NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES
True Stories
Of going to HEAVEN
Rachel J. Hopkins
~~~
Copyright © 2017 by Rachel J. Hopkins
Chapter 4: Susan Noeske
Chapter 5: Tina Angeli
Chapter 6: Robert Maasbach
Chapter 7: Paul Elder
Chapter 8: Nancy Rynes
Chapter 9: Tami Close
Chapter 10: Ryan Rampton
Chapter 11: Dr Cicoria
Chapter 12: Bill MacDonald
Chapter 13: Kevin Moore
Chapter 14: Shilo Harris
Chapter 15: Bill Vandenbush
Chapter 16: Rob Wood
Chapter 17: Sam Shelley
Chapter 18: Dr. Whitaker
Chapter 19: Jorden Samuel
Chapter 20: Alan Stevenson
Chapter 21: Darnisha Taylor
Chapter 22: Kellie Coffee
Chapter 23: Michaela
Chapter 24: Alison Ward
Chapter 25: Richard Cole
Chapter 26: Tamara LaRoux
Chapter 27: Mufti Shamsuddoha
Chapter 28: Berni Siegel
Chapter 29: Melinda Lyons
This book contains some of the most fascinating, exciting, and moving true stories of people who have had Near-Death Experiences.
These people describe Heaven. They describe leaving their bodies and being taken up to Heaven. Their stories are remarkable and from these stories we can get a glimpse of what really happens when we die, of what Heaven is really like, and how each and every person who got taken there, simply can’t wait to go back.
They say it felt like home. It felt like where they truly belonged, and the love they received there was like nothing they had ever known; total unconditional love and joy and forgiveness.
Have you ever wanted to know what happens when a person has a Near-Death experience?
Have you ever wanted to know what happens when you die?
Have you ever wanted to know if Heaven really does exist?
The stories in this book will answer those questions….
Copyright © 2017 by Rachel J. Hopkins
From a Declaration of Principles which was accepted and approved equally by committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations. In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. The information provided herein is stated to be truthful and consistent, in that any liability, in terms of inattention or otherwise, by any usage or abuse of any policies, processes, or directions contained within is the solitary and utter responsibility of the recipient reader. Under no circumstances will any legal responsibility or blame be held against the publisher for any reparation, damages, or monetary loss due to the information herein, either directly or indirectly. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher. The information herein is offered for informational purposes solely, and is universal as so. The presentation of the information is without contract or any type of guarantee assurance.
Kim Rives died of cancer. Heaven sent her back with a message. When she was only 38-years-old, she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. She had no choice but to go through three years of treatment including five separate surgeries, chemotherapy, and a bone marrow transplant. It led to her becoming extremely weak and in great pain. She ended up in the hospital after contracting three different viruses and her immune system had shut down.
Lying in the hospital bed, she was certain she was going to die. She was afraid of dying in the hospital alone and she asked the doctor if he would let her go home. He agreed and she went home to her mom’s house. She was in so much pain that she just wanted to die at home and go to heaven. She prayed to god to take her.
As she prayed one day, she was suddenly released from her body and she found her spirit hovering on the ceiling. “I looked down below and saw a body in the bed and I realized it was mine. As I was pondering on this, a man appeared on my right-hand side, dressed all in white. He motioned me to go with him. He seemed like a man of good character and so I did go with him.”
“We went through the ceiling and that didn’t hurt, and we ended up in a beautiful meadow. There was beautiful lush green grass and roses of all different colours. I went and cupped some of the roses and they began to sing to me, welcoming me to this wonderful dimension.”
“As we walked through the meadow, I saw this beautiful glowing city, beautiful buildings with diamonds. I asked if we could go there, and instantly we were there. The man continued to motion for me and we went into one of the buildings and there in one of the rooms I was able to meet different people; I met family and friends who had passed on. I was able to see a little bit about my earth life.”
“I met heavenly figures that I won’t go into; it’s more than I can go into but as I was taken to many places the one that stands out to me the most is my time with the Saviour. How it happened that I met him; I was taken back to a time in my childhood when I was young and I could see my younger self, at about 10 years old and I could see she was frightened and I looked to see what she might be frightened by.”
“I saw an army of evil marching toward her. Although she couldn’t see them, I could see they were there. They looked very evil and they had instruments of war and I thought they might attack her or me and I was very frightened for both of us, and as I was pondering on this I realized I should pray for deliverance.”
“I heard a chuckle to my side. The Saviour was standing beside me. I wanted to look at him but I was afraid of looking at him. I was afraid of what God would think of me as a person; what would his reaction to me be.”
“Finally, I decided that no matter what I was going to turn and look at him, because he had chuckled that I was more afraid of evil than I had faith in God, and so I turned and I looked and the most beautiful sight came to my eyes. He had this beautiful light that streamed five or six feet out from his body and such blue eyes.”
“He greeted me with total unconditional love. There was no blame or shame, just unconditional love. He encouraged me to look at the army of evil again, but when I looked back they had fled. He said “Kim; look to the light and live,” and with that came the feeling that if we really want to live, we need to love each other, forgive each other, forgive ourselves, be kind to one another, do acts of kindness.”
“There were many ways we can look to his light and live. He said, “What would you ask of me?” I found this a great request that the Saviour of the world would ask me how he could serve me! I told him I wanted to know what every emotion felt like in the most perfect state. He encouraged me to put my arm into his light and as I did I felt forgiveness, pure love, hope and joy. I felt them at the celestial level.”
“Then he took me to another place; to a time in his life that was very hard; to his crucifixion. I saw him nailed to the cross by his hands and feet. I saw the crown of thorns on his head. He was groaning in agony. He was trembling in such pain that I knelt below him and I wanted to free him but then he let me know that that was what he was there for; to free me and each one of us from the burdens that we carry.”
“He asked me to give him my pain and I said no, let me take some of yours, you have enough, but he once again told me that that was the reason he was born, and so I gave him my pain and he took it on and it came as a black cloud into his chest and he thrust backward as he took it on, but then I was relieved from the pain that I was in.”
“I felt his love for me; his unconditional love and what I realised from this is that he wants all of us to be happy and free from the burdens that we carry. He just asks us to bring them to him and lay them at his feet and he will lift them, so if you carry burdens that are greater than what you want to deal with, go to him in prayer and ask him to lift them from you that you might feel the freedom of peace. This is my witness; that he lives and that he is there for us. That he loves us….”
American, Mrs Mary K. Baxter has spoken of her experience; “An angel of the lord came by my bed. It had rainbow wings about 12 feet high and a white garment on. To the left, behind the angel stood Jesus. Jesus smiled at me. The angel said, “Come and see the glory of God and immediately I was out of my room and I was standing outside the gates of Heaven. Jesus wasn’t there but the angel was.’
‘The Gates were about a mile high and made out of some kind of iron and pearls. Lights came from the gates and two angels were on each side of the gates and they were tall and they had gold hair that was turned under on the bottom, and they were the keepers of the gates.’
‘The angel that was with me went over and talked with them and they all went inside the gates and they got a book with my name on the front of it. The angel opened up my book and he read something and then he said “She can come into the city.”
‘So, I went in with this angel with the beautiful wings and we reached a grassy area; and the grass looked like it had diamonds in it and there were flowers. They were big flowers, opened, and they were singing music to us. Over to my left there was five men with white garments on, standing around a pedestal, and then I looked at the hillside at all the trees and all the fruit on the trees.’
‘There were families on the hills, of all nationalities standing around talking, some sitting on the grass, others sitting at picnic tables. The little children were picking the fruit and eating it but no juice went on their hands or faces.’
‘I could hear the most beautiful music everywhere, and everyone was praising God. All the beauty; there was no decay anywhere. I knew if the petals fell off, they wouldn’t decay, they would just grow another flower. There was no dying in Heaven.’
‘Then the angels said to me, “Come and see the glory of our God,” and I went over to where the five men were and I saw an angle come down a pathway that had beautiful long hair.
Some of the angels had wings, others did not. They wore different garments according to whatever job they were going to do. Heaven has an order to it. They keep records of everything.’
‘This angle with the very long hair looked like a female angel. Sometimes you could see right through the angels. Some played music, with flutes and other instruments that they kept in pockets of their robes. They can move real quick, some were flying. The men were making a diamond and I watched them read this thing given to them by the angel and I heard the angel say that the men were going to make a diamond for someone’s mansion and they would take it to Jesus as he’s the master builder.’
‘The angel said whatever people did on earth, if they helped the poor or sick, they would get rewarded in Heaven. The men were smiling. We went on up a pathway to see God. Over to my right I saw beautiful chariots suspended in the air. I could see the Chariot of God. It was huge, as high as the Empire State Building. The wheels were on fire but they never burnt. Huge jewels were in the wheels.’
‘ I was in awe of everything I was seeing. I see 50 white stallions, their skin looks like white satin. They were about four feet wide and thirty feet high. The angels said “Observer; look.” The stallions were standing side-by-side.’
‘There was a woman there. I knew that she had been redeemed. Her clothing was so beautiful, such a beautiful dress, and she stood in front of the horses and she said; “All creatures shall praise the Lord. You will go before the lord and you will bow and praise the Lord.” And all those fifty horses bowed down….’
