Jeffrey C.

When I was 19, I found out that my girlfriend was cheating on me with one of my best friends. So I washed down several bottles of drugs with a bottle of rum. My mom called an ambulance and I went to the hospital. Before I got there, I was out. I normally got an euphoric feeling after taking drugs, like being high or drunk. I don’t know how long it was, but the next thing I know, I felt like I was in bed and slipping off of it to my left. I didn’t feel drunk or foggy at all. I instinctively tried to grab on the bed and I jumped up. I was overwhelmed with panic. I saw images of a house, a Jaguar car, and people that I had never seen before in my life. Immediately I was thrown back on the table. I opened my eyes and I saw a doctor on top of me, giving me a chest massage. I tried to sit back up, thinking he would move out of the way but he didn’t. Again, I went into him and saw images of his wife, kids, and his car. I felt the panic in him. It was so overwhelming and repelled from these visions. I slammed back on the table.

I was slipping to the left again and looked to the right to see my own body next to me. When I looked back to the left, I saw a flash of blue light. As I looked to the corner of the room to get a better look, I saw a column of light coming down to the floor. I heard a voice from my right say, ‘It’s alright, we’ll save you.’ As I looked, I saw what truly looked like a blue fairy taking me by the hand. I caught a glimpse of a green light heading to my left but it took my hand and pulled it up over my head. I couldn’t see what it was because the two of them together pulled me around, upright, and off to the right side of the room in the corner. I shook them off so I could see what was going on. I saw the doctor over me trying to revive me, a nurse at my head putting an oxygen mask or something on me, and my mom in the doorway with her arms crossed. The little blue angel said, ‘We don’t have time, we have to hurry.’

As I began to really comprehend the situation they took me into the column of light and it was a trip. The motion and lights seem to make me feel a little bit sick, so I closed my eyes for a while and opened them every once and a while out of pure curiosity. I saw the proverbial ‘Stairway to Heaven’ along the way with someone being led up it by a dog. Eventually, I saw clouds. As I tried to look over my shoulder and down to the ground, I saw a huge crowd of people standing in front of the gate of heaven. The little angels put me down just inside the gate and to the right of it in a room. I was kneeling with my eyes closed for a minute. It was so cold, and as I though that, it stopped. I opened my eyes to see that I was in a room with cloud walls. I started to walk towards the clouds and a voice said, ‘Don’t do it. You’ll regret it. You’ll be lost forever.’ I turned back around and was pretty angry because I fully intended for dead to be dead. I was realizing that this is not what I expected. This wasn’t dead, it was just more living in a different place.

I was an arrogant, angry 19 year old. I thought to myself, ‘So this heaven. At least they could have given me a bench or something to sit on.’ Just as I looked down to a place where I would have put one, there was a white marble bench. I thought, ‘Great, a marble bench. I bet this is going to be cold.’ But it wasn’t. As I sat down on it, a corner of the room turned flat. The clouds started to get dark and swirl. It opened like an elevator door, and there were three figure standing there silhouetted by a bright light. I could feel them as well as see them. One of them was my grandmother, and another one, a very old lady said, ‘See, I told you so’ to my grandmother. The third one was a young girl who flew into the room with a joyous squeal and sat down next to me. The door closed and she asked me what happened. I’m not real good at telling my problems to people I don’t know, but her compassion and caring nature seem to bring it all out of me. She took me on several journeys.

The first was like the story of Christmas Scrooge. She showed me things from my past that were significant. Things that I had done that impressed people, and the things that people said that I never knew. She showed me the people that would be affected by my death; the people that would be affected by my life. It didn’t really have much effect on my selfish arrogant 19-year-old self.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a grass field on a sunny day. I could hear really southern, hillbilly-sounding voices of a girl and a couple of guys. They were laughing and cutting up in a really stupid way. I tried to slowly, quietly, get up to look over the grass and see who it was. I saw a run-down old shack. As a breeze came across the grass, I caught whiff of the foulest smell. I finally saw the the people that were talking, but they weren’t really people. They were wearing overalls, but they had jackal faces. They noticed me and came running over. They asked who I was and where did I come from. Just then, one of them pointed to the sky.

As I looked, I saw a line appear and the sky ripped open. A giant, brown creature came jumping out and landed next to me. He had horns all over his head, 5 or 6 eyes, and was cussing violently. He was not like the detailed creatures you would see in a movie. He was more like a cartoon. He smelled really bad, and was really hard to listen to. His words were full of curse words and insults. I don’t remember what all he said, but he grabbed me and jumped back into the hole in the sky. We landed on a platform in space, with a wall of what looked like TV screens. They were actually cubes. There was a control panel like a podium. He told me this was hell, and in every cube was a custom made hell for every soul. He explained that people adapt to every kind of hell, and some people are more tolerant of some things than others, so hell is ever changing. He took great joy out of watching people suffer.

