Mathilde M's NDE

Mid-May 2006, I had a meningitis. 

I refused to be transferred to the hospital as I felt the need to remain in silence, interiorized, and as conscious as possible, without any morphine drip. 

I took this decision knowing the risk it entailed and the pain I would suffer. I have no rational explanation for that, I was just intuitively confident and I’ve not been scared any time. 

During the first night, suffering very high fever and unbearable headaches, I understood that my body would not stand this shock for long. 

Then calmly, through conscious action of my will, I decided to let go.

As soon as I intensely wished to go, to see this other reality that the mystiques are telling us about for centuries, I instantly entered in infinite energy, as if I was sucked by a very bright vortex. At incredible speed, I went through cosmos, passing by planets, stars…

Then, everything stood still around me. I had entered a bright and calm universe, where I felt myself floating.

For a moment which I cannot assess, because time does not exist in this other reality, I know that I had no thought anymore, no more personality (while keeping the memory of my identity), no more body, which I had left, and I did not suffer at all anymore.

Silence had engulfed all.

Consciousness remained, totally alert, linked to this luminous flow to such an extent that it dissolved in it.

I was this refined, sublime consciousness. It bathed into cosmic energy, and simultaneously was wide open, limitless, as if it had contained the universe space. It perceived, felt, had all properties of a living being, but acted in a dimension located out of matter and out of time.

The feeling was tender, peaceful. The light I saw, through non sensorial perception, located at another level, was intense, radiant but not blinding, not dazzling.

A golden color illuminated the immensity and allowed my consciousness to embrace the whole scope of it, making everywhere visible in the universe.

I had a feeling of lightness. Never mind the ill body because there was nobody who could suffer…

Fullness, freedom, instant out of time.

My consciousness had left space-time limits, it had entered another plane of reality, extending infinitely, whence this feeling of openness towards universe, up to wholly containing it. In that moment, my consciousness was this bright space.

The light freely went through my consciousness which had found its source, it was its very substance, nourished it, plunged it in bliss.

I immediately felt loved by this supreme Consciousness. I understood that this light was the absolute Love I felt.

It was very beautiful, very sweet. True tenderness came from this light.

I felt pure love, unconditional acceptation, great compassion too.

“Somebody” outstretched their arms to me. However, there was nobody who loved and I had nobody to love.

There was just understanding, respectful, unrestrainedly open, unintentional… Love

This immersion in total love brought to me endless joy, immense gratefulness to be loved, and flood me with peace.

This feeling cannot be accurately described as it is situated beyond anything we may know in our terrestrial existence… It brings an absolute safety feeling, a well being certainly close to the one felt in motherly womb.

During this experience, I did not see the tunnel which most people who experience near death relate. I did not meet any light being, no dead beloved who would come to welcome me and talk to me, with an appearance that would have made them recognizable to me, no guide. I did not see, either, a fast review of my past life. No memory, no scene of my life came to my consciousness.

I was out of the body, but I did not see myself looking at it: it did not exist anymore to me.

I just bathed, I would say “eyes wide open”, in the bright energy that enveloped me with its love.

Should we consider that this reality in which I was immerged was adapted to my consciousness level, or was it the ultimate reality and there is no other?

I know that I desired to extend as long as possible this indescribable happiness feeling.

I was indeed aware that I was in a state very close to death, at life end. I heard me saying to myself that I had to go back to earth. I do very well remember that I hesitated (Through which process does the brain make itself an accurate receiver for all this experience, while it suspended its activity?).

I felt so well! I lay inside this bright reality; I then desired that this bliss state would last…

Coming back meant suffering, and indeed the return was harsh, terrible.

I could make the decision. Its love for my loved ones Earth which made me come back…

Vivid memory of my identity, the certainty to be me, kept me related to my loved ones who stayed on earth.

This direct and spontaneous perception of the light gave me the ability to deeply understand what the Life which goes through us is.

It enabled me to know (because this experience is the very knowledge: to know is to unify one’s consciousness, not to comprehend the objects through thoughts, concepts and language) the unique source that generate us all, human beings, animals, plants.

All living beings are part of this light, it goes through us all.

During my recovery, sitting in front of my garden, I felt life acting in blackbirds that joyfully answered each others, in wasps flying in to drink water in saucers, in euphorbia the gracious tiny flowers of which grew in a spiraling movement…

It’s the same energy that supports everything, the same all encompassing Consciousness.

I understood during this “trip” the significance of the universe, which I perceived as a very consistent whole. I could access absolute knowledge, and this, instantaneously. Since then, this understanding gives me an intense feeling of life and the certainty to be part of a harmonious whole, to belong to a meaningful cosmic unity.