Chapter 3: Jim Anderson
Jim Anderson flat-lined several times, and each time he choose to come back to be with his wife and family. He had had a massive heart-attack. He had been working 12 hour days as a supervisor at a waste-management plant. When it happened, he was resting in his bedroom when all of a sudden, he had a crushing pain in his chest and the pain radiated down his arm and into his neck.
He couldn’t catch his breath and he called out for his daughter, who was home, to get him to the hospital. He told her he wasn’t going to make it. However, a balloon catheter was placed inside of his chest and he was stabilised and placed on the heart transplant list. Two days later he flat-lined.
“I could see everyone rushing into my room. I could hear the alarms going off. It’s like I had gone underwater. The hearing was fading away. That’s when I began to pray. I knew I was dying. It wasn’t a scared praying; it was earnest, asking to take care of my family.”
“Next thing I knew, off in this distance I saw the most beautiful sublime pure perfect light. As I started going toward the light, it was perfect. I can see the outer edge of it begin to spiral and I couldn’t figure out what it was but as I got closer, I could see it was the words of prayers. The words broke off, going into the light and I followed into the light and the next thing I felt was being embraced, safe and secure.”
“It was wonderful. It felt like total love. Then the next thing I know I was back where my body was, looking down. I could see everyone working on me, I could hear what they said. There were two nurses outside the room looking in. One said to the other, “Why are they working so hard on him? If they bring him back he’s going to be a vegetable.” Later on, I told her what she’d said! She about passed out! Then I thought to myself, where’s my wife?
“And I was instantly in the room where she was. She was praying. When I saw her face, I saw every aspect of our life together, all the emotions we’d shared. I just couldn’t leave her. I cried out to the Lord, please let me go back to her and our children.”
The doctors never gave up. They shocked him so much he had burns on his chest. “I came back to a world of pain. My hearing came back, the doctors were saying they couldn’t believe it.”
He was breathing on his own, but he was placed into critical care. He flatlined several times while in there. Each time he did, he says he had another near-death experience. He met Jesus, who asked him each time if he wanted to go back...
In 1983, Susan Noeske died at the age of twenty. She had been scheduled for a C-section, but everything went wrong. “I was bleeding heavily. Somehow the anaesthesia put me in a dangerous place. I asked them to save my baby son, not me, but my husband asked them to save me.”
“Anyway, during the delivery, I ended up going somewhere else. I was knocked out but I ended up finding myself in a tunnel. I don’t remember going into the tunnel, but I was in a tunnel and there was this light at the end of it. I came to this light. It was the brightest thing I ever saw in my life but it didn’t hurt my eyes. It was the most welcoming loving light I had ever seen.”
“There was nothing I could do not to go toward it but I wanted to go toward it. When I came out of the tunnel there was this man there. He was over 6 feet tall. He was in a white robe, and he had dark hair. I was surrounded by fields. I saw gold I had never seen before; golds that don’t exist here. It was so pure. I don’t know how to describe it. It was special. It was holy. Every grain of wheat was this gold colour. The sky was a blue I had never seen before; it was vibrant and the white was so pure. No white I have ever seen here can compare to the white I saw there. They don’t compare. This man told me his name was Gabe.”
“The love that I felt from him was so encompassing it was like a drug. I’ve never felt it here, ever, despite being a mother of four and a grandmother; it doesn’t compare. It was like a magnet. It was so powerful. You don’t want to leave. He had a wagon. He was standing thirty feet away and I had no mouth to communicate with but we were communicating. He told me I had to go back but I didn’t want to leave that place. He told me I had to go back to raise my children but I didn’t want to leave and go back.”
“I’d never heard of a near-death experience. I didn’t know this was what it was. He was telling me this with love but he said I had to go back. I knew that if I were to get on his wagon, I would have gone to Heaven, to God. But I wasn’t allowed to do that.”
“To my right, I was not allowed to look that way. I wasn’t told; but I had this feeling it would be a faux-pas. God was on that side. Gabe made me leave. I had no choice. All I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to get on his wagon, but he told me I had to go back and tell people what had happened to me.”
“I found myself back in the recovery room in my body. The pain was horrible It was like my body was now this ugly thing I didn’t want to be inside of. I had depression that lasted a couple of years. I was ashamed I would have left my children and stayed there. I didn’t know it was common that people felt shame after their experience; but the felling there was so overpowering that you just want to stay there.”
“So I felt such shame. I didn’t care about being back. I wanted to be where God was, because what I saw there was, I don’t know, it was so intensely wonderful, powerful, everything you think it is and more, and so when I got back to my body and the pain, I thought this isn’t right, I shouldn’t be back.”
“After the surgery, I was wheeled back to my room and was told what had happened to me in the operation. Whether I actually died or not I don’t know. I had haemorrhaged everywhere. I didn’t say anything about it for over 15 years because I was so ashamed that i would have left my children. Then when I read other people’s experiences, I didn’t feel so bad as I read that this was very normal.”
“I could recall that love for years; we’re just not capable of that love as a human race. I don’t know if that’s our fault or not but that’s just the way it is. Here we have chaos, you just don’t want to come back to it, but I realise that all of us are going to get there one day and when you do you are not going to want to leave. It’s wonderful and its beautiful.”
“I came back with a weird sensitivity to light, and I hear people. I can feel people. I can be around people and feel an ugliness inside of some people. I can physically feel it. When you die it’s not the end; it’s just not. This life is just one tiny stepping stone. I still see Gabe, when I want to recall him.”
Tina Angeli has had several near-death experiences. ‘When I was in my twenties I actually drowned. I heard a snap and then there was no more pain. I saw pictures above my head, of my life here. Other pictures I didn’t recognise, but then I became aware that these were past lives and I became aware that the theme in this drowning situation was about me. A thought came into my mind and I was being shown or made aware that this life-time was very pivotal in healing me; I had had abuse in past lives.’
‘When I realised I was drowning, whatever was going on in the water, my friend pulled me out but I was very much in pain, coughing up water, but I came out of that with the feeling that I was now focussed and I needed to get out of my current marriage because it was only going to get worse for me. It felt like that experience was to give me strength to go through with it.’
‘I had another. This second one was as a result of a car accident. I call it the miracle car crash because if you looked at my car you would never think that the person driving this car would ever have made it out alive. I was caved in on the driver’s side. My head hit the side and the airbags exploded and once they exploded the odour in them made it very hard to breathe. All of a sudden I felt like I stopped breathing. I found myself above the car in this room.’
‘It felt like a room but it had no walls. It had this whiteish golden light. In this room were nine beings of light and they were behind this half-moon shaped desk or table. For some reason, I felt so strongly that the being in the middle was the one I needed to communicate with although the other eight beings were holding me in this incredible love energy that felt so wonderful, and yet simultaneously I could also see what was going on at the car where the people were coming toward the car, getting me out it the car.’
‘The sound was very loud and I could actually feel what these people were feeling. Some of them were curious about the accident, others were actually very concerned about whether I was still alive or not, and so I could see all that at the same time that I was communicating with these beings. I could say, “No, I’m not ready to go yet. I’m not done with what I need to do still on the earth. I can’t do it,” and all of a sudden, I felt like I heard “Ok,” and I found myself back in the car; but prior to that I have to explain what these beings looked like.’
‘They were wearing capes, dark capes like dark brown colour and their faces were just bright light so I couldn’t see their faces, and it also felt like the capes were for my benefit, just so they would have a silhouette form. So I was aware of all of that. I just knew it. Then I found myself back when I heard the “Ok,” and I came back into the car and there I was surrounded by exploded airbags.”
“The same people I had seen coming to my car from above, got to me then, and they were asking if I was ok and could I manage to get out of the car. It had seemed like a long time with these beings, but everything must have happened in seconds. They were holding me in this incredible love. I feel so blessed to have had this experience.”
Since her own experience, she says she has spoken with lots of other people who too have had these experiences. One thing that is common among them she says, is that no matter how many years earlier it happened to them, their near-death experiences have stayed with them ever since. It has been completely unforgettable.
“Everything is so detailed you can never forget it. What you felt or saw. You can never forget.”
Chapter 6: Robert Maasbach
Robert Maasbach is the pastor of Life Church UK. As a teenager one night, in 1978, Maasbach was going to a movie theatre with friends. They were running late to catch the start of the movie and so they were going very fast in the car. They were traveling at over 100mph when they came to an unexpected corner in the road. As he drove into the corner, way too fast, the car lost control and shot fast across the other side of the road and collided with an oncoming car. His car was completely torn in two.
“It all happened to fast that I forgot to pray. I forgot I needed to get myself right with God. I was too busy with the experience. I woke up in the hospital a few days later with my neck broken in two places and I was going in and out of consciousness. I had a ‘vision’ I saw Jesus. He said to me, “What have you done for me in your life?” You know, I couldn’t answer. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done good things, but when I stood before Jesus I was speechless, because the very thing he died for I had never given him. He died for me but I had never given myself to him.”
“I had done a lot of things for him but not surrendered my life to him. When my father walked into the hospital I was just choked with tears. He walked up to me with compassion and he said to me, “Don’t you think it’s the grace of God that you’re not dead, or paralyzed.”
