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  • My Deaths Direct My Life:Living with Near-Death Experience
  • Peter Baldwin Panagore

My first NDE was transcendent, ineffable, unitive, and in the aftereffects, noetic. I can only speak of it in metaphor, there is no other way. It was and always is timeless. It was the end of duality and the beginning of Unity. I remembered who I was, what I was, and to whom and where I belonged. I died of hypothermia far from medical care and was carried to Heaven by an intelligence who had no form and was a power beyond my comprehension. My body was left behind unneeded, unwanted, and discarded. I understood that the world I had left behind was a world of forgetfulness. I was never my body; instead, I had inhabited it like an avatar. My consciousness and soul were safely Home and contentedly existed inside infinity like an orb of awareness living inside an eternal-illuminated greater darkness, content in timelessness.

A gigantic portal of light appeared, which I saw with the single eye of my soul. I was my eye, my ear, my mind, my thoughts all separations in me had been fused into oneness. The gateway flowed like a river of light, being transparent and translucent, and opening into an everlasting tunnel, the end of which was beyond my sight.

My consciousness reached out, my desire was for the light. I touched the river, and it flowed into me as I rushed into it. The voice called me by my ineffable soul name, which I heard with my soul. There was no sound. There were no words.

I tumbled into a hell of my own making where I experienced all of the intentional and unintentional sufferings that I had given away over my lifetime. Simultaneously, I experienced in sequence all of my justifications for causing pain. I shrunk in shame. The lens of love that I carried with me was given love in life. I had given love away in life. I saw mercy and the abundant warehouse of love.

Oneness infilled me. Truth, joy, love, beauty, wholeness, healing, mercy, charity, forgiveness, action, isness, being, goodness, knowledge, understanding, awe, adoration, bliss, and paradise—all these good things that we on Earth experience as separate are not separate. They are all made of love, which one drop more of would have obliterated me, casting me into pure unity. It was a divine agony of desire from my Beloved.

I saw Creator create me, and keep creating me, right until this moment, light from light, and saw the everlasting long tail of my soul, and knew myself as a separate creature, a photon of light, being wave and particle, separate and oneness simultaneously. [End Page E3]

Any knowledge I desired filled me instantly, and I understood the structure of the world and why it is the way it is, and how it is made.

Telepathically, I conceived, "Am I dead?" The voice instantly and self-evidently God, said, "Yes. Come stay with Me. Welcome back home, My Beloved."

"I cannot die now," I said.

"Why not?" asked my Beloved. "See, my love for you was, is, and will always be a septillion times greater than all the love you have ever known."

It was true, and yet, I resisted, and then at the speed of thought I was carried by the divine and shown a hologram of all the earth, and I saw every one of the seven billion humans, each one Beloved just like me but each on Earth blinded to infinite love that heals all wounds.

I saw the faces of my parents and could see their future without me, and with me. I knew, and know, that all was well, is well, and will be well for everyone, including my parents.

"Come stay with me, they will be well because of my love."

"If I go back to help them through their lives by not dying now, may I return to this Oneness of Being? This Heaven inside me? Your forgiveness through love?"

"Yes," said the genderless voice.

"I choose to live my life," I said,

"You won't live yours. Yours is over. You belong to me...

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