That comes after 30 years of quest, sometime tinted with anguish, for the meaning of the existence, 30 years during which, undergoing strong inner tensions, being supersensitive, I looked for answers by reading the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist mystiques.

Those books guided me along the path.

I also wrote two books, about Queen Saint Radegonde, and Mary the Egyptian, they helped me enter more deeply into myself.

During that quest, I met an enlightened person whom I consider as my spiritual mother. Born in 1913, possessing a vast culture and a higher spiritual level, a psychic, she taught me what is essential, someway  sowed in a soil that was becoming fertile thanks to my readings.

Also, through intuition flashes since childhood, visions of deceased beings, dreams, I could learn that different levels of reality do exist.

I thank all these teachers who taught me…

This long inner reviewing and harmonization work made that, for some years, I have felt better prepared to the steps of my existence, with a greater understanding of life.

Just before my illness, I had the feeling to be at the end of a cycle that began 30 years ago, and to be at last ready to live a deep inner transformation.

My receptivity allowed me not to be upset, confused by the experience offered, and to fully live it as a true spiritual revelation.

I have the feeling that this experience is indeed part of my life path.

From there I brought a great peace back, an ongoing feeling of total love, wrapping me up as a warm coat.

I keep a wonderment feeling, an immense gratefulness for life.

I stopped mental concentrations to understand, discursive thoughts, meditations and introspections, multiple readings to find the path. There is no path to follow towards what we are for all eternity. There is nothing to tend to.

All trying and failing have been swept by this light which radiates Love.

So many errors, so much pain could have been avoided for so long…

In my everyday life everything remains just as it was before, because I came back with a full understanding of my experience. So, I don’t have to struggle to adapt my daily life to my new consciousness, inasmuch that I never, since childhood, intended to be part of society at any rate.

I just pay less attention to thoughts, feelings, moods that come and go, leaving no trace.

Now I know, through direct experience, that the original consciousness is empty, it is just conscious of self. It does not project in time, in action, it is not spread by attention and identification with objects as our ordinary consciousness in daily life is.

Original consciousness may only extend in the void that exists between two thoughts, two feelings. The mind is suspended there, the object is absent there, and time is no more projected there.

This unintentional openness is our true nature, there, where consciousness is left to itself.

Consciousness self consciousness has nothing to do with the coming and going of the ego, fully absorbed by contingencies and driven by events.

Consequently, all conditioning set for immemorial times, all aspects of personality may freely come and go. My consciousness does remain bond to supreme Consciousness, in the very heart of daily life.

The mind is not continuously agitated anymore by these parasitical thoughts which usually take over the entire consciousness field. The racket of thought ended.

I feel lighter, more relaxed, bondless, in harmony with my deeper being, needing not to relate myself to a forged identity that has no genuine reality.

Natural consciousness of the absolute persists each day, within usual tasks, on a background of serenity and inner silence.

I know that each moment in life is grace.

Before, life seemed simple to me, and uselessly complicated by the human beings; it seems even simpler to me now. I see it in life lightness and beauty.

Of course I still see disorders in our world, its chaotic play of good and evil, but beyond that, I sense its bright essence.

I feel more painfully the cruelty imposed on other human beings and animals, as well as nature sack. Our origin is common. Its an illusion to believe we are separate. When we hurt another living being, we also hurt ourselves.

Life is a whole. How beautiful it is!

I am not homesick for this other dimension I have known, neither do I feel hurt, nor difficulty to live everyday life, because I understood that there is no difference between this world and the other side.

Since my experience, I do not feel distant from human beings, on the contrary, what life gave me to see linked me more consciously to all that exist.

I intensely feel the energy that flows through me as it does through us all on this planet. Everything is saturated with cosmic essence. Everything comes from this source and goes back to it.

This energy in which we bathe, its Love that continuously goes through us, whether we want it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Our task here is to relate to this Love, to place our consciousness in this perception of continuous presence, in this vision of non-separation from the absolute.

There is nothing to look for, nothing to be avoided, but all is to be accepted in our presence to the world.

Because of that, there is neither good/evil duality, nor inner/outer separation.

These differentiations are only visions of the mind intending to differentiate things.

All is equal in essence.

The spontaneous awakening induced by this experience does not belong to time, Because the source exists at this very moment. The awakening always existed…

I understood at last, after this 30 year quest, that there is nothing to be reached, nothing to get.

Everything is already there, because all is this vibrating energy.