Something had happened. Perhaps in that ‘vision.’ In that experience, I thought, do we need to come to the end of our lives before we realize that without God, what is there? What is there worth living for?
My dad said to me, “Let’s pray.” He laid his hand upon me and he said, “Thank you Jesus.”
Something happened to me; new life had come into me. Jesus Christ had put his spirit inside of me to reconcile me with God, to give me a new beginning and all of a sudden there was hope, there was faith, there was love and joy. Everything that we could ever desire….”
Paul Elder died in an ambulance in 1992, following a heart attack while playing an ice-hockey match. While playing he felt a sudden excruciating pain in his chest. An ambulance arrived quickly and he was given oxygen. However, as he started answering the paramedics questions, as the ambulance was rushing to the nearest hospital, suddenly everything went black. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear. The intense pain was gone.
“The sensation was incredible. It’s difficult to describe it. I had never felt that better in my entire life. It was like every molecule in my body was buzzing, there was just pure energy. It was a surprise to me because I seemed to be floating and soon I floated up to the top of the ambulance, and I could see the paramedic bend over the top of me and I could see my body on the stretcher.”
“Remarkably, I had no fear or any concern. In fact, it was absolute elation. I had little emotion for the body that was lying there that was me. The most incredible feeling that I’ve ever had in my life was in this state, just floating there. I knew what was happening and I knew where I was going; I was going home. I was ecstatic.”
He came back to his body to find he was in a hospital, with the emergency doctors working on him to keep him alive.
“From then on I had no fear of death; I know what it’s all about and its nothing to be afraid of. In some way, I look forward to it. It gives you an insight, an absolute knowing that everything is fine and that we don’t end our existence here as a cold body.”
Nancy Rynes was “blissfully agnostic, blissfully unaware of any religion.”
“I was a science writer; I did a lot of technical writing, working for a software company in bolder. Colorado. In January 2014, I went out on a bike ride one sunny morning, the streets were dry. I found myself hit by a truck and ended up on the hood of the truck, and the truck kept driving and I was dragged underneath the truck for about 50 feet.”
“Turns out I ended up with a lot of severe injuries, but during that time when I was struck by the truck, I noticed that my consciousness split off into two. Now this was really odd for somebody who’s a scientist. As a scientist, I’d never heard of anything like this before. I was experiencing the accident both from underneath the truck, in my body, and from somewhere outside myself, in front of the truck, watching everything unfold. When the paramedics arrived, I didn’t want to think about it; it was too weird to think about this. It didn’t make any sense.”
“Because of the severity of the injuries I was brought into a trauma centre. I needed surgery in my back to reconstruct it. I had many broken bones in my back. A couple of days later I was brought into surgery, and during surgery, my blood pressure tanked, my heart-rate tanked, my breathing stopped. I started to die on the operating table. I was dead for about four minutes. During that time, I went off to a place that I’ve never experienced before, that I’ve only heard vague stories about, having been an atheist most my life, I didn’t even believe in Heaven until I was there.
When I was there, I was given basically months’ worth of information; a whole life-times worth of information to bring back to my life here on earth and to give to everyone, to help us all live a better life here on earth, to make things better not only for ourselves but for everyone else.
My family was Catholic but had stopped going to Church so I was raised with that awareness, but I really didn’t participate in it and when I went off to College and got my science degrees, religion and Catholicism didn’t fit any more. So, I turned away, and had been agnostic since then, for twenty odd years.
I was only gone for 4 or 5 minutes on the operating table but it felt like weeks or months. I was able to look around me with my scientific eyes, with more questions. The first ‘person’ I met wasn’t anyone I knew. She was this beautiful silvery-being with flowing garments.
There wasn’t anything about her that screamed ‘angel’ and she didn’t call herself anything, she didn’t say she was an angel, she said; “I am a being in this place and I speak for many others. If we were all to come to you, you would be overwhelmed.” It allowed me to look at her more as a teacher rather than, “Oh my gosh, it’s an angel.” It was overwhelming, but I could relate to her better more one on one and it made me more open to her.
She started telling me things. How we have forgotten so many things when we have come to this planet as humans, and they want us to remember some of this stuff so we can make more of a heaven on earth. We can be creator of our own heavens within our own lives, even if the rest of the world Is falling apart. That was the bulk of her teachings and I was asked to share this with the rest of the world if I could. The first teaching was that feeling of love that I was totally immersed in when I was there.
Everything centred around love; not just romantic love or love of our family but loving everybody as much as you can and learning how to love people you don’t agree with, or don’t like, but it’s worth it.
Also, the teaching of gratitude. Gratitude is just another form of love. I am now so grateful for my life that I’m telling our creator, God, that I love him for the life I have been given. They taught me that gratitude is love. It expanded to love of our planet, and love of ourselves; that’s a big thing because, what my guide told me was that were in a lot of trouble because most of us don’t love ourselves. If you don’t love yourself you can’t truly love anyone else.’
‘They gave me a lot of help about how to put this into practise in my own life, and they helped me write a book to help others. It’s not my book; it’s theirs. It definitely wasn’t me that wrote the book; it was them.’
When Tami Close was 6 months pregnant, she found herself in sudden severe pain. After phoning her doctor, he advised her to get to his surgery as soon as she could. Her doctor was a two-hour drive away, and as she was getting ready to leave home to drive there, her symptoms became worse. She began to feel faint and the pain in her leg was getting much worse. Her doctor had said that she may have a blood clot, and so she decided that with the pain increasing, she wouldn’t be able to drive for two hours. She decided to get to the nearest ER instead. Her husband was with her and he put her in the car and drove her to the hospital.
When they arrived, her husband got a wheelchair for her and wheeled her from the car into the ER waiting room. It was here that she says she had a near-death experience.
“I entered another dimension, of higher consciousness, and I experienced such a profound feeling of peace. Though the ER staff were rushing around me frantically, and I heard one of the nurse’s comment that they were losing me and that my baby’s heart rate was dropping, another nurse told me I would feel a prick as she was going to put a needle in me but I didn’t feel a thing. No pain at all. Nothing had any significance to me. My thoughts stopped and the only thing was this heightened state of being. I heard a voice say; “It’s not your time.”
In 2001, Ryan Rampton died and met God. “I want you to know that God is real. The experience I had, I want to testify to. I was in my photography studio; I’m a commercial photographer. I had tipped over one of my lights earlier in the day and I had broken the wires out of it, shattered it, so I was trying to fix it if I could and the cord was broken. I remembered it was still plugged in, so I went to the wall and unplugged it. I later realized I had unplugged the wrong one (there were four plugs plugged in) So, I go back to trying to fix it and I use my teeth as plyers. Not one of my wisest moments. The electricity surges through me. It’s completely encompassing my body.”
“Every cell feels like it’s going to explode. I can’t move any part of me. I can’t move my hands. I can’t pull the chord out. I can’t move anything. I’m trying to desperately see if anyone has seen me, but I can’t move my eyes. My heart is frozen too. The only thing keeping me alive is the electricity running through me! My life flashed before my eyes and I’m thinking I should be dead. I feel so stupid I’m going to die this way, and I’m going to be a joke on the internet!”
“So, I’m being shocked and I wasn’t really worried until I could see black smoke billowing out of my mouth. I’d been an EMT when I was a fire-fighter. I know this is it; I’m dead. At that point, I saw this bright light above my head. I couldn’t move my body but I could look up at the light! It was the most beautiful light I’d ever seen, and it came down and enveloped me and took me into the light and I ended up in this pure white room, and instantly I knew where I was and where I was going. I was going home to God. I was going home to the Father, and I started to jump up and down and say; “Yes! Yes!” I had never been so excited in all my life. Like a little boy at Christmas, with the anticipation running through me. I’m so excited to be going home.”
Christ shows up behind this veil and I could see the outline of him, and he is so brilliantly lit, like somebody has a search-light behind him and then my heart is just melting and filled with love, and I feel the spirit of the Lord so strongly, and I feel like everything is alright, and he comes to me through the veil and he’s standing right in front of me. His radiance and his love overpowers me.
He flashes my life before my eyes; we review it together but it happened in a milli-second. And he’s happy with my life but I’m surprised, because I feel like I should be going to the other place with the pitchfork and the horns; that’s where I thought I deserved to go, not before Christ and to have him look at me with such love. He looked at all parts of my life with nothing but love. I was so completely overwhelmed with his love and he says to me, “Do you want to come home and live with me? Or, do you want to go back to them?”
I can see my little children, they’re playing. I can see where they all are and I know they need me and I know that I can’t go home. I know that I can’t stay in Heaven and it breaks my heart. As much as I love my children and as much as I want to be with them it breaks my heart to leave Heaven and not go home to Christ. I don’t want to but I know it’s my duty, my children need me and so I decided to go back.
I slammed back into my body like I was hit by a truck. I’m being shocked still with the electricity and I think why would the Lord send me back to my body and not get me off the electricity, and then I hear his voice in my head as clear as a bell and he says, “Oh. Did you ask for help?”
And I reply, “Please Heavenly Father, help.”
