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My
Near-Death Experience
by Rene Jorgensen
My awakening happened at the age of twenty-seven
when I had what can best be defined as a deep near-death experience.
After the chock of my father’s sudden death, I decided to break free
and go on a longer travel. On this travel, I met a girl from Japan
with whom I would end up in India and this was where I had my
experience.
On the day it happened we had taken the drug LSD while we were
relaxing on the beach getting ready to watch the sunset. We were
talking about something, when she suddenly paused, looked right into
me and said, “I feel we have been family in a past life.”
I was totally unprepared for this, and my mind stalled. I had never
believed in reincarnation—I didn’t even believe in God—but in the
moment she said it, I truly felt it. It all fit together. Our
meeting, what had happened to me, the way I was opened up, and the
universe around us, all came together in this infinite moment. A
deep feeling of recognition overflowed inside me, and my heart felt
that it was true.
But this feeling was too much for my mind. Her approach was too
strong for me, and she was taking me where I was not prepared to go.
I had nowhere to run and I felt like a little kid who was being
exposed in lying. So, at the same time my mind was saying, “No, this
cannot be possible.” Reincarnation—past life connection—I could
simply not contain all this.
The moment opened up to infinity, and what it revealed was beyond my
comprehension. I was now in unfamiliar waters with a feeling of
groundlessness that I had never experienced before. The split
between my mind and my heart created a conflict within me. This
conflict was between the old me, and the new me that was ready to be
born. A power from within me revealed itself and fought the old part
in me. For the first time, my ego was fighting to stay alive in an
endless uncharted ocean. My ego was begging for mercy, but there was
no mercy to be found. My feeling of groundlessness expanded and
became so powerful that it threw me out of my body.
I was suddenly no longer observing what was happening from inside my
body. I now found myself outside my body in the air above where we
were sitting. My awareness was moved to a place outside my body,
maybe ten or fifteen yards in the air. From here, I could look down
and observe both her and my body sitting on the beach. I was looking
down from a bird’s eye view as a third person and it were as if I
were a point of space of infinite awareness.
The sensation of being pulled from my body was overwhelmingly
powerful. I felt a deep explosion, like a volcanic eruption, pull my
body apart and dissolve the essence of what I once knew as myself. I
was suddenly naked, exposed to everything in the entire universe,
but at the same time I was bathed in the transparent light of
something so powerful, so indescribable, all words fade and
disappear.
It was love. I melted together with a feeling of love a hundred or
maybe a thousand times stronger than anything I have ever felt in
this dimension: “This is truth—this is what it is!” In that moment I
knew the universe, “This is who I am—this is all there is!”
What I experienced was my true nature as absolute and unbound
consciousness. In this state there was nothing that I did not
know—all knowledge was there. It was as if I had come home to my
self—home to the ultimate nature of reality—home to love. It was
all love. As I consumed all the love gathered from all the stars
in the universe, I broke out in awe, “Wow! I did not know!”
My heart was now thrown into a black hole by the consequence of this
realization. It is all love—but I did not know. Through this
revelation, I now also realized what was not love. The separation
between what I had known in my life to be true and this unimaginable
profound revelation created a pain within me. In the chasm of this
separation arose a great torment; I had lived my whole life against
my own true nature—against love. Out of this separation a deep
regret was born and I now started to see my life in review.
In my review I saw all the people that I had hurt throughout my time
on Earth. It was like a movie being played out right in front of my
eyes, and it showed me all the pain and suffering that I had caused
others. First, I saw my mother crying and broken as I shouted at her
in anger. I saw how the pain cut deep into her, and I saw myself
doing the cutting.
Then I saw an ex-girlfriend. I had cheated on her. Now her whole
world was shattered, and her heart was broken by my selfish action.
In fulfilling my own desires, I had not cared about her feelings.
All the trust and hope that she had placed in me, I had turned to
dust and disillusionment. As I felt her agony, I felt disgusted by
my actions.
Then I saw an episode in school which I had long forgotten. A small
girl was standing against the wall in the schoolyard and I was
teasing her. She was lost in her tears and wanted to disappear
forever. I was calling her names, telling her she was worth nothing.
