I was having a yoga vacation. The people offering the vacation package had invited a Colombian woman. She told us that she had met a Native American man who had discovered a way to experience ‘the other side’ of life. She told us that you bring your body to a state of syncope or pre-death and then she brings you back. She told us that this experience was going to rid us of fear of death because we were going to be able to compare life to what was on the other side.
(NDERF Comment: We don’t recommend this because it sounds dangerous and it is not based on solid research. Nobody can predict who will have an NDE. Only about 5-15% of people who die and are resuscitated have an NDE)
I signed up for the experience because it didn’t involve swallowing or inhaling any type of substance that would make me lose control of my mind. I have never taken any drugs, hallucinogens, or anything of that type. I also signed up for it because I had a deep fear of death and found it hard to believe that there would be anything after death. I felt this way in spite of my always feeling that there had to be something that would explain where we are from or what we are; something that would continue after death, although it seemed impossible to be able to prove it. From when I was a child it was a subject I had a fascination for, because I always had great existential doubts about the Universe, humanity and death. Therefore, when these people explained to me how simple the exercise was, I decided to sign up for it. I am an engineer and from the point of view of my rational mind, I never believed in anything supernatural because there wasn’t a rational and provable explanation.
The ritual consisted of making a series of very simple movements while at the same time taking some breaths. It was not in any way like hyperventilating or hypoxia. It was so simple, that I signed up thinking I would never get to the other side. I was more curious to see how my other companions would do in the experience. The woman told us that it wasn´t easy for anybody to get to the other side, especially if you were a very rational person or you were afraid of the experience. I was convinced that it would never work with me but I did it anyway.
The first girl who began the exercise didn’t get anywhere at all. This made me all the more convinced that I would never get anywhere either. I began the exercise in an untroubled way, and with hope that it would be over soon. Moreover, this was how my experience began. It still hurts to tell my experience because my strong sense of rationality has problems with it and because I continue believing that people could think I was crazy or something.
All of a sudden, I felt like I had been fired upwards, like a rocket at great speed. I remember the sound, like a combined type of beep, hum, and vibration all at once. I saw the brilliant light at the bottom. At first, the light was white, and then it turned into several colours, like a rainbow. I heard musical notes that accompanied me. Then I was going into a space where everything around me was hyperactive, mega, ultra-real. I also find it hard to describe the sensation of Extreme Reality that I felt. It was very difficult to describe because that kind of reality doesn´t exist in this world. In fact, this world that all we know is like a joke or like something made of plastic compared to the new world where I´ve just arrived. You could feel a very huge ecstasy of love, something indescribable and that you never have experienced in your life.
I felt a sensation of abundance and plenty. I didn’t need anything, nor did I lack anything around me. I was in a state of perfection, feeling perfectly safe and confident. I was not frightened of anything. I did not feel fear of sickness or that I might be wrong. I felt more like ‘Myself’ than ever. I felt an empowerment of myself. Yet, I felt neither inferior nor superior to anyone or anything around me. Everyone was a part of existence, including myself. This made me feel that I had the right to live, and that my actions were noble and benevolent to everyone around me. I felt the safety that nothing bad was going to happen to me. I felt as if this place was my own true home, because I had the sensation of being home, safe, protected, and welcomed. I felt liberty because I didn’t feel like a slave who was indebted to anyone or anything. I felt oneness because I was part of everything that surrounded me, and everything in its own way was part of me. I had the sensation of continuity or of belonging to this life. There was a feeling of creation or of consciousness because everything that I imagined or thought about took form instantly before me. This included people who were able to communicate with me without needing to speak. I only had to create the words in my mind and the person would hear it and vice versa, like telepathic communication. I felt peace and tranquility like inner and outer peace, peace, peace and more peace. There was complete serenity wrapped in a sense of timelessness or eternity. I had the sensation of living there all my life, as if I had always been there. In fact, I had no memory at that moment of the identity I now have. I didn’t remember anything from my current life, including my name, age, or the fact that I live on a planet called Earth. I had no memory of what it is to be a human or about anything that comes with it like eating, sleeping, or travelling. I felt love and ecstasy. This is the hardest part for me to talk about because trying to explain this sensation with only words degrades the experience. It is like the physical sensation that would be to feeling an orgasm multiplied by 10 times, and continued throughout time without limits, and in which the emotional feeling would be like Universal Compassionate Love, gratitude, and union. It would be like not wanting anything to change, like it was emanating without being able to stop this ‘Love’, I also had the sensation of living through a thousand experiences or adventures, much activity, and very sumptuous visual images with a large amount of detail, very colorful, and coming one after another, without end. I don’t remember meeting any of my deceased relatives. Although, the last image that I have is looking at a woman who was sitting down on a type of throne. She looked like my mother, but I didn’t associate this person as ‘my mother’ from earth. At my side, were two very small children of ages 2 to 3 years old whose physical aspects were like that of my brothers here on Earth. But again, I never associated them with my current brothers. I did feel they were my ‘family’ over there.