At that moment, I can feel I’m pulling the chord and I pull with all my strength and it was like the Lord made me do everything in my power to pull that chord out of my mouth. He made the impossible part, possible, to overcome that electricity. He did that. No matter how strong you are, you can’t overpower the strength of electricity. He did that part. The cord popped out of my mouth. I was free.’
Chapter 11: Dr. Anthony Cicoria
In August 1994, Dr. Anthony Cicoria was meeting his friends and family at Sleep Hollow Lake. It was a beautiful summer’s day. While waiting for everyone to arrive, Cicoria began to prepare the barbeque and then went to the pay phone located near-by to call his mom. The pay phone was connected to a building and as he dialled the number it rang a few times but his mother did not pick up, so he went to hang up.
With the phone was still close to his face, he heard a loud crack and a streak of lightning had hit the building and exited through the phone cord. He had been hit in the face by lightning. It sent him flying backwards. As he was going backwards, something happened and suddenly he felt himself moving forwards.
“I remember standing there confused because I had seen the lightning. I knew I’d been hit and I knew I’d been sent backwards but I was standing there looking at the phone, not able to make any sense of out of it. I saw my mother-in-law screaming at me and running toward me. I had no idea what was going on, but I noticed that as she got up close to me she was looking down as though I wasn’t there. That was the first realization that something bad had happened. I was then looking at this body a few feet away as my mother -in-law ran toward this body on the floor.
She’s at the body and I’m shouting at her but she can’t see me. I have this realization that I’m dead but I’m also thinking and having thoughts just like I normally would, and the realization came that whoever I am, I always am. Whatever’s on the floor is nothing more than a shell.’
As I’m walking up the stairs I’m noticing that my legs are starting to dissolve and I’m thinking, ok, this isn’t funny anymore. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, I had lost all form, and I remember looking down at myself and thinking, where did I go? There was just this energy ball.
I felt like I was suddenly immersed in this bluish-white light and in that white light was truly the most amazing feeling, and if you can imagine absolute love and peace. It was a force, but there was nothing else in it.
This energy made up everything that exists. It flows through it. I knew that whatever God was, that it was this. This was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Then I was moving, and it was like somebody snapped their fingers and I was back in my body.
Explorer and author Bill MacDonald had a near-death experience in India in 2004. He’d travelled from California to the Himalayas and found an Ashram where he was asking about a particular sacred cave that he wished to visit.
It took a while to be granted permission to visit the cave but when he was finally allowed, he set off with just his friend accompanying him, because all the guides had by now left for the season. They set off with a piece of paper with rough directions written on it. They’d also been given strict instructions to return by 5pm to be able to get back into the Ashram where their backpacks and personal belongings and beds were.
They walked uphill for 3 or 4 hours. They had no water with them, he had dysentery, he had a heart problem, and regularly had seizures. By now, he was feeling light-headed, sweating terribly, and feeling exhausted.
Finally, they thought they had found the cave. He had stopped sweating now, which he interpreted as actually a bad sign. It meant he had no more sweat left. He was dehydrated. Finally at the cave however, he began to read the names of all his friends and family, to pray for them at this sacred temple. He also began to meditate, but he was feeling very dizzy at this point now.
When he left the cave, his chest was beginning to hurt and he was still very dizzy. As he and his friend stood near a cliff edge, he collapsed and toppled thirty feet over the cliff. He landed after bouncing off the rocks a couple of times. His heart was killing him. Then, all of a sudden there was no pain. There was this bright light in the sky and no sounds. Just this bright sky in the sky.
“Next thing you know, I’m looking down from the cliff at my body lying there. I’m up there looking down and I see a thick Cobra snake, crawling across my shoes and I get excited. All of a sudden, like someone took two paddles to my body, I’m jumping up in my body, standing up and trying to grab this cobra snake and my friend’s up there watching! The snake moves toward a waterfall and I’m chasing it. Finally, I realize I’m not going to get the snake, and my buddy comes down the cliff and we gradually find our way back to the Ashram.”
British man Kevin Moore had been through a very painful break-up. To try to take his mind off what he described as the most painful time in his life, he called a friend who lived in Los Angeles and asked if he could go and stay with him for a short while. His friend said of course he could, and when Kevin arrived, his friend showed him around his home, taking him through the rooms and even showing him the gun closet.
On one occasion while staying there, he considered going to that closet, getting out a gun and using it to kill himself with. That night in bed, he felt his breathing slow and he found that he was rising up out of his body. He couldn’t understand what was happening. He was out of his body, high up above it. He was in shock but he also simply accepted it. He says he finds it hard to explain properly.
He found himself in a tunnel, with pins of light in this ‘cylinder-like’ tunnel. It was a narrow tunnel but it was full of voices, surrounding him, along with the most incredible overpowering sensation of unconditional love, like nothing he had ever known, and he heard a message; “Do you want to cross over?”
“Despite all the pain I was in, I knew I couldn’t do it to my parents, or to myself, and in that moment, I found myself back lying on my bed. I called my parents immediately, even though it was the middle of the night for them. I couldn’t explain to them properly what had just happened. I know I was crying my eyes out. The love I had felt from those voices was incredible. They were all calling to me.”
“I’m not sure why or how I had that experience. I know it taught me that unconditional love exists, and all these voices wanted to tell me this. My experience is that there is something far greater that we come from and that we go back to. Remember, be kind to yourself. My personal experience has taught me; be kind to yourself, be kind to each other.”
Former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Shilo Harris received devastating injuries when a roadside bomb exploded in February 2007, while based in Iraq. He spent 48 days in an induced coma, during which he says he had a number of Near Death Experiences.
Left with terrible skin damage from the burns he sustained during the bomb blast, today he speaks out about his life-changing near-death experiences. “During that incubated state, there were instances when I did die. On the airplane ride from Germany I quit breathing. Everything stopped. The respiratory tech; he brought me back. They baged me all the way back to San Antonio. Maybe that was the time when I died, maybe that was the time when I was seeing demons. And I remember there was somebody that came and talked to me.
It wasn’t distorted. I know it was a man. He was a big man. He didn’t seem mean or angry. I don’t remember exactly what was said. He did talk to me. He told me that everything was going to be ok. I think it’s important that I share these things. I think it’s important to share these near-death experiences.”
Bill Vandenbush volunteered to join the Military as an Infantry soldier, to go to Vietnam. “I did that because I didn’t really understand what the Vietnam War was all about. I was a young man, I grew up in Southern California. I was a hippy when I got out of high school. I had long hair, bell-bottom pants. I used to hang out and smoke dope and all that stuff and one day, on my way back from an anti-war protest, I started to ask myself; Why was I protesting this war? I grew up in a time when we had war heroes; from Korea and World War II. I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. So, my buddy and I went down and joined the Army.
I went through advanced training to prepare to go and fight in Vietnam. When I got there, the war zone was much more frightening than I could ever have imagined. This was life and death. I spent ten months there, and became a very hardened soldier. I saw my friends die. I saw the enemy die. I had people die in my arms. Death was everywhere. My two best friends and I made a pact; we would always cover each other’s backs.
One day in April 1969, bombs were falling all around me. I was blown up. Shrapnel in my face. My eye was ripped out. I thought I was going to die, at nineteen years old. I was going to die. No mom to kiss and make it better. I took my pack off, I took my helmet off, and the next thing I know, everything was peaceful, everything was calm. There was no more war. I was in a tunnel, moving into a bright white light. And when I entered that white light suddenly everything was wonderful. There was unconditional love, joy, peace. There was no stress, no responsibility. No pressure. Just peace and happiness.
It was a joy that I had never felt in my life. I stood there for a few minutes and I was approached by a ball of energy and I realised this was my grandfather who had passed away a few years earlier. It was his spirit. And we spoke and he welcomed me in. He took me in and guided me to this place and I was full of joy and love and care and concern for all the goodness in life. All the bad things had disappeared. There was nothing but goodness. I was so happy. I was so filled with joy and as we stood and we talked, he told me how wonderful things would be.
He told me I would come there and I would find peace and I would find my way, and he would take me and show me the way, but just as we were beginning to move in, another ball of energy came, very friendly, but obviously an authority figure, and I was told I had to go back, I couldn’t stay there.
It was not my time. I had to go back. I had a higher purpose. I had something I had to do before I could come to that place, and they explained that that purpose was to heal myself and then to heal others. And I was told that as soon as I left I would return at the same time that I left.
I turned around, I stepped back into the dark tunnel and I was back on the battlefield. I could smell the gunpowder, the stench, the hot humid stench, but I was not in pain anymore. I was surrounded by white light. I had no concerns, no worries.
I was told when I was up in that light that no matter what happens this day, I would survive and I would go on to live a long and productive life, so I had no worries about death or dying or the consequences of the injuries I had sustained. I started to get up off the ground and I hollered at my men that I would go get help.”
He was still very seriously injured. Eventually medics reached him, and got him to the field hospital, but once there, the doctors didn’t think there would be anything they could do to save him.
