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Barbara Whitfield’s Near-Death Experiences

Written on August 5, 2015. Posted in Integration Narratives: A Closer Look.

I was born with a deformity, a curvature in my lumbar spine called “scoliosis.” It never bothered me until 1973 when it suddenly became the focus of my life. I was hospitalized four times in the next two years, each time for two weeks, with traction and injections of Demerol to help alleviate the pain. Looking back on it now, I believe, like many other NDErs, that my back pain was a metaphor for my life, which had gotten off track.

Finally, I underwent surgery, a spinal fusion. I awoke after the five-and-a-half-hour operation in a Stryker-frame circle bed. This strange bed looks like a Ferris wheel for one person. There are two big chrome hoops with a stretcher suspended in the middle. I remained in that bed for almost a month, and then I was placed in a full body cast from my armpits to my knees for six months.

About two days after surgery, complications set in and I started to die. I remember waking up in the circle bed and seeing this huge belly. I had swollen up, and the swelling was pulling my incisions open and it hurt. I called for my nurse, and then I started screaming.

People in white came rushing in. It was a dramatic scene, just like those you see in hospital dramas on television. I had no idea what was going on because I hadn’t become a respiratory therapist yet. It seemed like everybody was pushing carts and machinery, throwing things back and forth over me. They hooked me up to all kinds of machinery, tubes, monitors and bags. Overwhelmed emotionally, I lost consciousness and later that night woke up in the hall outside my room. I floated back into the room and saw my body. I felt peaceful, more peaceful than I had ever been in this lifetime. Then I went into a tunnel where I was greeted and held by my grandmother who had been dead for 14 years. Before this I had never once thought about her surviving her death. I didn’t believe in that. But now I knew I was with her. Her love enveloped me and together we relived all our memories of each other. I could see and feel all this through her eyes and her feelings of each moment too. And I know she experienced how her actions and her love had comforted me in my childhood.
Suddenly I was back in my body, back in the circle bed. Two nurses were opening my drapes. The sunlight was startling. It hurt my eyes. I asked them to close the drapes. I tried to tell my nurses and then several doctors that I had left the bed. They told me that it was impossible and that I had been hallucinating.

My Life Review

About a week later, I again left my body in the circle bed. I was no longer on the critical list, but I was still debilitated and weak. I had been rotated forward onto my face. I was uncomfortable. I seemed to have been in that position for too long. I reached for the call button, but it had slipped away from where it had been clipped to the bed sheet. I start-ed to call, then yell, then scream frantically, but my door was closed. No one came. I became hysterical. I separated from my body.

As I left my body, I again went out into the darkness, only this time I was awake and could see it happening. Looking down and off to the right, I saw myself in a bubble — in the circle bed — crying. Then I looked up and to the left, and I saw my one-year-old self in another bubble-face down in my crib — crying just as hard. I looked to the right and saw myself again in the circle bed, then to the left and saw myself as a baby. I looked back and forth about three more times, then I let go. I decided I did not want to be the thirty-two-year-old Barbara anymore; I’d go to the baby. As I moved away from my body in the circle bed, I felt as though I released myself from this lifetime. As I did, I became aware of an Energy that was wrapping itself around me and going through me, permeating me, holding up every molecule of my being.

Even though I had been an atheist for years, I felt God’s love. This love was holding me. It felt incredible. There are no words in the English language, or maybe in this reality, to explain the kind of love God emanates. God was totally accepting of everything we — God and I — reviewed in my life.

In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything that everyone else had felt as a consequence of my presence and my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned. Oh, how I learned!

The information was flowing at an incredible speed that probably would have burned me up if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary Energy holding me. The information came in, and then love neutralized my judgments against myself. In other words, throughout every scene I viewed, information flowed through me about my perceptions and feelings, and the perceptions and feelings of every person who had shared those scenes with me. No matter how I judged myself in each interaction, being held by God was the bigger interaction. God interjected love into everything, every feeling, every bit of information about absolutely everything that went on, so that everything was all right. There was no good and no bad. There was only me — and my loved ones from this life — trying to survive… just trying to be.