I felt how the shame I caused that day would expand throughout her
life and consume her happiness. She would be less outgoing and less
able to love herself as an adult. I felt the full effects this would
have on her family and the loved ones around her.
I was horrified. An overpowering feeling of torment crushed my heart
on behalf of all the people I had hurt in my life. Having realized
the true nature of existence to be infinite love and now seeing
myself causing all this pain was devastating. The essence and
purpose of life was love, but I had gone against love and therefore
my own true nature. It was as if I had been doing all this to
myself—by hurting others I had hurt myself. We are all connected—we
are all one. From the deepest part of my heart, I cried, “How could
I do anything other than love?”
Then I saw the world. I saw all the pain and suffering in it. I saw
all the poor people, and all the people living in misery. I saw all
the conflict and all the wars in our world. This was far too much
for me to bear. My heart could not contain all the world’s grief. In
an extremely intense sensation, I felt my heart literally tear in
two, and the pain was so strong I could not bear it. We live in a
world with so much agony, all against the nature of love. How could
we accept all this? How could we live the way we do, not seeing the
sorrow, not feeling the pain?
At that moment, I knew that I had to do something to change this. I
could no longer be an innocent bystander, a mere witness to this
unending misery. I had to do something to help all these tormented
souls.
Then the feeling of pain changed back into the feeling of love
again. I again recognized this almost uncontainable powerful
sensation of love as my essence. This was who I am—this was all that
there is. With this feeling in me, I now looked to the future in
front of me. It was a clear bright light, and I knew that this was
the direction in which I would go. I saw myself loving people around
me, having compassion for others, and devoting my life to helping
the world. At the end of my life, I saw myself entering this light
to return to where I came from, and I knew that this was where I
would go when my life was over. After this look into the future, I
now came back into my body.
Coming Back
After I returned from my journey, my head felt split in two. I
wanted to understand what had happened to me, but with no previous
knowledge of such an experience, I was unable to comprehend it.
Ironically, I had always asked for the proof of God’s existence, and
when I finally received it, it was too big for me to handle.
This split between the two realities created confusion in my mind.
Which one was the real one? After some months of confusion, I looked
up a therapist with whom I could talk about my experience. For
little over a year, I went through psychotherapy to help me
understand what had happened to me. My therapist explained that I
had had a “dramatic ego death experience,” in which I had been
confronted by a spiritual insight I was not prepared to understand.
My experience had been fertilized by the drugs, which produced an
ego death experience that had caused me to leave my body.
My therapist turned out to be a very important step in bringing me
back to myself, or I should say to my new self. I was no longer
afraid of dying and, therefore, I was no longer afraid of life. This
meant that I now found the strength within myself to love more and
show compassion. This came out in all my connections with people
from my family to strangers on the street. It was as if the profound
experience of the light had stayed with me and was now shining from
within. Instead of feeling separate from other people, as I did
before, I now felt connected with everyone through my experience of
the light. I felt that the light was part of me and that by
connecting to it I also would connect to the light in others.
One important way this came out was through my forgiveness list.
Still acutely aware of the people I had hurt throughout my life, I
made a list of every one of them that I could remember, and then
began to contact them one by one. This was a truly great experience
of healing. I learned that as I asked for forgiveness from the
people that I had hurt, I not only lifted a weight off my own
shoulders but also off theirs. By asking forgiveness I made
everything right again, and the healing power of this was amazing.
At the same time I also became very curious about where I had been
and what I had seen. Therefore, I began a spiritual walk in search
of answers. Here I found that whatever the religion or tradition,
essentially they were all pointing in the same direction; towards
the Light. This gave me confidence in the universality of the
ultimate reality of the light and reassured me that what I had
experienced was real. In Buddhism I came across the words of Sogyal
Rinpoche: “Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is
reflected.”
This for me, was the most exact description of my experience and
with this connection to death, I soon came across the research done
on the near-death experience. To my surprise (and relief!), I found
that these stories were the most detailed, step-by-step descriptions
of my own experience. Of all the places that I looked, I could not
find a more accurate testimony to my experience, and I knew that I
now had come home in this world too.
The End
If
you want to know more: Get the full story of my NDE and follow my
path of investigation through the study of near-death research,
philosophy, religion and science, in my book Awakening After Life:
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