“My left arm was torn almost completely off. My face was crushed in. I had a head injury. My throat was ripped out, my chest was ripped open, I had a sucking chest wound, and I knew that I had a long road ahead of recovery for me, but I had no concern; I knew that that spirit would take care of me, all I had to do was have a little faith. I spent months in the hospital but I was still connected to this spirit and I just knew that everything would be good.
Rob Wood grew up in Annapolis, Maryland in the 1950’s. His father was a Southern Baptist and his mother was Jewish. As he grew up, he found himself curious about the Universe and God. His mother and father had agreed that due to their different religions however, they would never talk about God in the home. Rob on the other hand, was in search of enlightenment and when he was grown up, he read about the use of the drug LSD for medical therapeutic purposes. He read articles about what people had experienced after taking the drug and he became curious. One day, he decided to experiment on himself.
Unfortunately however, due to an error in his calculations, he accidentally ingested 70 times more than the standard dose. Very quickly, he left his body. “I began to hear music. It was almost like all the voices that had ever existed were in harmony, and they were calling to me. They were all welcoming me. The nearest emotion is it was like homesickness, but so intense that my heart felt as though it would surely burst. The closer I got to the light, the more intense it became, until finally I arrived.
I realized the light was a river. Flowing as currents in the river were individual personalities - beings who had once had physical form, but had come home. This homesickness I could no longer ignore, and I dived right into the river, and I became one with them all. Love washed over me, through me.
I felt finally loved, and free.’
Sam Shelley says he has a secret he learned from his near-death experience. His experience happened when he was a six-year-old boy.
“At age 6, it was the last day of school. I heard the sound of the ice-cream truck. I ran to my mom for the money, and ran out to the truck to get my ice-cream. As I was coming around from the ice-cream truck, carrying my ice-cream, there was this big service van that wasn’t paying attention and it basically crushed me and he ran me over; basically, it crushed the right side of my body. Broken arm, broken hip, head trauma, I almost bled-out. I was pretty-well mangled.”
“Well, anyway, that night I just remember being placed back into my body and then seeing these 6 beings around me; 3 on each side and they were removing all these tubes that were keeping me alive, and then I remember the next morning, my mum asked me; “Why did you remove your tubes last night?”
And all I knew at this time was that I must have done it. No-one else could have done this, so I pretty much forgot about the experience, but then I can look back today and I think, how would a 6-year-old boy remove his own tubes. But I forgot about it and put it behind me without understanding it.”
“I had a difficult life. In my 20’s, I was bi-polar and had to be institutionalized, I was trying to kill myself. I was racked with arthritis. I was plagued by migraines. At age 44, I lost the ability to walk. I now had multiple sclerosis. Well, today, I don’t have any signs of disease.”
“I healed myself of 5 incurable diseases, with no outside help. Just relying on myself and my intuition. When I look back at that 6-year-old experience, those beings were telling me that I could heal myself. That our true way is inside of us. Letting go of this junk in our head that we’re not good enough, that we’re lacking, that we’re full of stress and fear; all these issues are nonsense. It’s the mind making noise. But there’s a great strength within you.”
Chapter 18: Dr. Donald Whitaker
Dr. Donald Whitaker says of his experience; ‘In February 1975, I was an alcoholic and abusing drugs. Alcohol was my drug of choice. I was totally out of control. I had a lot of friends in the entertainment industry including Ringo Starr. I was partying hard. This time, I was on the West Coast partying, but after about four days out there I became ill. I had a severe pain in my abdomen. I called a friend and said I needed a car brought to get to Hospital. I checked into the hospital with electrolytes; my potassium and other chemicals were so out of balance they had to give me IV’s to build me up.’
‘At the time, I was a hard-core atheist. I lived for myself; atheists live for themselves. I was self-centred. This is where I found myself, in the hospital, and they operated on me and when they operated on me I found myself in intensive care. I woke up on a respirator, which was breathing for me. I couldn’t speak and I had been laying there in a coma and I had heard these people talk about how sick I was and how I was going to die and how I wouldn’t make it out of the hospital.’
‘At that time, my hair was very long because I wore it long that way, and I heard one guy say “My, his hair is long.” Another guy said; “Not nearly as long as it’s going to be before he gets out of here,” and a third voice said; “He’s not going to get out of here; he’s going to die.”
‘I remember my surgeon, he told me; “Don, if you have anything to get right, anything inside, you get it done, because we’re not sure how long you have.”
‘So I knew; I had a condition called acute hermeragic and chronic pancreatitis. You don’t live with this disease. The doctor told my two sons that I would be dead before morning. I’m lying there; now I’m a professed atheist, and when I say that, I didn’t believe in God. I believed in the power of the Universe. I believed in something, but don’t talk to me about God and surely don’t talk to me about a resurrection or a Virgin birth because I had a PhD in research science.’
‘It’s very easy to be an atheist when you’re successful and you’ve worked your way from Oklahoma welfare to being one of the most powerful men in your state. I could sit back and say, I don’t need God. But, it’s very difficult to be an atheist when you’re lying on your death bed, because you begin to think; what if these people are right?’
‘Now, laying on my death-bed, knowing that I’m going to die, what if there is a Heaven and a Hell? And almost immediately, the most pressing thought in my mind is, how do I get saved? What is saved? What is it? How can I get saved? And so I sent for my friend to come because I wanted him to do whatever he had to do. He believed and I hadn’t believed him. How could a man hanging on a tree over a thousand years ago mean anything to me? But I knew he had something I had to have.’
‘As I’m laying there in bed I began to fade away and I began to go down into a darkness. It was like so so dark. It was like the darkness just penetrated your very being, and I can tell you I left my body because I remember when I came back into my body. Now there are people that talk about the light, there are people that talk about floating above, there are people that talk about a feeling of warmth and love. I didn’t feel any of that. I felt none of that. I felt untold terror.’
‘Absolute terror, because I knew that if I ever went all the way, if I slipped all the way, I would never get back. Now in my being of being, I knew that, and so I fought all night long. They told me later on I not only pulled the mattress cover off the mattress, I pulled the mattress upon me, because I had to stay. I had to wait until my friend got there.’
‘Again, though I would leave my body and be going down into a deep dark terror. My skin began to get cold and I smelt the cold. It became bone-chilling cold in my lower extremities, coming up my legs and I would leave my body and be in the darkness, that void, and I remember one time entering back into my body because when I entered my body it was a thud. I felt my physical body thud when I entered back in.’
‘Now, that was the most horrifying most terrifying experience I ever encountered. I fought all night long. The next morning, in came my friend, Ron. He asked me of my chances, and I told him I had been told I had none. He said, “Now is the time.” I had cursed him but now it was the time, because I had to have whatever he had because I had just a short period of time left on earth and at any time I might go all the way.’
‘Ron led me simply in a sinner’s prayer. Now, I had no idea what the sinner’s prayer was, but I trusted Ron, and he led me in this prayer and he told me that Jesus had died for my sins, he had died for the sins of the world. I didn’t quite understand that but I knew, he showed me in the word of God where it said that. Now, you have to understand, I’m a man of books. I’d spent 25 years of my life in books, all types of scientific books, had advanced degrees, had degrees to practise medicine, so he told me and I believed him because it’s in a book; the Bible. And so I let Ron lead me in prayer and I said the sinner’s prayer after him and I can tell you one thing. There was a peace that came over me like I had never known.’
‘I had searched for that piece in a bottle, in needles, in alcohol and drugs, in women. I’d searched in all types of places but there was no peace in my life, but once I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour I was no longer afraid. I still believed I was going to die, cos I knew the condition I had was that you do not survive this; I was a physician! I knew you did not survive. But, my friend showed me in the word of God where it says these signs shall follow those that believe. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.’
Miraculously, he survived the night. Not only that, but he made it out of hospital and has never been ill since. From that day on, he fully recovered…’
Jordan Samuel never believed Hell existed. “I didn’t want to believe in all that dark stuff. There’s no hell - that’s what I thought.”
Now however, he believes there is a hell; because he’s been there. Earlier in his life, he says he lived his life the best he could. “You know, I thought, Karma exits, do the best that I can do, what goes around comes around, be the best man that I can be, you be the best you can be to others.”
He grew up in Edmonton, British Columbia, son of a single mother. He went to a Catholic school, and he was naturally inquisitive as a little boy. “I just thought, how can one man come and just die for me? Who is this guy?” After asking this, he was kicked out of class. He asked again, again he was kicked out of class. After it happened the third time he said to himself, you know I don’t want to know who this Jesus guy is anyway. If no-one want to give me answers and this is how they treat me, then I don’t want to know. Although he had a happy family life after his mom got married, when she divorced his step-father, he began to rebel due to the hurt he was going through.
He got into trouble. The only way he knew how to deal with the pain was drinking, underage driving, stealing cars, robbing stereos, and living for the thrill of nearly being caught. He was reckless, but after four years of this, he wanted to turn his life round and he stopped selling drugs. He began working for an oil rig company. He was making really good money and had a house.
After work one day, he went to smoke some pot and did not know, but the pipe he used to smoke the pot was laced with crack cocaine; this was a drug he had never touched. As soon as he began to smoke it, he felt like he was going to die. His heartbeat became very erratic and he felt himself flat-line. He believes in that moment he went to Hell.