I realize now that without God holding me, I would not have had the strength to experience what I did. When it started, God and I were merging. We became one, so that I could see through God’s eyes and feel through God’s heart. Together, we witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my thirty-two years of life was that I had never learned to love myself.

God let me into God’s experience of all this. I felt God’s memories of these scenes through God’s eyes. I could sense God’s divine intelligence, and it was astonishing. God loves us and wants us to wake up to our real selves, to what is important. I realized that God wants us to know that we only experience real pain if we die without living first .And the way to live is to give love to ourselves and to others. It seems that we are here to learn to give and receive love. But only when we heal enough to be real can we understand and give and receive love the way love was meant to be.

When God holds us in our life reviews and we merge into One, we remember this feeling as being limitless. God is limitless. God’s capacity to love is never-ending. God’s love for us never changes, no matter how we are. God doesn’t judge us either. During our life review, we judge ourselves by feeling the love we have created in other’s lives. We also feel the pain we have caused in other’s lives. This may be a kind of Cosmic Equalizer.

I did not see an old man with a white beard who sits in judgment of us. I only felt limitless divine love.
God only gives. God interjected love into all the scenes of my life to show me God’s reality. And the most amazing part of all is that God held nothing back. I understood all that God understood. God let me in. God shared all of God’s self with me: all the qualities of gentleness and openness, and all the gifts, including our own empowerment and peace. I never knew that much loving intelligence and freedom could exist.

What I saw in My Life Review

At this point God and I were merging into one Sacred Person. It felt as though I lifted off the circle bed and we went to the baby I was seeing to my upper left in the darkness. Picture the baby being in a bubble; that bubble was in the center of a cloud of thousands and thousands of bubbles. In each bubble was another scene from my life. As we moved toward the baby, it was as though we were bobbing through the bubbles. At the same time, there was a linear sequence in which we relived thirty-two years of my life. I could hear myself saying, “No wonder, no wonder.” I now believe my “no wonders” meant “No wonder you are the way you are now. Look what was done to you when you were a little girl.”

My mother had been dependent on prescription drugs, angry and abusive, and my father wasn’t home much of the time and did little to intervene. I saw all this again, but I did not see it in little bits and pieces, the way I had remembered it as an adult. I saw and experienced it just as I had lived it at the time it first happened. Not only was I me, I was also my mother, my dad, and my brother. We were all one. Just as I had felt everything my grandmother had felt, I now felt my mother’s pain and neglect from her childhood. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She didn’t know how to be loving or kind. She didn’t know how to love. She didn’t understand what life is really all about. And she was still angry from her own childhood, angry because they were poor and because her father was sick almost every day until he died when she was eleven. And then she was angry because he had left her. She didn’t know what to do with her anger so she gave it to my brother and me. Her anger boiled up all the time and then she physically abused us or she made us listen to all her resentments. Her list went back to her early childhood. Everyone had hurt her. I don’t think that she, through her numbness and drugged state, understood how she was doing the same thing to us.

Everything came flooding back, including my father’s helplessness and confusion at stopping the insanity. I could hear myself saying, “No wonder, no wonder.” And then the benevolent Energy that was holding me held me tighter and with even more love.

We continued watching my mother in pain, always seeing doctors and always receiving prescription pain killers, sleeping pills and tranquilizers. My only feeling during this time was loneliness. I saw myself down on my knees by the side of my bed, praying for a doctor to help my mother. I saw how I had given up “myself” in order to survive. I forgot that I was a child. I became my mother’s mother. I suddenly knew that my mother had had the same thing happen to her in her childhood. She took care of her father, and as a child she gave herself up to take care of him. As children, she and I both became anything and everything others needed. As my life review continued, I also saw my mother’s Soul, how painful her life was, how lost she was. And I saw my father, and how he put blinders on himself to avoid his grief over my mother’s pain and to survive. In my life review, I saw that they were good people caught in helplessness. I saw their beauty, their humanity and their needs that had gone unattended to in their own childhoods. I loved them and understood them. We may have been trapped, but we were still Souls connected in our dance of life by an Energy source that had created us.

This was when I first realized that we do not end at our skin. We are all in this big churning mass of consciousness. We are each a part of this consciousness we call God. And we are not just human. We are Spirit. We were Spirit before we came into this lifetime. We are all struggling Spirits now, trying to get “being human” right. And when we leave here, we will be pure Spirit again.