As I walked along the wall of cubes, I was sucked into one of them and found myself in a small white room with a door and a shelf. Soon the door opened and a very good looking guy and girl walked in. They were very nice to me and asked if they could get me something. Generally in unknown situations, I don’t eat or drink. It’s just me. I have to be perfectly comfortable before I’ll indulge myself. So I kept saying ‘No’ but they kept on bugging me about it until it became so annoying that I finally told them, ‘Sure, a sandwich and coke.’ They left and returned with a sandwich and a coke. I was skeptical, so I just let them sit on the shelf. Then they started to bug me to take a bite and enjoy. I finally gave in and took a bite, but I looked through it to make sure it was what I thought it was. After biting into it, I was totally repulsed by the flavor. It was so rank, I spit it out and grabbed for the coke that was just as bad. I had to spit it out too. They laughed and laughed as I was trying to get the rank taste out of my mouth. Real funny, ha ha. Then they apologized and offered to get me another. I said, ‘No thanks’ and they again started to convince me that they were just joking and it wouldn’t happen again. I finally just stopped talking to them and began to see that these two good looking people actually had jackal faces with a transparent mask or something. I realized that I could see through their masks and this whole thing was just a way of torturing me. I was whisked up and snatched out of the cube in a whirlwind. As I left the platform, I could hear the devil screaming, ‘Nooooo!’

The next thing I knew I was being shown flashes of all the bad things I had ever done, and I was being put into other peoples’ shoes as I was doing bad things to them. I could see how insensitive I was to people and didn’t even know it. It was excruciating and overwhelming to relive things that I had forgotten about, or just didn’t care about. I was made to feel they way I made others feel. I was so cold and was shivering.

I realized that I was somewhere. I opened my tear-filled eyes and found myself kneeling in a cave of some kind. It had a low ceiling and a cold wet floor, and was very dark. I felt so alone and abandoned. I began to try to move through the cave in the dark. It was hard because I couldn’t crawl without getting wet, and I couldn’t stand up because the ceiling was so low. I didn’t want to get wet because I was so cold. Soon I saw an amber light ahead, I hoped that it would be warmer near this light. I could see other people near the light and found a crowd of people all kneeling at the side of an opening. I could tell there was fire inside. I saw a girl kneeling with her wrists cut, a man with a rope around his neck, and another with the back of his head blown out. I could hear screaming from the cave ahead, and I was trying to get one of these people to talk to me and tell me where I was. One of them told me to be quiet or I would be next. Then a huge, ugly demon reached out of the cave, grabbed them and dragged them into the cave. I became worried that I would be next. I knelt down. As I closed my eyes, I was overwhelmed again with visions and emotions of all the bad things in my life. I opened my eyes and realized that I could not close them unless I wanted this to happen. I looked around and realized that this was why everyone looked like a bunch of zombies. You can not close your eyes. You can not talk to the others. You can not stand up. You can not sit down. You can only kneel there on the tips of your toes and the points of your knees. All you could do was stare at the hole of fire, listen to the screams, and hope you are not next.

I saw a man in a robe who was about 40 years old with a trimmed beard and a balding head. I thought he looked like a monk, and wondered to myself if this was Judas. After a long time, my eyes began to burn so badly, I finally decided that it was worth it to put up with the bad flashes if I could just close my eyes for a while. I began to sob quietly as the flashes of my evil ways rushed in, and I heard a voice. It said, ‘If you ask him, maybe he will save you.’ I thought to myself, ‘How?’ The voice said, ‘Say it. Say the words, Jesus Christ my savior in heaven, please save me.’ I said the words out loud. The voice said, ‘ Again’ and so I said it again, and again, and again. The screaming stopped, and then the flashes stopped. It was silent.

As I looked up, I saw a man sitting in a giant stone chair. There was a silver-winged creature next to him who had a helmet with wings on it. There was a woman on his left. She had some very old men behind her. We were on a platform in space, but the stars were eyes instead. I realized that this was Jesus and the creature on his right was the angel of the lord, and woman on his left was The Blessed Virgin Mary. I can only guess that the old men had to be Abraham, Moses, or one of those important people; maybe the disciples Peter, Paul, or someone. Jesus had a look of disappointment on his face that touched me to my soul and made me feel so ashamed.

The Angel of the Lord said, ‘Tell our lord what brings you here.’ I began to explain that I felt that the world was not a fair place and I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. He looked at me as if I was crazy and asked, ‘Who told you it was going to be a fair world?’ I really didn’t understand. The girl that I first met in heaven swooped in and whisked me away to a great hall that was kind of dark. We were at a great doorway. As I asked her where we were, she told me she had something to show me. The door opened and a bunch of people came out. I saw a group a priest that I recognized from another religious experience I had had at Versailles when I was a child. I had a brief flashback of that experience. As the room emptied, we went in.