“All the things you think you want in the world; money, women, success; in Hell these women turned to demons. You could hear cackling, laughing, they were demons. You could hear them. Everything was all red and black and all I could hear was screaming; they were screaming at me; “Turn around; get out of here!”
‘All the people were burning. I was so afraid. All I could smell was their burning. I felt myself breathing but I still thought these were going to be my last breaths.”
In that moment, he made a declaration to God. ‘With the last beat of my heart, not even knowing why I said; “I believe,” and then, boom, I am gone. I have left hell.’ Jesus pulled him out of hell and took him to Heaven. He was all in white, in a robe when I saw him and he looked at me, and he wore a crown on his head. His eyes were fierce like fire. I was at his feet. He was so perfect. I worshipped him because he is the almighty. He saved us.”
Then, he came before God. “The Lord went to the right hand of the Father and I began to get judged by the father and it was the worst. He replayed secrets in my heart that I thought I had locked away, that only I knew that I ever did. But I could feel what God felt and I said Lord, forgive me. It was the worst feeling. He just come and he hugs me and says, “All is forgiven.”
‘The heart was broken, my old heart needed fixing and God gave me a new heart. All of a sudden, he told me he loved me and I’m not alone. I’ve never been alone. He showed me all the times when I thought I was alone but he was always right there. He hugged me again and then I was there, back on the floor of my room.’
After this experience, his lived was now changed. “My swearing, my language changed, my words changed. Everything was cleansed. I was delivered from any addiction I had. There was no doubting.”
He was so profoundly changed from his near-death experience that after he married, he and his wife became missionaries.
“God loves the broken and loves the lost and he doesn’t give up on them. He LOVES them with all his heart. He leaves the flock to find the stray one, and he did….”
Alan R. Stevenson makes the statement; “I’m a heart attack survivor. I was in the throes of having a heart attack for three days; I wasn’t aware of this. I had all the symptoms, but I didn’t realize. I wouldn’t trade the experience now; but there’s not many who survive.”
“I was in Niagara, Canada, in 2010. The snow had piled up off the lake and even buried the telephone lines - it was deep snow. There were no cars out, no people, no businesses open; no nothing. I had to try to make it to the bus stop. When I finally made it to the bus stop I thought I was going to be ok. Within myself my soul was screaming at me to get help, but it didn’t know. So I felt ok when I sat at the bus stop waiting for the bus. Once I got on it, I was collecting the change in the coin receptor, and the bus lurched in the snow and that’s when something physically within me closed off my artery. I was in complete physical distress as well as mental and soulful distress as well.”
“I quickly went downhill from there. I knew that something drastic was going on and here you start conflicting with yourself to ask for help because you know something really extreme is happening and you need to reach out for help, so internally I’m debating with myself while my physical biology was declining very quickly. At the last, and I mean the last extreme moment that I had an opportunity I asked the bus driver to call 911 and all she did was she picked up the phone to call 911 and I told her, I think I’m having a heart attack. I had already started to turn blue at the time.”
“I looked back from the mirror looking at her eyes in the mirror at the front of the bus and I look down on my feet and my hands and that was the moment that I died. Directly after that I slid from my body sideways. Once I had slid I was somewhat aware of my body but not in the sense that we are on a day to day basis. I became total consciousness and what we really are. Shortly thereafter, I was trying to take a lot of it in, and I could not see but I was still consciously aware of physical reality, but in a very different way; like through the misty shower glass, as you rub it clear. That was more into the non-physical aspects; you could see more clearly.”
“Consciousness, when we become aware of stuff, is quite different than the way that we perceive physical reality through our eyes. Consciousness is very very different. Moment to moment I was expanding, learning more and more, understanding more and more as time went by. There was no pain, no emotional conflict, it felt very loving. In life, we worry about such tiny stuff and we pour that energy inside of us, that essence, into things that are not that important, not that worthy.”
“If we pour more of that energy into helping a neighbour, helping a person in need, or an animal; that is what truly matters; those are the things I learnt are really important. We are loving beings and we have that choice to be loving.”
He coaches people now, in getting rid of their negativity. “I came back with awareness that I could hear the other side. Our minds puts things together in an image form. That’s how we understand one another during conversation. I now get images from the other side. I get these image-based conversations from the other side and have to try to seminate them. I am now freer after my Near-death experience, to hear messages from the other side for people who are standing near to me.
He wrote a book describing what happened to him in “I had to die to learn how to live,” on amazon.
Darnisha Taylor was an experienced diver. In the waters of Crystal Lake Michigan, she found herself in trouble she had never expected. She went out on the lake with her husband, to a ledge that had a drop of fifty feet below it. That was their marker, the ledge, and so they knew where to come back to after the dive, but this day, they lost track of the ledge.
When her husband glanced over at her, he noticed that her scuba equipment was no longer working properly. Air bubbles were coming out of it. He gestured for her to go upward but they couldn’t find the ledge. She surfaced so that she could try to fix her equipment but it couldn’t be fixed. The equipment was now feeling heavy and her oxygen was leaking out of her tank. They couldn’t find their safety ledge.
She was getting tired treading water and she really started to feel she could be in trouble. Her husband was still under the water, waiting for her to go back under. She began to pray. She knew after several minutes that she had no more strength to stay afloat. In the end, she said to God; if this is your Will then I am going to trust you to take care of everything that needs to be taken care of.
“I shut my eyes and asked please Lord, just help me to swim. That’s when I drifted off into eternity.”
Her husband had by now surfaced but was shocked that he did not see her. He did a 360 and still couldn’t see her so he started searching for air bubbles on the surface of the water.
Meanwhile, Darnisha says; “I woke up on my knees in this place, that was the only way I can describe it, is that it was a room but it had no walls. It was just a wide open bright space. It was so peaceful. It was very pure in the distance. I could tell there was this great destination; this gateway, this place that people were entering into. I remember feeling like I was home even though it didn’t look like my home. It was a place that I knew I was welcome.”
“We didn’t talk but we communicated; there were other people here, and it was as if they were asking me, “Are you coming?” and I didn’t know what to say.”
By the time her husband found her, she had sunk to the bottom of the lake. “Everything was black. I started asking; Why? Why are they bothering me? I’m home. Then I remembered; I had drowned. Before that I had been in this peaceful setting then I was back. I remember having to talk to myself and say, ok, I have a decision to make. I remember actually having to specifically make the decision; do I stay or do I come back? I heard clearly that I needed to relax and let Him bring me back, and so I said ok, and I allowed the process to happen.”
Her husband says it’s an absolute miracle he could even find her in the huge lake but he began to pound on her chest and breathe into her mouth. He spotted a boat on the lake and screamed for help. The boat cut its engines and the first thing he heard were the prayers of the men in the boat. They gathered her up and in the boat, she coughed out all the water in her lungs and began to breathe again.
Kelli Coffee, who runs YouTube channel ‘Kelli in the Raw’ where she interviews other metaphysical and spiritual speakers, had a near-death experience. It happened in September 2010. She had surgery to remove two bottom wisdom teeth. Weeks later, she was in severe pain. It wasn’t a pain level of ten. She says it was a pain of ten thousand. She hadn’t eaten for a number of days; it hurt too much. She went to the Doctor, and when she came back home she started to feel like she was passing out.
‘I was at home alone. I had called my husband. I told him something is very wrong with me. I wanted to tell him I feel like I’m dying but I thought he might think I’m being overly dramatic. I just said; “Something is very wrong, I’m not ok. Please come home now.” He stayed on the phone with me. Once he walked in the door I knew he would be doting over me, asking me lots of questions, so I told him please just sit beside me on the couch and hold my hand. I had been struggling just to breath this whole time. It took every ounce of energy I had inside of me just to keep breathing and stay alive.’
‘Now he was home I had this sense I could relax and whatever was going to happen would happen. He was holding my hand and I started to breathe out and I tried to breath back in and I just couldn’t. I started to feel my body just systematically shutting down. I couldn’t move anything. My breathing had stopped. I was very aware of this.
My husband started telling me to breathe. I was staring straight up and I started to see this dot appear in the middle of the living room. I didn’t know what it was but this dot appeared, white, and it started to get bigger and bigger and then it became very huge and the closest I can come to describing it is that the light was alive. There was movement in it. It was just brilliant light.’
‘When the light got big enough, all of a sudden I popped out of my body. When this happened, I was hearing my husband telling me to breathe and I started to move toward this light. Like every fibre of my being was being pulled toward this light but immediately I had pain relief; there was no pain, in fact it was replaced by bliss. Just heavenly bliss is the only way I can describe it. I felt this overwhelming sense of acceptance and love; that I have never ever felt on this earth, that it is not possible to feel on this earth.’
‘There was this warmth that enveloped me and the kind of love you’ve always been longing for your whole life was there. As I was being pulled, it was not my body; my body was behind me with my husband and his voice was starting to fade and I was being pulled into this light. I had started to forget this earth and our world. It was fading. I realized then who I was and what I was and why I was here on earth and what I was here to do. I had access to all knowledge of the Universe I knew Everything.’
