility for who
I was, I began steering my own life, and began realizing the harm
judgment causes when applied to other people. I most likely would have
continued to blame others, blame life, and blame God for my personal
shortcomings. I never would have taken responsibility for who I am or
what I am doing with my life.
By itself, my NDE could hardly be considered a positive experience.
Some might even consider my experience morbid, frightening, or
surreal. After all, there were no bright lights to step into, no
loving family reunions, no angels, and no talks with God in paradise.
But in a larger context, looking at my life as a whole, I can see that
my experience was specifically designed for me, in order to expose
personal traits like fear and judgment. It served the greater purpose
of helping me learn who I am. I really don't believe I would have
learned these lessons without having gone through the experience. In a
way, it forced my hand, forced me to change how I respond to the
world, and how the world responds to me.
Experiences like this happen for a reason, even though sometimes we
do not understand why. I believe experiences like this are Spirit's
way of tipping our hand, showing us what we need to change within
ourselves in order to get to where we need to be, both as individuals
and as a collective whole. If humanity is going to change for the
better, the change must start from within each of us. It's experiences
like these, dealt with honestly, that create real change.
From the Author:
The author of this account has requested anonymity, not out of
fear of being attacked for the views and experiences shared, but
because of the belief that experiences such as these should be viewed
as just another part of life. In the author's view, all life
experience is exceptional when it is used to learn and grow as an
individual.
