“I was born with a deformity, a curvature in my lumbar spine called “scoliosis.” I underwent surgery, a spinal fusion. I awoke after the five-and-a-half-hour operation in a Stryker-frame circle bed… About two days after surgery, complications set in and I started to die… Overwhelmed emotionally, I lost consciousness and later that night woke up in the hall outside my room. I floated back into the room and saw my body. I felt peaceful, more peaceful than I had ever been in this lifetime.
Then I went into a tunnel where I was greeted and held by my grandmother who had been dead for 14 years… Her love enveloped me and together we relived all our memories of each other. I could see and feel all this through her eyes and her feelings of each moment too. And I know she experienced how her actions and her love had comforted me in my childhood. Suddenly I was back in my body, back in the circle bed… I tried to tell my nurses and then several doctors that I had left the bed. They told me that it was impossible and that I had been hallucinating.
About a week later, I again left my body in the circle bed… I started to call, then yell, then scream frantically… I separated from my body… I again went out into the darkness, only this time I was awake and could see it happening. Looking down and off to the right, I saw myself in a bubble... As I moved away from my body in the circle bed, I felt as though I released myself from this lifetime. As I did, I became aware of an Energy that was wrapping itself around me and going through me, permeating me, holding up every molecule of my being.
Even though I had been an atheist for years, I felt God’s love. This love was holding me. It felt incredible. There are no words in the English language, or maybe in this reality, to explain the kind of love God emanates. God was totally accepting of everything we — God and I — reviewed in my life. In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything that everyone else had felt as a consequence of my presence and my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned. Oh, how I learned!
The information was flowing at an incredible speed that probably would have burned me up if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary Energy holding me. The information came in, and then love neutralized my judgments against myself. In other words, throughout every scene I viewed, information flowed through me about my perceptions and feelings, and the perceptions and feelings of every person who had shared those scenes with me. No matter how I judged myself in each interaction, being held by God was the bigger interaction. God interjected love into everything, every feeling, every bit of information about absolutely everything that went on, so that everything was all right. There was no good and no bad. There was only me — and my loved ones from this life — trying to survive… just trying to be....
At this point God and I were merging into one Sacred Person. It felt as though I lifted off the circle bed and We went to the baby I was seeing to my upper left in the darkness… I could hear myself saying, “No wonder, no wonder.” I now believe my “no wonders” meant “No wonder you are the way you are now. Look what was done to you when you were a little girl.”
My mother had been dependent on prescription drugs, angry and abusive, and my father wasn’t home much of the time and did little to intervene. I saw all this again… and experienced it just as I had lived it …. Not only was I me, I was also my mother, my dad, and my brother. We were all one. Just as I had felt everything my grandmother had felt, I now felt my mother’s pain and neglect from her childhood. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She didn’t know how to be loving or kind… Everything came flooding back, including my father’s helplessness and confusion at stopping the insanity. I could hear myself saying, “No wonder, no wonder.” And then the benevolent Energy that was holding me held me tighter and with even more love...
As my life review continued, I also saw my mother’s Soul, how painful her life was, how lost she was. And I saw my father and how he put blinders on himself to avoid his grief over my mother’s pain and to survive. In my life review, I saw that they were good people caught in helplessness. I saw their beauty, their humanity and their needs that had gone unattended to in their own childhoods. I loved them and understood them. We may have been trapped, but we were still Souls connected in our dance of life by an Energy source that had created us. This was when I first realized that we do not end at our skin. We are all in this big churning mass of consciousness. We are each a part of this consciousness we call God. And we are not just human. We are Spirit. We were Spirit before we came into this lifetime. We are all struggling Spirits now, trying to get “being human” right. And when we leave here, we will be pure Spirit again.
As my life review continued, I got married and had my own children and saw that I was on the edge of repeating the cycle that I had experienced as a child. I was on prescription drugs. I was in the hospital. I was becoming like my mother. And at the same time, this Loving Energy we call God was holding me and let me into It’s experience of all this. I felt God’s memories of these scenes through God’s eyes, just as I had through my grandmother’s eyes. As my life unfolded, I witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my life was that I had never learned to love myself. And then I was back here, in this reality…”
~ Barbara Harris Whitfield is a practicing thanantologist and author of Spiritual Awakening and Final Passage. She researched the effects of near-death experience at the University of Connecticut Medical School and served on the board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. She is a contributing editor to the Journal of Near-Death Studies. She is in private practice.
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