The faces of these three beings were indescribable. They were radiating Extreme Happiness, Infinite Love, and Empowerment of themselves. My mother was extremely pretty; more so than I had ever seen and much more than any human being in this life could ever be. I don’t remember ever in my life having seen a face so full of Peace and Love. The more I looked at her, the more Love I felt. It was so hypnotic that I couldn’t stop looking at her.
Suddenly, that picture of my family and my whole life began to move rapidly away. I felt as if I were trying desperately to cling to the life that I considered Real. I tried to return to where I was, but there was something that was stopping me. I started to feel very frightened because I didn’t understand anything that was happening. I felt wrenching, emotional pain as if something was pulled from my body. I felt as if I were moving at tremendous speed through a dense darkness, and with the feeling that every moment my space was narrowing.
Then I began to hear a voice saying to me ‘Come back…Come back…’ I knew that I should go to a place that I felt I knew, but at that moment, I wasn’t able to remember where that was. It was like having something ‘on the tip of my tongue’ but not being able to remember what it was. I remained frightened and at the same time asked myself, ‘Come back?… Come back?… To where? Where do I have to return? Where are they taking me? ‘ I tried to find a possible home in my mind to go to, but I couldn’t find any. So I began to panic and felt like I would go crazy or lose consciousness. At that moment, I heard my inner voice saying to me, ‘Calm down, come back, you have to come back.’ Yet I kept asking myself, ‘Where?’ My inner voice said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid, trust me, come back…’ I started to relax and feel more confident. I kept going forward and towards nowhere, but I trusted the voice and gave into it. I ended up going with no resistance.
At that moment, I felt I was entering a new space. The first thing I felt was an enormous dense emotion that was like dirt. I could feel emotions not available in the world I´ve just left. Some emotions were similar to those I experienced there on the other world, like peace, love, fullness, and freedom. I say they were something similar because in this new place, I couldn’t perceive things in the same way. It was as if these emotions were like a cheap substitute of the ones that I felt on the other side. They carried inevitably their own opposite emotions. I felt as if I had been thrown against a wall, or that I had dropped a glass of icy water full of scarcity, impurity, retardation, imperfection, discouragement, limitation, imposition, stupefaction, anesthesia, loveless-ness, instability, materialism, disorder, and conflict. One after another, these emotions appeared to me, in my new mental panorama, at a dizzying speed. I felt within me, as if these emotions were to make me feel disgruntled, that everything was unavoidable, and they form part of this new world where I had arrived.
I felt as if I had fit into a small, narrow and dense container that it was my physical body. I felt a tremendous physical heaviness and the sensation that my body weighed tons. I felt compressed, especially in my head. I believed that if it continued this way my head was going to explode. It hurt very much and I felt a great pressure. I began to realize, that something I couldn’t control, had started to erase the memories of the Earth that I had come from and of my life. I really didn’t want this to happen. I tried to grab my memories by force to keep recording them into memory. I managed to keep the sensations, emotions, and knowledge.
I felt as if all this was disappearing towards my left and at the same time, it was erasing that which I considered my life. I saw that on the other side of my head, to the right, there were new images forming, or more precisely, it was new knowledge. I felt like if something were loading me up a series of programs containing instructions on how to manage myself in this new world with its physical laws. This was to make up for my lack of knowledge and so I could learn how to live in this new receptacle that contained me. At this moment, I managed to open my eyes. The first thing I saw was I falling forward and that I had bitten my tongue. I still didn’t know who I was or where I was. I just saw the ground, and something I didn’t recognize, or know what it was for: it was my hand. I was bewildered and a bit frightened. I kept asking myself, ‘Where was I? What was all this? Was this new world real?’ Because what I felt was as if I had been put into a dream, and now everything I saw was like a toy, a joke, the memory was fuzzy or false. In the background, I heard a repetitive voice of a woman saying, ‘Come back… Come back…’ I felt a blow towards my back, all along my spine. Then I felt a light bulb over my head, and I began to fit in all the new data that had come to me. I knew where I was and in a cabin that belonged to the Colombian woman. Oh! Surprise! Suddenly I remembered that we were doing a ritual to experience death. I was impressed because I never believed at any moment that I was going to have this experience. I couldn’t speak. Everything was dense. I couldn’t communicate as I had earlier with just thought. Everything had become heavy and difficult, as opposed to how easy it had been over there!