It was dark and there was a great roundtable with a three-dimensional display in the middle of the universe. There was an old man. As she brought me to him, he ask, ‘And why are you here?’ The girl explained that I felt that life had treated me badly and thought it was unfair. He thought this was preposterous that I would think such a thing, and in short began to explain that the globe on the table was the universe and that all the stars had meanings and their arrangements had meanings. When people are born, the arrangement of the stars in the universe had an effect on them and the life that they would lead. He explained that heaven was a safe place where souls are protected and taken care of by the lord. Everyone has their own status, and that status is determined by what you have done and learned in the material worlds. He explained that people are rarely happy with where they are for long and that they are always longing to move forward. The souls in heaven are no different. He explained that I came to this council begging to be born into the material world. He explained that I presented them with a very well thought-out case, and that I employed the help of many wise people to determine exactly where and when I was to be born and who I would be born to. I chose my own name for a very distinct reason, and if there is anybody to blame for the life I’m living, it is myself. He explained that I entered into a contract with the creator and I must live up to that contract or face the consequences. He ended the whole speech telling me that I knew what I was getting into, I knew the risks and complications, and that I had been warned. My only choice was to go back and finish what I started. I didn’t get a word in edgewise. For me, at 19 years of age, this didn’t really go over very well. I thought he was just a mean old man with a bad attitude, especially since he ran us out of the room and slammed the door on us.

I found myself back on the platform before Jesus. The Blessed Mother asked me what I thought of what I learned. I told her I thought it wasn’t right that I had to put up with people hurting me, that Jesus was suppose to protect me, and if I was going to go back that I wanted him to make it right. He looked at me and said, ‘My son, I can not cause pain to another, I can only heal those who are broken.’ With the arrogance of youth, I tried to pull the old ‘I want to talk to the manager’ routine and demanded to talk to God. The Blessed Mother said, ‘You can not ‘see’ God.’ Jesus spoke up and said, ‘No one can see God.’ The blessed mother was angry and told me to kneel before this great healer and ask forgiveness. I knelt down. I could feel the great disappointment and astonishment at my arrogance. I began to weep, and Jesus ask, ‘Do you know why I saved you from the pit of purgatory?’ I replied, ‘No’. He said, ‘Remember the old man, the one you thought was Judas? This showed me that you believe, you truly believe.’ I realized at that moment that Jesus was with me, and had been with me the whole time. He was always with me, throughout everything that has happened. And my belief means way more than I had ever realized. He saw something in me that even I did not see. I began to weep so badly that I was frozen there on the floor with my head in my hands and crying uncontrollably.

The Blessed Mother ordered me to come forward and kiss his feet. It was like trying to crawl with a block of concrete on my back. If you could measure it in time, it took me a whole five minutes to crawl five feet. When I got to his feet, I saw that they were dirty and well worn, like a person that had never worn shoes and had walked everywhere they went their whole life. I would have rather kissed a baboon’s ass than these feet, with the yellow split toenails. But I did kiss them.

After I did, I was could feel myself being pulled back to the material world, and I cried out that I wanted to stay. Jesus said, ‘Give me a chance, give me a chance to make it right in the end.’ I thought, ‘Great. In the end. That means it will be all screwed up until I die. In the end, when will that be?’ I think it was the mother Mary who then gave me a message, it was a very compressed message that had words, pictures, and emotions rolled up in one. I was shown a vision of future events that have mostly come true. These were things no one could have predicted. As I entered the tunnel to return, I saw a vision of a circle with an eye in the middle, and as it turned I could see scenes around it like a clock of people and places all moving at once. I realized that this was God. And I had been allowed by him, to see him in the only way I could understand. It was a great comfort to be given that image, even though Jesus himself said I could not see God. The feeling I had when I realized that Jesus was there with me all along, I now had been given that feeling from God himself. And I went peacefully.

As I entered my body again, I could feel my heart beat. I felt the pain, the warmth, and the uncomfortable feeling of having laid in one spot for a long time. I could not respond in any way and was in a comma for three day after. I occupied my mind by going over the events again and again because I felt like I might forget. At one time, I felt a warm hand in mine and I struggled to open my eyes to see who it was. I saw a young girl with long brown hair standing next to my bed and holding my hand. When I woke up I asked the nurse who she was and where did she go. She look so surprised when I described her, but then explained that there was no young girls in the intensive care unit and no one had been allowed beyond the glass in three days. The only people had been the same four old ladies in 12 hour shifts and they had all worked there for years. I thought this might be a dream, but she explained to me that I had died for six minutes and I had been in the intensive care unit for three days.