As my life review continued, I got married and had my own children and saw that I was on the edge of repeating the cycle that I had experienced as a child. I was on prescription drugs. I was in the hospital. I was becoming like my mother. And at the same time, this Loving Energy we call God was holding me and let me into Its experience of all this. I felt God’s memories of these scenes through God’s eyes, just as I had through my grandmother’s eyes.

As my life unfolded, I witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my life was that I had never learned to love myself.

And then I was back here, in this reality.

Barbara Whitfield

Written on August 5, 2015. Posted in Integration Narratives.

Background

As you can read in my Life Review, my childhood was fraught with physical and psychological abuse. There were also times of neglect. I learned to become my mother’s mother to escape the abuse which usually backfired. By the time I grew up, I had totally lost my true self and had become anything and everything the people around me wanted. I married young to get out of my house and promptly had 3 beautiful children. By the time I had my catastrophic surgery at the age of 32 we had the American Dream — a beautiful large home in a beautiful suburb of Detroit Michigan called Bloomfield Hills, a swimming pool, our own airplane, beautiful vacations, etc. Deep inside I knew something was wrong, something was missing — and it was me. I was gone.

Spiritually Transformative Experiences

Barbara, who was an atheist at the time, had two near-death experiences in 1975 as a result of complications following surgery on her spine. They occurred while she was strapped in a Stryker-frame circle bed. Her second near-death experience involved an extensive life review that showed her the reasons for the abuse she had endured and her future as a mother. In them, she felt the depth of God’s love and learned the importance of loving one’s self.

Click here to read her near-death experiences, including her life review.

Integration Issue(s)

I had been catapulted out of time and was embraced by this whole different way of thinking and being. Just as rapidly, I was back here, wanting to break new ground. I had had a great opportunity, and now I wanted to share it.

I insisted on seeing a psychiatrist, hoping he would understand what I had experienced. The doctor I saw didn’t understand. No one understood NDEs back then, so I realized that I couldn’t talk about it. I spent the next six months in my body cast, thinking about my NDE but not talking about it.

First, I volunteered to work in the emergency room of the hospital where I had been a patient. I was excited that first morning. I put on my volunteer uniform, wishing my pounding headache would subside. My first few hours standing in the corridor of the emergency room, doing what little I was asked to do, was agonizing because of this headache. Then an old woman was brought in on a gurney from an ambulance. She was shivering. I knew she was dying but I didn’t know how I knew. A nurse asked me to go over to the warmer and get a few blankets for her. She pointed to what looked like a refrigerator and turned out to be a warmer filled with blankets. I took two over to the shivering woman and spread them over her, one at a time, using my hands to smooth them. Then, to my surprise, something strange started to happen. I felt my headache moving down through my shoulders, draining into my hands and out of my palms, only the sensation wasn’t one of pain anymore. It was more like a tingling. I looked at the old woman and she was smiling right into my eyes. She said, “Oh, my dear, I feel a little better.” I took her hand in mine and sat down next to her, just content to hold her hand. A few minutes later, she said, “The pain medication is working. I’m out of pain and not so afraid anymore.” (My headache was gone too). I sat there for the longest time. Occasionally a nurse or the emergency room doctor walked by and they smiled but they didn’t ask me to do any more until much later when the woman was taken to a room.

After that first experience at that hospital, I had many opportunities to be with and touch dying people. Either I searched them out, or the staff asked me to. During my breaks I would go to the rooms of dying people I had met in the emergency room. I felt real when I worked there. And everyone else was real, too. In settings where life and death are on the edge every moment, only the truth is spoken.

My personal life, however, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. My husband, my friends and most family members were caught up in their own games. No one seemed to be communicating honestly. It seemed that what was shown to me in my life review now made me recognize how manipulative our relationships were. We never were able to honestly talk about what we wanted or needed from one another. The most painful part for me was watching the disrespect of each others feelings. I cannot deny that I, too, had once been a part of it, part of the denial and numbness. We used materialism as a way to substitute for authentic living. But now I was different. It wasn’t their fault I had changed. The only place I felt real besides the hospital was on a college campus. I realized that I needed to go back to school in order to qualify for some type of health care career.