The light Is for all eternity, full of compassion. No method is indispensable to know it: we already bathe within; we are this reality, since the beginning.

Nothing ever separates us from our essence, except our mind that generally makes distinctions between the innumerable forms of existence and differentiates!

The light towards which I felt sucked is the essence of my consciousness and of the consciousness of each being.

Indeed, we are in everything, and each thing is in us.

I feel the consciousness of each living being, including animals, as my own consciousness. The same energy goes through each thing, viewed as an infinite fragment of the big cosmic All.

Life resides in consciousness, and this consciousness exists for all eternity, besides our personality with its convictions, aspirations, regrets, memories.

In this state, that I have known, so close to death, we cannot identify ourselves anymore to our body, of course, neither to our social role, our culture, our job, our passions, our hobbies, our sex, our character, our persona on the scene of the world, all this confused catalogue which we believe to be our personal identity.

Consciousness does not depend on this empirical ego. It possesses a sense in itself.

This understanding frees from all anguishes, all fears, particularly from death.

Death is no more an end but a mental creation which, just like others, goes back to the space from where it emerged.

Unlike what the philosophers assert since the 18^th century, death is not the end for everything including consciousness. It is not total annihilation.

There is no break, only a passage from one state to the other. Our consciousness continues to live, to sense, totally integrating itself with cosmic energy.

This consciousness, which some people call the Self, always at work during this experience of another reality, if your can sense it, eternally present under the garment of personality, then fear from death vanishes.

I know now that the border between life and death has no meaning there. There is only Life, that flows through us all.

This certainty, only given by the experience, that some day I’ll find again the grace to be so much loved, is a gift.

I feel that the ego gradually stretches, that the ties to this ego, with its memory, its desires, its expectations, just naturally vanish…

Consequently, why should this experience lead me to separate from the world, to leave my job or even my family, my friends?

There is nothing to give up, nor to flee, or to grab so as to identify to something, with an image of oneself, or to reach a situation which the mind believe is pleasant.

Its only the mind that projects in the past so as to compare it to the present, or to the future, to create duration and invent a distance, a need for a path to be followed. There is no path to go to Self.

There is no answer outside. Now, events have lost their fascination power.

Touched by a truth that never can be reached through thought, but by direct experience, I set myself free from the confusion and the oppositions generated by the mind.

This awakening to unity of all things sets me free from the idea: this is my thought, my emotion, my feeling, I am this ego. It sets me free from this body to which I do not identify myself anymore and the pain of which (nerves of my right leg remained inflamed for over six months after the meningitis) does not impinge my joy. The body also seems to be penetrated by this consciousness, this cosmic essence. After all, it has been the instrument of this experience…

I am willing to accept what is, with no fear or rejection wish.

I got a deep feeling of being, needing not to project myself in a future I would imagine, nor to relate myself to the new person I became, even if that one is at peace.

Indeed, the one from today, transformed by her experience, does not exist more than yesterday’s one, with her errors and her quest so clumsy.

Both are personalities, envelopes, covering the consciousness that does exist for all eternity.

I indeed lived a mystical experience, in the sense that my own consciousness melt into supreme Consciousness.

Ancient time prophets, spiritual masters most certainly lived similar experiences, they are the source of their teachings.

I know that the elements which usually feed our consciousness, thought, feeling, emotion, action will, were not active during this experience, leaving the light spread into that void.

We generally reduce our consciousness to all these elements, the effects of which we see on our personality and our existence. Psychological time applies all its power thanks to the omnipresent thought which ceaselessly projects and objectifies each state, each experience.

We usually equate our consciousness to the objective universe which it deals with.

The absence of object is even considered as a “loss of consciousness”.

However, my consciousness was silent and inactive at phenomenon level during this experience, and indeed present though. It was, I would say, a consciousness conscious of itself, and therefore, someway an undifferentiated, impersonal consciousness.

What this experience brought to me is the capacity to deeply understand that a part of consciousness does exist which cannot be equated to our mind, to our action capacity or to the objectified universe which it usually deals with. It is located at another level, to which we do not access through the materiality of our terrestrial existence, the space-time dimension in which we think and act, which creates like a separation wall, and through our mind often inattentive, superficial, seldom intensely in deep thought.

Nevertheless, each being is free to set their consciousness at strictly human level or to open it on the immense space, in order for it to reintegrate its essential nature.

It is differently arranged in each of us, according to the room our ego leaves it.

It always brings reality to the place it is located.

It is the very Life, located in itself, united to the light significant of Love.

Mathilda M