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DiggOverheard: What It Feels Like to Die
This article appears in the Eschatology issue of Trinity News , the magazine of Trinity Church-St. Paul's Chapel.
The next thing I knew…I was standing in a mist and I knew immediately that I had died and I was so happy that I had died, but I was still alive. And I cannot tell you how I felt. It was, “Oh God, I’m dead, but I’m here! I’m me!” And I started pouring out these enormous feelings of gratitude because I still existed and yet I knew perfectly well that I had died.
While I was pouring out these feelings…the mist started being infiltrated with enormous light and the light just got brighter and brighter and brighter and, it is so bright but it doesn’t hurt your eyes, but it’s brighter than anything you’ve ever experienced in your life….And this enormously bright light seemed almost to cradle me. I just seemed to exist in it and be nurtured by it and the feeling just became more and more and more ecstatic and glorious and perfect. And everything about it was — if you took the one thousand best things that ever happened to you in your life and multiplied by a million, maybe you could get close to this feeling, I don’t know. But you’re engulfed by it and you begin to know a lot of things.
I remember I knew that everything everywhere in the universe was okay, that the plan was perfect. That whatever was happening — the wars, famine, whatever — was okay. Everything was perfect. Somehow it was all a part of an infinite being in perfection. And love and safety and security and knowing that nothing could happen to you and you’re home forever. That you’re safe forever. And that everybody else was.
— A near-death experience recollected by Jayne Smith
From Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Moment Point Press, 2000), by Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut, and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino.
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