Transformative Beliefs**

I learned in my life review that the only thing that is real is love, and the only way to share love is by being real. Being real happens when we acknowledge our feelings, the feelings of others and continually share our truth. When we feel our feelings and are real, we share our truth out of love. Then our relationship with God and our self is healthy. This relationship is always here and can continue to grow in our lives if we allow it to. This sacred relationship continues to interpret for us what we are doing here, what life may be all about.

When we die, if we re-experience our lives from everyone else’s perspective as well as our own, there are only feelings, perceptions and knowledge. We really cannot judge or blame others, because we suddenly understand where we and everyone else is coming from. We only judge here in this earthly reality. When I was with God, I was just learning. The knowledge of what had happened was pouring into me, and I was repeatedly saying my “no wonders!” I came to believe that God doesn’t judge but wants us to learn so we won’t make the same mistakes again. My experiences showed me that God wants us to stop being fearful and instead, to extend love.

What I learned and experienced for myself during my own life review was that a Divine Energy connects all of us — has since orchestrated all of my relationships.

To this day, I still feel connected to this Energy through my heart. Within my heart, there is a constant prayer. This prayer forms the background music of every experience I have. When we are connected to God’s loving energy, it is the single most powerful force in the universe.

Current STE related activities:

I graduated a few years later as a respiratory therapist. I loved working in the emergency room and the ICU, where, once again, my patients were telling me about their experiences as they were dying. And those who returned to their bodies told me about their NDEs. I started to write about what I was hearing, calling my topic “the emotional needs of critical-care patients.” Surprisingly, I was invited to speak at professional conferences and was published in respiratory therapy journals. The emotional needs of critical care patients was a hot new topic in healthcare during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Finally, I became a researcher and could start looking for the answers that I so longed to find. Because I was undertaking my research at a university medical school, all kinds of new knowledge became available to me. Now at last I could frame and reframe not only the hundreds of experiences I was studying, but also my own.

I have followed the current and its gentle urging for 35 years now and looking back on all of this, I truly believe that the guidance has been amazing. I became a subject in Kenneth Ring’s two groundbreaking books on the near-death experience Heading Toward Omega and Lessons from the Light. I was Bruce Greyson’s research assistant for 6 years at the University of Connecticut Medical School where I learned so much about the aftereffects of awakening spiritually that I was able to write several books on the subject. My first one was my story and Dr. Greyson wrote commentaries for this book called Full Circle: The Near-death Experience and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, Pocket, 1990), My next four books are Spiritual Awakenings: Insights of the NDE and other doorways to our Soul (HCI 1995). Final Passage: Sharing the Journey as this life ends (HCI 1998), The Power of Humility: Choosing Peace over Conflict in Relationships (co authored HCI 2006) and my latest book is The Natural Soul: Unity with the Spiritual Energy that connects us: What It looks like and how It feels (Muse House Press 2010.)

For 12 years I taught classes at Rutgers University’s Institute for Alcohol and Drug studies on the integrations of Spiritual Awakenings. I called my classes: When the 12th Step Happens First.

From all this learning and guidance, I am now in a marriage that is wonderful container for who I am. That is very important to me – to be able to continue to learn and grow for the rest of this life and beyond with a man who wants to do that too. And the overriding feeling after all the struggles on this amazing journey is Gratitude with a capital G.

Above is a picture of the circle bed I had my two near-death experiences in. Then there’s one with me and my incredible granddaughter Lily. I take care of her 4 days a week while her parents work and go to school. Then I share a psychotherapy practice with my husband Charles Whitfield, MD in the evenings and weekends. We do individual and group therapy with adults that were repeatedly traumatized as children. Finally there is a picture of us when we were in Aruba where I was invited to address a big women’s organization there.

Barbara’s websites are:

www.barbarawhitfield.com
http://barbara-whitfield.blogspot.com

** The views expressed in these profiles are those of the experiencer. ACISTE does not represent or endorse a spiritual viewpoint.

Sandy: What I learned…

Written on August 5, 2015. Posted in Integration Narratives: A Closer Look.

