Robert B NDE

Experience Description

Transcribed and written by Joseph Khasho

Edited and approved by (Anonymous)

(Age ~17, Mid-1990s, A western nation in the south pacific)

Decades have passed since this happened. I grew up in the south pacific. I was a quiet teenager with many friends, not involved in religion, and not interested in God, angels, or anything spiritual. I considered myself rationally minded and believed the physical world was all that existed. My home life and childhood were very difficult, and years of that can wear on a person. I wasn’t depressed in the clinical sense, just exhausted by existence. I didn’t see a point to life, to humanity, or to myself. I made the decision to end my life, believing there was no need to go on.

There was a nunnery called Little Sisters of the Poor that I always felt drawn to. It was peaceful and beautiful, and I felt safe there, so I decided this would be the place. I climbed over the fence and entered their grounds. It was a gray, overcast day, but I felt calm and sat under a large green tree. There, I poured out a large handful of sedatives and took them all. Soon after, I began to feel an emptiness and lay back on the grass.

All of a sudden, my next memory was sitting up again under the same tree, but everything around me was immediately different. I heard a deep, low buzzing sound, like the hum you hear when standing near an electrical pylon. I looked at my hands, which appeared solid and normal, yet they seemed lighter in color, not glowing, but somehow illuminated from within. I wasn’t afraid. The sun came out, and the wind began blowing, moving through the grass in distinct patterns that I could clearly see. I could feel the grass on my legs and the wind blowing on me, details like that.

I know how this sounds, but I knew this wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. Everything I’m describing was as real, if not more real, than anything else in my life. For example, I remember the birth of my children, the room and other details; it was that real. In front of me, a few feet away and towards my right, I saw the silhouette of an intensely glowing female figure. I couldn’t make out a face or body parts. She reached out her hand toward me, and so I then reached back with mine. The very moment our hands touched, I felt a sensation like a heartbeat or shockwave, a “whoosh-boom,” and instantly I was somewhere else. It wasn’t like traveling through a tunnel or moving through space, though there was a sense of that. It was more like existing in one place and then, in the blink of an eye with that heartbeat boom, existing in another. I found myself standing in a vast, coliseum-like place with hundreds of beings gathered in pairs and small groups. They were having conversations with one another, but not through speech. They weren’t talking, yet I could hear their communication.

I remained in that place for what felt like a literal eternity with this radiant being, though I know how crazy that sounds. I asked her question after question after question:

Who am I? Who are we? Who are these people? Why do we exist? What’s the point, is there a purpose?

There was no dialogue in the normal sense. I would think of a question, and instantly I would receive the answer or complete understanding at the exact moment I was asking it. There was no concept of time either. The best description I can give is that it felt like being inside a bubble of existence.

She answered me sometimes by bringing understanding directly into me, but she also showed me things, as if understanding some things required sight. In those moments, the same shockwave whoosh-boom transition would occur, and we would instantly be standing somewhere else. She showed me extraordinary things that sound unbelievable: the beginning of humanity, civilizations, distant planets, even other sentient beings. I saw Earth far in the past and far in the future, including a time when humanity came to Earth and later left it. The amount of information I was given felt enormous, yet consistent with the eternity it felt like I spent with her. There is no possibility that I could have imagined or invented everything I was shown. I know all human beings are connected, and although people have different beliefs on things, there was a strong sense of knowing that there is one real truth.

She continued, explaining more about existence as a whole and who we are as humans, and I could say much more. But after this eternity, she told me I would be returning. I should note that when I say “she,” it wasn’t that she was female. I sensed a distinct feminine softness and warmth, like that of a mother, but she was ultimately a being of light.

She communicated to me, in essence, “You’re going back now.”

I didn’t understand what she meant, having no memory or knowledge of my earthly life at that point. As far as I was concerned, this was my true existence, more real than anything could be real. What she conveyed as a whole, though words fall short, was something like:

“You’re going back to where you’re from, back to who you are in that world.”

Again, I had forgotten my earthly life, but something else she said stayed with me deeply. Its essence was:

“You will come back to be with us and then choose to stay or go back. We have always been here and will always be here. You are us, and we are you.”

With that, and another heartbeat whoosh-boom, I was back. I opened my eyes in an ambulance. I remember the shock of the paddles. I drifted in and out of consciousness in a way completely different from the state of clear awareness I had just been in during the experience. It’s important for me to share that there was a distinction between that diminished human in-and-out of unconsciousness I was going through in the ambulance and the clarity I had during the experience which I had just returned from.

Within a few minutes, in the ambulance, the physicality of my being flooded back: my identity, my body, the pills, what had happened. I wasn’t confused, but I immediately knew that I couldn’t tell anyone about what I had experienced, not because I doubted it, but because I knew it would sound insane.

It’s interesting to me that at the beginning of the experience, after taking the pills and first waking up under the tree with illuminated hands, I did remember my earthly life. I was still me, still there under the tree in the altered environment. But the moment our outstretched hands touched, the illuminated, motherly being’s hand and mine, I literally lost all recollection of my physical self. I didn’t remember being a teenager, what country I lived in, or having a body. There was no sense of loss. I was simply the being that was there, fully present in that illuminated experience.

Back in the ambulance and later in the hospital, I felt healthy. I had a deep understanding that everything happens for a reason and that learning and understanding come from it. In the first few days that followed, my vision was markedly altered. Everything appeared as though I was seeing a layer of overlaid static, like the black-and-white noise on old CRT televisions. This static-like thing wasn’t external; it was happening within my mind. At the same time, I could still see the physical world normally. It was as if I could see both simultaneously.

In this static-like vision, I seemed to be seeing deeper into reality itself. Normal external visual input was still coming in, but my mind was accessing deeper information, how people and objects are composed of particles, atoms, and molecules held together to form recognizable shapes. This “static” had no color, but that sense of depth was seen in it. It happened when I looked at people, furniture, the floor, everything. At first, it was frightening. I thought something was wrong with my vision, that I might be going blind. But over three or four days, the solidity of objects overtook this deeper static-type perception, and my vision normalized. Color returned as well.

In the months after the event, I returned to Little Sisters of the Poor to piece together what had happened physically. I introduced myself and explained that something had happened to me on their grounds years earlier. One of the sisters recognized me immediately and said, “You were the young man under the tree.”

She told me that when they found me, I had no pulse, wasn’t breathing, and was completely pale. They believed I was dead and were terrified. They called an ambulance but didn’t know how long I had been there. One sister had first seen me through a window and thought I was sleeping under the tree before they came down to my body. I explained that I had been resuscitated and recovered.

One of the sisters hugged me, shaking and crying, overwhelmed with relief that I was alive. It was deeply emotional for me. I apologized repeatedly for frightening her and for what I had put them through, and I told her I felt completely fine. She gave me her necklace with a Marian pendant, which I found fitting. It is the only physical object I have from that time.

In the past 30 years, I’ve shared this experience with only three people. I purposely avoided sharing it because the knowledge was specific to the way I experienced it, something most people wouldn’t understand, along with the difficult circumstances that led to it. I understand that people may not get this. It’s a lot. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. To be sure, before this experience, I had no belief in God, angels, demons, or anything spiritual. Obviously, that has changed. As a result, I told almost no one about this experience for nearly 30 years, not because I doubted it, but because I knew people would dismiss it. I’m not sharing this for myself, but a friend I eventually shared it with told me about this research website. My intention is simply to put it out there to help those who study near-death experiences understand them better.

Background Information:

Gender: Male