There appeared an entity to the side. As if a human being, but energy surrounding it. Light was surrounding it. It was blue. Its eyes were white. It was this gorgeous colour of blue. Its voice was the most beautiful. It was motioning with its hands, “Come this way.” It was a male voice; the most perfect voice I have ever heard. The voice was Love. It felt so familiar and it was calling me. It was calling me, beckoning me and at that moment, I realized, I’m going home. I’m going back home, and I was elated.’
‘This earth was just a distant memory. I was being pulled and pulled and I was almost into the light when it felt like I was waking up. Like my existence on earth was just a dream that I’d had and I was now waking up, and I was more alive and alert than I have ever been in my life. I was almost to the entrance when the blue light entity said, “It’s your time.”
Once ‘He’ said this, something that was almost automatic just kind of clicked and I said, “No; it’s not my time. I have to go back,” and once I said that immediately I started coming back down toward my body. I was seeing the entity just standing there looking at me, no longer beckoning me. I started to hear my husband again and I was looking down not with the eyes of my body but with ‘my’ eyes, and he was checking to see if I had a pulse, and all of a sudden, I just popped back into my body as if a freight train had just hit me. I felt so heavy and the pain was back. It was horrible.
Kelli runs her own YouTube channel, ‘Kellie in the raw.’
“The day I died was a new beginning. That's the day I started living. Now I have no fear of death. I actually have no fear of anything.”
Michaela grew up in small town Holmer City, Pennsylvania. She describes herself as a very good kid. She didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, never took drugs. When she was 17, she was coming home from a family vacation. Her mom was driving, her dad was sleeping in the passenger seat. Her brother played computer games beside her.
They were heading up a hill behind a farm equipment delivery truck. A car behind theirs was trying to overtake. As the woman attempted to, she saw oncoming cars, swerved to miss them and ended up hitting the family’s car with Michaela in it.
“My left arm went through the back windshield. My sunglasses cut into my eyelids.” The parents found themselves crawling out through a broken window. Her mother saw Michaela’s head hanging down, her hair covering her face. She just knew it was bad.
E.R. doctor Dr. Scott Magley was on duty that night. He was paged that there was a serious accident. It was approximately 2 miles from his home and he rushed to the scene. He found Michela in the back seat with severe trauma. It was obvious at that point that she was having very slow respirations. Less than 8 per minute and she was only having a very feint pulse. Her visible injuries were very gruesome. She had a laceration that extended across her right eye into her eye and across her forehead, with bone visible. She was in shock, because there was no major bleeding.
“This is why they call this the golden hour of trauma. It becomes a co-ordinated level of response. To get the injured to the operating room in under 50 minutes. I wondered though if she was near-death at this time.”
Michaela says; “I felt this wind on my face and I opened my eyes and I was on a gurney and there was a helicopter, with its blades going round. I thought I was dreaming. Then I was still me but everything was different. They say your life flashes before your eyes. In an instant I saw so many different aspects of my life. It was me when I was a child playing ring-around-the roses, or dancing and watching myself in the mirror, or singing songs with my dad. It didn’t feel like a dream feels because I was part of it and it felt the same as me walking down the street or making breakfast in the morning.”
“It was so detailed. It was me walking with a man who I guess would be my partner. We were holding hands and walking up a mountain. I also saw me as an adult. I saw me with my grandchildren. I’m not a grandmother! I don’t even have kids yet. But I felt what it feels like to be a grandmother and to have those children that love you and look after you so much. I can’t say their names but the love in my heart at that time was just remarkable.”
This was taking place while she was in the helicopter, and the EMT’s said she was unresponsive at the time. “It was something that seemed so familiar, even though I’d never been in that place before. It was very comfortable there. Everything was very peaceful. I felt like I was being held by someone, and this very secure feeling and it made me happy. I remember just wanting to be a part of this and wanting to see it but at the same time I felt that I hadn’t lived the life I was supposed to live in this body, so I found myself praying and fighting and begging, “Please God I want to live, I don’t want to die.”
Multiple times throughout the critical care of Michaela, she was demonstrating times where she was not breathing, she was so critically ill, so much so that the doctor was able to pass a tube into her windpipe without any resistance from her, that was how badly injured she was. She had such severe injuries to her upper body that they couldn’t even get a vein to be able to start an i/v. It had to be put into her chest instead, to be able to start administering her intravenous fluids.
“At that point, what I saw was it went from the white fuzzy warm light that I was in, to red, green, blue, all these colours and emotions and everything flashing and me struggling and fighting and fighting and all of a sudden I felt like I was being sucked through outer-space in this vacuum tube.”
The doctor noticed she was becoming more awake; but it only lasted a few seconds. She needed emergency neurosurgery to save her life. “The next thing I know, I was up in the corner of the hospital looking at my body laying there. I remember seeing my mom and dad in the cafeteria of the hospital sitting on a bench style seating. My grandma and my gran were sitting across from my parents and my dad is a smoker and he said he was going to go have a cigarette. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, who would never, and had never had a cigarette in her life, stood up and said; “I need one too,” and my other gran did it too - neither would ever smoke a cigarette!”
After she came out of surgery, she described this scene to her mom, who confirmed that it had happened exactly that way. There was no way that she could have known that that even happened; unless she was ‘there.’
“To have been through this, it really makes me feel how everyone is in such a hurry on earth to do everything. When I think of death now I think of it more as a celebration. It changed everything about my life and I was totally different after. It made me think about everything differently.”
Her family too now feel more accepting of death. They too no longer have the fear that most people do.
English lady Alison Ward, was attacked by her ex-partner and sustained a severe blow to the head, which led to an out-of-body experience.
“In 1994, I was being attacked by my former partner in front of my little boy. It was a really horrific attack; I knew I was dying. It was quite obvious. Interestingly, the human brain does act quite bizarrely to try and keep you alive. I started singing nursery rhymes in my head as a tactic to try to keep me alive and stop me from dying but then I had a real sharp blow to the head and with that blow I felt myself go very woozy and felt myself leave my body.”
“You know when you hear a cork pop out of a bottle, it felt like that. I was released from my physical shell. I felt myself moving at speed and as I was moving at each side of me I was seeing tiny little snap-shots in black and white. Like little photos. Of people I hadn’t seen for years.”
“Bizarrely again, and that’s a word I’ve said twice now, but I then began to see a light, incredibly bright but it didn’t hurt my eyes. All the physical pain and everything that was going on back in the room, disappeared. It felt like I was so supported and so loved. I was fearful for my little boy and yet I was feeling so loved, and so much acceptance.”
“As I moved toward the light I saw a triangle of people. At the front was my grandfather Sam, who my little boy was named after. I said “Grandad, you look so well.” He looked so healthy. Obviously, he was dead, but he looked healthy and younger. But then I heard someone say, “It’s not time to go yet love.” And then, I was back in my body. The pain came back.”
“It changed my life. I see life as a beautiful gift now. I came back very different. After getting myself well, although I had post-stress disorder, I began to help other people with stress-related trauma. Now, it’s more than a belief, that life-after-death exists; it’s a knowing. I believe I came back that day so that my son would not be killed.”
Chapter 25: Richard Cole
In 2016, Richard Cole described what happened to him. “I’m 72 years old, I have never been what I would call religious. My boys believed there was a God and Jesus, but I’ve had doubts; I’ve been a doubter. This happened to me in 2005. I was on my way to visit Monterrey to historic car races. I go every year. I stopped at a stop light. I felt a pain that started in my jaw and travelled down my jaw bone, down my carotid artery and into my chest. My friend, traveling with me, asked what’s wrong. My hands felt clammy. My friend said he would take me to the hospital. He insisted.”
“We went in and they put me on a gurney. My blood pressure was extremely high and they gave me a couple of shots right away. I went right into the x-ray room and they gave me some x-rays and I came back and the Dr says, “You have a serious problem. You have an aneurism and it’s split.” I had an emergency operation.”
“The anaesthesiologist told me he was going to give me a shot and I’d go straight to sleep. Before he did, I asked the Doctor what he was going to do to me. He said they would have to cool my body down to a very low temperature and everything would stop; my brain and my heart. I said; that’s odd. He said well, I don’t often tell patients this; they’d run away!”
“I was told I had a 50/50 chance of making it. I found out later that with that kind of operation where they take your heart out of your chest, it’s really a 10% chance of surviving. The IV went in, I went off to sleep right away, they start rolling me down the hall to the operating room and I realized I wasn’t asleep. I was for a bit but then now I wasn’t. I wanted to tell the doctors, hey you got to give me some more of what you gave me, I’m not out yet! But I couldn’t get my words out. I couldn’t speak. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t tell them; I’m still conscious!”
“The doctors and nurses are in the operating room standing over me. The doctor starts to open me up with a scalpel. They got an electric saw out and started cutting my chest open. I saw them take my heart out. Then everything went black. I was still conscious but I could no longer see. It was like a thick heavy black fog. I couldn’t figure out what to do next. Right then, two large beams of light came from over my shoulders. I heard a voice, it was very authoritative. It said: “Don’t turn around.” I’m thinking, why not? But he said, “If you see my face, you’ll have to stay here. That would be ok, but I have a job for you to do and if you disobey me I won’t be happy.”