What I learned from my spiritually transformative experiences and afterwards: **

“15 years after my first STE, I started to receive insights about God, creation and our world from an otherworldly dimension. It is as difficult for me to explain this phenomenon as it is to express my STE because our vocabulary simply cannot clearly describe ethereal insights. I hope that you will forgive me if my expressions fall short of explaining it adequately enough for you to understand. I wish to make the disclaimer that the following is my conclusion that I have come to, from my own understanding, after all of my lifetime experiences and insights thus far. I submit this contribution in hopes to help other people understand what I learned through my near-death-like-experience and other phenomena.

I discovered many things that answered many questions about God and the reason for things. I honestly don’t have the intelligence to make up these answers or to give myself these visual effects. I felt awe struck as I watched this information unfold so that I viewed it from a mystical “third eye” that I didn’t know I had before. I saw creation take place from a mystical perspective from within a consciousness before there was form and shape. I was an observer of this consciousness and I perceived a conversation of a conscious mind about what it wanted to do before doing it.

I saw that our world was planned through a Divine Creator and yet the process of evolution was a part of that planning. This consciousness thought everything through from beginning to an ending purpose. I observed that while this consciousness was pleased with its “perfection of peace” it also wanted to love and move. It was perfect and “tranquil stillness” as it is, and yet it wanted involvement and interaction with life. It wanted to share all that it is with life. (I don’t feel right calling this an “It” so think about “it” as being an abbreviation of a living Intelligence.)

But there was something special in having another “being-ness” who chooses to love and interact with this Divine Consciousness without being made to do it through force. This consciousness wanted life to choose to want a communion with “It” because It wanted to share all that It is with us. I felt its desire to nurture and to express itself. This became the feminine Consciousness and yet it was not separated from the masculine Consciousness which was content as It is. This consciousness wanted something similar to Itself that had its own freedom of expression and the ability to think for itself, and yet It knew that we couldn’t be exactly like this Divine Consciousness or we wouldn’t become a different “being-ness”. It was like separating a drop of water from an ocean except that the ocean had no boundary. How could this Divine Consciousness make another entity that was so much like Him/Herself and yet not be Him/Her?

This consciousness thought of the epitome of us before the formation of the universe and all that is on our planet. I will now call this consciousness “God” to make it easier for me to explain. God has the power to force people to follow His guidance, but He doesn’t want to force His power against our will. There can be no absolute control over people if we were given free will and as was revealed to me, God did not want to take away our free will and freedom of choice. God remains hidden to this realm and many people have a problem believing in His existence. He stays hidden to permit us freedom of our choices, even about belief in Him! God certainly is not forcing people to believe anything, otherwise we would all see and hear Him dictating His absolute authority each moment of our life. God did not want that for us and so to see religions trying to coerce people to follow their scriptures goes against the will of God. God only intervened to give us guidance through inspiration because He foresaw people making bad choices with their freedom and where it would take them. He only intervenes enough to get us back on track and then lets us live our lives as we choose, and yet He hopes that we make good choices.

He permits us the freedom to pursue our destiny according to the level of our ability and at our own pace of comprehension. Perfect love does not dictate authority and God is perfect in every way. Perfect love respects the rights of another person’s will while teaching and guiding with care, compassion, understanding and tolerance. Isn’t it logical that since God is all-knowing that He would be tolerant and understanding of our weaknesses and mistakes? Wouldn’t He understand why each of us does as we do?

God created in diversity so that we could be uniquely whomever we wanted to be in freedom, although He hoped that we would choose to follow the path of goodness along the way so that we would live in harmony. Unfortunately with freedom of will, there was always that vice which permits us to decide our path between what is good or bad for us, healthy or harmful. As I observed the vision of human spiritual evolution, I saw that people migrate toward likenesses of themselves because they conflict with their opposition and they seek harmony with their own soul’s identity. Those who migrate toward God’s attributes are lead toward His path of unconditional love and philanthropic views, while those who migrate away are lead down the path of harming others and ultimately harming themselves.

Each person is responsible to learn the delicate balance to use our own free will without crossing over the line to infringe on the rights of others or to intentionally bring them harm. Each person has the freedom to choose the way which guides their life. As more and more men were inclined towards corruption, there evolved the need to give guidance to mankind to try to guide us back to the path of goodness. This is why so many people received divine inspiration which formed different religions throughout the world. The dilemma is that the guidance that He inspired is difficult for men to comprehend because we are not perfect beings. Therefore our interpretations are not perfect.