I started to feel a bit sad and also felt a yearning. I didn’t want to be in this new world. I wanted to go back to that other one, where everything there was more real and I was more myself than ever. I was processing everything I had been through, not knowing for how long I had been out. I was pondering questions such as ‘What happened?’ ‘What scientific explanation could I give them?’ ‘Had all of it been a hallucination?’ I concluded, ‘No.’ This had been more real than everything that was happening now. The world I am in now was the dream, the other world from that which I came from, was the Reality. I didn’t feel of this world, I felt more from the other. It was because there I had felt a belonging because of the unity I felt.
Later, I verified what had happened to me while I was away. I was able to assist in the journey of the next companion that did the ritual. The physical effect that happened to him was as easy as when he stopped doing the movements of the ritual his body fell down like lead, completely inert like he had been a sack of potatoes or like a person who dies of sudden death. The Colombian woman brought him back by hitting his back repeating, ‘Come back… Come back… Come back…’ The journey didn’t last more than 5-7 seconds of our time, but the experience for me was as if I had lived thousands of years or eternity.
I remember that I spent days in a state of shock. I didn’t dare tell anyone about the experience because, although I was in a group of open-minded people, I felt that they didn´t believe me at all, some of them thought that it had been a sort of hallucination or similar to that. But for me, it wasn’t in any moment a hallucination or vision. It was very real, more real than the life that we know now.
My rational mind tried to look for some sort of explanation as to where I had been. I tried to convince myself that not all that had happened to me could not be true. How had all this been possible? But I couldn´t help but to answer me honestly that the experience had been real or to put it more clearly – more than Real.
It was hard to eat again or to do human things now that everything felt more tricky and dense. I still was wondering ‘What were we all doing here?’ or ‘Why had we come here?’ I felt helplessness because I really wanted to tell aloud my story to all of humanity. I felt that it was an experience that had to prove to people, once in their lives, so we could overcome what actually real life is, and what is true love. Everyone should experience this in order to overcome fear of death and above all so that we overcome the ‘craziness’ of suffering, fighting, fear of living life as we really would love to live, and without feeling the need to please others.
But my rational mind wouldn’t let me tell anyone. If anyone else had told me this story a year earlier, I would have thought they were crazy and that it had only been a vision and a product of their own imagination. So it was that little by little this experience was being forgotten, in spite of the fact that daily I was experiencing strange phenomena in the form of supernatural experiences. I had very vivid dreams, many premonitions, some lucid where I knew that I was dreaming. I had some dreams of other people, I was in them, and then, later, talking to the other people confirmed that effectively they had been dreaming of what I had told them. I have sensations of leaving my body, or feeling out of my body while I was going to sleep or while I meditate. I have numerous synchronicities, or signs that had revealed about everything that had been happening in my life. Detail by detail, I was shown a reason much greater than simple coincidence. Also, I began to be able to feel peoples’ inner emotions and feelings without being shown them physically.
I had an episode of feeling or seeing presences of people who were no longer in this world. Up to nine months later, my father died from a serious illness and his death was surrounded by supernatural events. When he’d spent hours under sedation, and my family was talking in another part of the building, I heard a voice saying to me to go to the bed because my father was passing away soon. At first, I was surprised, thinking it was a product of my imagination. But the voice had been very clear. I approached the bed because I didn’t have anything to lose and, at the moment I gripped my father´s hand, I could see that he stayed alive and I thought that I’ve just heard only an imaginary voice. But in the corner of my eye, I saw that out of his head had come a type of scroll of white smoke with a small brilliant ball in the center. I looked very quickly, to see what it was that I had just seen. I couldn’t see anything and started to think that it had been a product of my imagination again. At that moment, I looked at my father´s face and he was breathing the last breath of his life. I also remember that on the day of his funeral, during the night I felt a presence in my house. I identified it as him and it came up to me to give me a kiss. I was filled with peace, and felt an indescribable sensation of well-being. I never told anyone in my family for fear of them thinking I was crazy or something similar.
Three months later, my mother and my little brother told me of similar experiences like my visit from father. They were frightened because they didn’t believe in anything like this. I started to open up to tell them what I had seen on the day he died and about my NDE that I had had the previous year. They thanked me for telling them all this because they felt less pain and greater peace at the going of my father. Up to the death of my father, I never brought back the memory of the experience that I had on the yoga vacation. I started to listen to talks on NDEs. I didn’t know what it was because I had never heard of one except the typical concept of which someone in an operating room having seen the famous tunnel with the white light, but nothing more. I began reading books on NDEs and I really liked it. There were many experiences of very similar things to those, which I had felt in my experience. I felt relieved to think that I wasn’t crazy and that my experience had been truly Real. More people in the world were able to reach an understanding of how I felt after my NDE. I remember that it gave me goose bumps, every time that I read something else that reminded me of my experience or made me cry. I remembered with total recall and clarity the experience in spite of the passing of time.
So thank you for creating this space, it is the first time that I have dared to tell about the NDE with this much detail and above all with the peace of knowing that I won’t be judged as crazy or having a vivid imagination, or being inventive.