I said, “I know who you are,”
He said, “Oh, you do?”
All through this conversation I had a feeling he was on a white throne. Just a plain white chair and I could just feel that – I don’t know why. The next thing that happened is he said, “Do you have any more questions before you leave?”
I said, “I need to think about this.” I was thinking so hard; what could I ask God? But I couldn’t think of anything. I wanted to be so clever but I couldn’t think. Then I asked him what’s the meaning of life?”
He said, “I get asked this a lot. I’ll tell you; it’s a really simple answer, and when you come back, I will answer any questions you have.”
He put his arms around me and it was a feeling that I can’t explain. It was unconditional love. I can’t find the words. The next thing I heard, the nurse was saying, “I think he’s ready to come out.” Just over a week later I was discharged from hospital.
“First thing I wanted to do was go out and tell everybody what happened to me. My life has changed entirely. All my problems I thought were problems are all gone. Nothing gets me down. I’m no longer afraid of death. I don’t have any problems. I don’t have any fears.”
Tamara Laroux was 15-years-old and a troubled teenager. One day, she took her mother’s gun and put it against her chest. She pulled the trigger. Her body was rushed to the ER but her soul had left her body.
“I was convinced that there was no way to live a completely happy life; and if I couldn’t live happy, I couldn’t life at all. It began with a divorce; a broken home and I believe through that my personality began to develop as sense of rejection. I was young, I didn’t understand things. I felt the break- up was all about me. That sense of rejection really grew. I began to see myself as a burden to other people. I began to dwell on it and as I grew, the rejection began to grow. What is wrong with me? I believed the only answer for me was to end my life.”
“I walked to my mother’s room, thinking I don’t want anyone to see me because I’m so determined to end my life, to end the void, the suffering, to end my loneliness, that nothing was going to stop me. I began crying out and screaming out to God, please forgive me, and the gun went off.”
“When I pulled that trigger, I knew I was dying. Death gripped my body. I became blind. As my soul left my body, I began traveling faster than the speed of light and I began falling and falling and then all of a sudden, this explosion happened inside of me. It was as if there was an acid burn that consumed me in every way. It was so hideous and terrifying there are no words to describe the level of pain and the type of burn that I was experiencing. It was hell. It was what the bible describes as hell. When I looked around not only was I in a place of death but I now had become death.”
“I was no longer in a place where there was peace. I was in a place of total torment. I had become fear. I had become a being of fear. The bible describes that death is the absence of God and so in the absence of God and in the absence of anything good, your soul actually transforms into a being of fear; the opposite of love. The only thing that mattered was that I never surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ. Regret; absolute regret and guilt and shame that I hadn’t.”
“When I looked out I could see Heaven and the Earth. There was a mutual understanding among all the other people there with me, that we did not want anyone to go where we were. We wanted people to go back to earth and warn everyone. Do not come here; you could see the joy and love in Heaven. I had cried out to God to forgive me and in my agony and in the revelation of what I experienced, God’s hands came down and scooped me up. My pain was gone. I was cleansed of my sin.”
“I returned through the roof of my home. I was placed back inside my body, and I knew that I was going to be ok. I don’t know how long I was out of my body, but I called for my mother to come and help me. I was grey. The E.R. thought I was already dead.”
“In ICU, they said I didn’t need to be there. They put me in a regular ward! God told me, you have not got to be afraid of people; the only person you need to fear is me! I began my journey with Christ. God delivered me and made me whole, where I was no longer sad or lonely or rejected. Initially I didn’t tell my parents; it had scared me! For two years, I kept this secret!
In 1986, Mr. Mufti Shamsuddoha had just turned 40 years-of-age when he found himself being rushed to the emergency department of his local hospital.
“Had my sister not been visiting at the time and seen my condition and insist that I go to the hospital immediately, the doctors said I would not have lived through the night. In the emergency room, my heart stopped.”
The doctors grabbed the electric pads and pushed them fast down onto his chest to try to re-start his heart. They managed to revive him, and he was diagnosed with a tumour as well as undiagnosed diabetes, which had spiralled out of control and his symptoms were so serious that he had to remain in hospital for the next two weeks. He had numerous tubes sticking out of him, trying to treat him. During this period, the doctors were not convinced he would live at all. They expected him to die at any point.
He didn’t die, but, he did leave his body. “Like a flash, my consciousness, or my soul, left my body. I found I was flying upward, at an impossible speed.” He saw the Universe, and galaxies with other planets. “I still had a body, but it was light as a feather.”
Then, he found himself in front of a luminous glowing table, that was very long, and seated at the table were beings, who looked human in form but were bathed completely in glowing bright light. They were wearing long white robes. “These Beings had heads but I couldn’t see their faces; I couldn’t make those out.”
He counted ten of them sitting there at the table. He didn’t know who they were; “Were they angels?” A sensation came over him and he says he began to cry. He felt such guilt. He found himself telling these beings, without any prompting from them, of all the bad things he felt he had done in his life. He told them all about the times he knew he had been acting with deception, or lying to others, of the times he took drugs or was greedy. He felt wretched, and the beings agreed that he had not spent his life well, and had indeed done many bad things. Then he heard one of them speak.
It was a calm masculine voice. He heard this voice inside of him, not out-loud, as though he was telepathically communicating with the beings. Much to his great surprise, the voice told him that he was forgiven for his sins. Then he was told that this was not the right time for him to be there. The instant he was told this, he found himself spinning and hurtling away, flying so fast again, this time descending at speed.
He was hurled back into his hospital bed, back into his body, returned to his desperately ill body and yet what stunned him was the vision he had now with his eyes, which had been extremely blurred due to the diabetes, but now was the crispest, sharpest vision he had ever had. In fact, he made a remarkably fast recovery, so much so that his medical records had this: “Recovery is astounding.”
The change in him was not just physical however; “Like other stories I’ve now read about people who have had near-death experiences, everything after my experience, everything seemed to be illuminated with such love and gratitude for God’s infinite love and forgiveness. I’m sharing my story so that all of you will know and that one day you will experience it too. We are born of this infinite love, and we return to it.”
Today, Bernie Siegel is an eminent M.D. As a child, he grew up in New York and while he had the most loving family and the neighbourhood he grew up in was so close that everyone felt like extended family, he was born a sickly baby and as a young child, his health was poor. He had a near-death experience at the age of 4-years-old.
At the time, he had a very painful ear infection. He was alone on his bed as his mother was in the kitchen. He was playing with his toy telephone and had unscrewed it. He placed some of the small parts into his mouth, as small children are prone to do, and as
he breathed in, the pieces were sucked into his throat.
“I felt the most pain I’d ever experienced,” he recalls. Then as he struggled to breath and began to choke, “My body went into spasms. I couldn’t shout for help…. suddenly, I was outside of my body. I felt totally at peace, very comfortable, and I was watching the little boy on the bed who was dying. I thought, how can I see this? I was feeling glad I was no longer in that body. I had no brain and yet it felt wonderful. I didn’t want to go back to my body; it felt so wonderful. There was no pain, no problems.”
“It was neat. I preferred death over life. Then, this boy on the bed suddenly vomited and the parts came out of his mouth and he started breathing again and I was back in that body, mad as hell that I didn’t get my choice to stay as I was. I was going toward the light but it was as though someone pulled me back.”
“Afterward, it left me with no fear of death.” He adds, “The truth is, even the blind see when they have a near-death experience… I know this from my patients.”
The experience for him was so profound that it stayed with him as he grew up. When he made the decision to become a Doctor it was because he had been filled with the strong desire to help people, as a result of having discovered the wonder of life-after death. He wanted to support people as they faced illnesses. He also really wanted people to know that death was not such a bad thing after all.
“Near-death experiences tell us we are more than just physical bodies.” In his many books, and in his workshops and lectures, this retired Yale University surgeon and professor now promotes messages of love and hope.
Melinda Lyons died at the age of eighteen, from a beef allergy, “out of the blue,” she says, as she describes her near-death experience on YouTube. “I had my own inner demons. God did not judge me. He never brought up the mistakes I had made as a human. He just embraced me in this love. It wasn’t just white; it was made of all colours. I was embraced by angels too. I found myself in the glorious presence of Jesus. He allowed me to know the whole truth about who we are in spirit, who we are in God.
“What I’m telling you is not a personal belief, or from any particular religious view point. At the time, I had bad experiences that happened to me that I thought would cause me to be judged, but there was no judgement in Heaven. I never had to even say I was sorry, even though I was. He never brought up the pain and any of the mistakes I made. He just embraced me in this light of love. Other souls greeted me. It was spectacular.”
“The judgement, I’ve learned, is the judgement we give ourselves, based on our ego; our pride, fear, our unawareness. And that was the hardest part because I thought people would go to the place they are justified in going; like Hell. But the angel said no, they don’t. I asked why and the angel said the only person judging them now is you. I was rejoiced in the realization we could all be forgiven. Those who hurt others go through healing in Heaven, and when they experience it even just a little bit, the remorse comes through. The angel said we don’t damn them, we forgive them for they know not what they do, but in Heaven they are taught it. We are all the children of God. Not just Jesus, we all are. You have such true potential. Each one of us….”