To know God is one of our choices. He wanted us to choose to follow His guidance because our heart agreed with it. He wanted us to choose to know Him. But to know Him was also to evolve toward His likeness. The problem is that we can’t be His exact likeness or we won’t be our own individual being. We need our own identity. So He concealed Himself so that we would not see Him as He is until we chose to embrace Him because our heart loved what He is.

I want to point out that during my NDLE, I saw God as a masculine Deity and I was even permitted to embrace Him. But during these visual revelations, I didn’t “see” a God of form. This is because my transcendent vision was prior to God manifesting Himself as a visual Deity. In the spirit, we have access to God and God is not bound to the past, present or future. It was through this spiritual connection or communion that I perceived this explanation from a prior state. This is why I don’t have a problem with other people discovering God in a different concept or form. God is a Consciousness that emanates His attributes into life. Each and every plant, rock and creature has an attribute that is God’s. Each life form has varying degrees of God’s attributes and characteristics. But to give us our own individual being-ness that was unique, He designed each thing with its own unique characteristics. As life forms evolve, or expand upwards to contain more and more characteristics of God’s attributes, life forms have more abilities and hold more and more of God’s purity.”

“Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face. My knowledge now is partial; then it will be whole, like God’s knowledge of me.” 1 Corinthians 13:12

“For all that may be known of God by men lies plain before their eye; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attributes, that is to say his everlasting power and deity, have been visible, ever since the world began, to the eye of reason, in the things he has made.” Romans 1:19-20

”[I pray that God] may give you the spiritual powers of wisdom and vision, by which there comes knowledge of him. I pray that your inward eyes may be illumined, so that you may know what is the hope to which he calls you.” Ephesians 1:17-23

**The views expressed in these profiles are those of the experiencer. ACISTE does not represent or endorse a spiritual viewpoint.

Denis Purcell: My Veridical OBE and Analysis

Written on August 5, 2015. Posted in Integration Narratives: A Closer Look.

My out-of-body experience took place in the spring of 1965 when I was 19 years old. I had returned one afternoon from the local junior college in Redding, CA and I decided to take a nap. I awoke consciously in my still-sleeping body shortly thereafter and heard a sound that seemed to be moving up my spine increasing in frequency as it did so. As it moved up my spine, it seemed to pull the essence of my body with it. When I got to my head, I was very frightened and had a vision of an escalator – out of control – moving up rapidly and I imagined trying to grab the hand railings to keep from flying off the top; however, it was moving too rapidly and I flew off the top and exited my body through the top of my head.

As soon as I was outside my body, the fear vanished and was replaced by a sense of well being. I thought this must be the way it felt to die when there were no traumatic circumstances involved. Upon discovering that my “guide” was hovering near me, I asked him what I was. He said to me, “You are a seat of consciousness.” I said next, “Well, what is my shape?” He replied to me, “Roughly spherical.” Then I said, “Well then, why can’t I see in a full 360 degree circle if I’m just a sphere of consciousness and don’t need eyes to see?” He replied, “It takes about 2 weeks to become deconditioned to the customary modalities of perception.” I marveled at the clarity of mind I was experiencing – having previously thought that if the mind could operate independently of the brain, it would experience a diminished intellectual capacity. I next moved through the wall of my bedroom, out over the dichondra in our front yard.

I found myself hovering about 5 or 6 feet over the dichondra and could see all around me perfectly without glasses which I must wear when in my body. I next asked my guide, “What is my method of propulsion?” He said, “Will power.” So I said, “Okay, I’m going to will myself to move 1 foot forward and then come back 1 foot.” As I did this, I moved 1 foot forward over the dichondra and then moved back to my original location. I “probed” my guide and learned that he had been an M.D. during life. I felt like a small child exploring the world for the first time and everything was “bright and new and shiney.” I then had access to all the memories of my life up until the age of 4 that I had since forgotten.

I remembered being a child up until the age of 4 and leaving my body like this virtually every night, but forgetting the experience when I awoke in the morning. A lady then appeared on a field of clouds and informed me that I had been there with her before my birth and I briefly remembered being briefed by her about my life to come and suggestions given on how to respond to major events that would occur in this life. I then returned to my position above the dichondra and asked my guide what was different about my sense of my surroundings than if I had been physically standing there. He directed my attention to the high-tension wires across the street and I noticed that I could hear a sound coming from them that sounded like the auditory equivalent of a square wave on an oscilloscope – as if people were cutting in and out of the electrical currents running through them. I then asked my guide what I could do next.

He said, “You can go anywhere and do anything.” So I went up in the air about 100 feet over my house; however, it felt cold up there and I decided I didn’t want to get too far from my body in my bedroom. Thus, I came back down. He volunteered that, “You can separate your analogous modalities of perception from your seat of consciousness and experience at a distance while staying right there. I had always wanted to climb Mt. Bally across the Sacramento Valley from my then current position; so, I projected my sense of hearing to the snowline on Mt Bally while maintaining my seat of consciousness over the dichondra. I could hear the snow melting into a puddle. I thought that that was great and I then recollected my analogous modality of hearing with my seat of consciousness.

At this time, my father pulled up in his pickup and I decided to collect data that would be inaccessible to my body. He pulled the truck into the driveway and I mentally noted that the front tire was about 6 inches behind the third stake on the side of the driveway. That was datum number 1. He then got out of the truck and I suddenly realized that all the disagreements we had had recently were just a phase I was going through of late adolescence and that I loved him very much and had known him for hundreds of years. I remembered before I was born, hovering near him as he slogged through the mud of Germany during World War II. He had all of his children call him by his first name; so, I said, “Hi, Dale” and waved at him with my arm that appeared when I wanted to wave. However, he didn’t see me. I next followed him into the house through the front door.

When he got inside, he tossed his hat on a little table in the living room and I mentally “photographed” the angle of the bill of the hat to the table. That was datum number 2. I next used what I had learned earlier and separated my analogous visual modality of perception to follow him down the hall to the master bedroom where he flopped down on the bed after a tiring day at work. I mentally photographed the angles his arms and legs made with the bed. That was datum number 3. I then recollected myself in the living room.

I was hovering over the floor of the living room feeling great and my mother was behind a wall in the kitchen whistling as she prepared dinner. At that time, the wall opened up into an aperture through which I could see a lady sitting on a field of clouds with her legs crossed in a lotus posture looking at someone out of my field of vision. She floated forward and I started to go towards her. Then she said to the person with her, “Oh, these beginners!” Not knowing what I was getting into, I headed for my body in my bedroom.

When I got back to my body, it was like being in a “cold brick.” I couldn’t even move my eyelids. So, I asked my guide what was the matter. He said, “It takes a little while to get control of the nerve endings. So, I took my time and I started to wakeup. As I was coming to waking consciousness in my body, I started to forget the whole experience. I immediately said to my guide with whom I could still communicate, “I don’t want to forget!” He said, “OK, backup a little bit and create a replica of your memories in your physical brain; so, that they will be accessible to waking consciousness.” I did as instructed and then awoke physically with a complete memory of the entire experience.

I felt fantastic as I got up – as if I had “turned over in my body.” I next checked my dad, walked down the hall and checked his hat, and went outside and checked the truck in the driveway. All the data points agreed with my physical sight observances. From that time on, I knew I was a spirit temporarily occupying a body.

I have subsequently come to three conclusions about this experience which are relevant to science and medicine. First, individual consciousness can separate from the brain and be present outside the body as some sort of energy field. If this were not the case, I would not have had the “data” I collected confirmed exactly. Second, there is a neuronal interface between consciousness and the body which can probably be investigated scientifically. This would explain why my “guide” said, “It takes a little while to get control of the nerve endings.” Finally, there must be a duality of memory location – survival-oriented memory stored in the physical brain and memories prior to birth and of early childhood stored outside the brain in the energy-field of consciousness and not generally accessible in the waking state. This would explain the need to “download” the experience to the brain for waking-state access. This final conclusion could explain why so many people come physically close to death but don’t recall anything from the interval. They may have failed to download the experience. In which case, it might still be accessible in an altered state of consciousness.