The following is, as best as my facility with words may allow, my account of what may be called a ‘Near-Death Experience’. For those who have expressed the interest and posed the questions leading up to my public revelation of this experience, I must thank you for your role in encouraging me to construct the bridge that will begin to connect this years-long cultivation of inner strength and vision with the shared world of practical actions (and I do believe that this account’s reaching the right people will bear wonderfully forbidden and fateful fruit) and cultivated effect.
Before coming to this decision, this sort of experience was the kind that remained consigned to personal communications only, for several reasons. First, my military enlistment had not yet expired, and it may not have been beyond the conscience of overseers not as intelligent as I but unashamed of passing judgement on matters beyond their perception to hold an opinion on my mental health - the thorough indoctrination of even our mental health professionals relegating them to an ultimately materialist-informed dogma from which to judge the ‘truth’ of any experience they may offer an (all too often entirely unsolicited!) opinion on.
Secondly, and perhaps less ignobly ‘rationalized’, I have for a long time held to the belief that such experiences should remain intensely personal, that one individual’s real contact with a higher reality should remain only valid for that individual. Thus did I hope to avoid attracting ‘followers’, of perpetrating a ‘religion’, of watering down any real wisdom gained through being handled by those who had not been initiated in real experiences of their own. To an extent this insistence on experience to qualify any pretension to opinion remains with me - I have only been shown the suitability of sharing some personal experiences to serve as an example for others’ individual quests. And, some correspondence being had with other travellers not content to rely on word of distant things second-hand, a great significance may be found in what, from individuals’ separate experiences, continually surfaces as shared observation.
Finally, and in light of my current understanding perhaps a little ridiculously, I was lately of an opinion that an experience such as this one was ‘Sacred’, and I would be ‘profaning’ it by sharing with those who were not inclined to seek this out for themselves. I still regard it as a sacred experience. But one of the chief reasons for this most recent move on my part in the direction of ‘Breaking the Silence’ has been for the benefit of those who would seek, if only they had some idea of a possible direction; who might make the trial, if they had some encouragement that such far-off destinations might have some truth; who might begin a journey of their own if ever some word of a strange traveller made them stop in the midst of their regulated, parochial life and wonder if such a strange place beyond the horizon were not the most truly reasonable explanation for such a divergence. To share this, now, because it is sacred, and as a reminder to those who search that there still are sacred things in this world, if only they will refuse to close their eyes and stay put.
But the decision has been made, and the account will follow. I will endeavour to portray these essentially wordless experiences as faithfully as my command of words will allow. A few minor details, such as the entire (mundane) circumstances enabling this experience of Beyond, are omitted in practical consideration to my everyday life as it remains in the present and is planned into the mid-range future. In all of the most important matters, however, I will attempt to provide as informative and honest (sans religious ambition, for one thing) a description as perhaps any public in recent memory has had access to, and within these parameters (and with these caveats) I will begin my description of the act of dying.
As much as I understood on some level that a point of no return had been reached and that something was approaching which would forever change my perception of reality - possibly something that I would not survive - the consciousness of my rational-mind proved remarkably resilient - willfully stupid - in trying to shut out complete awareness of this fact, of rationalizing away the extraordinary and making up explanations, above all, to preserve the fragile ego and save it from the threat of reflection and acknowledgement of that which infringed upon its preferred way of interpreting the world.
My heart, never unhealthy, was beginning to beat at a truly frantic rate while I sat inactive on the couch - but there could be all manner of reasons for this. True, I felt exceedingly strange in my relation to the space around me and the ‘flux’ of time - but was that not standard fare for someone who dared to hold poetic ambition? My mundane senses became sharpened and sensitive to a prodigious degree, and I felt that this was mounting to some significant crescendo - but could not this, too, be explained away self-satisfactorily, given enough time? Given enough time, perhaps, it might have been.
As my heartbeat showed no signs of slowing down, my mundane-consciousness was finally forced to admit that something entirely unprecedented was in the process of unfolding - and it was beyond my ability, or at least understanding, to stop. With this acceleration of my vital processes approaching a point which could not for long be sustained came a surprising equanimity and a resolution for detached observation and calm embrace of the uncharted course that Fate laid out ahead.
One thing that I recall in particular was how immense and monolithic sounded the little wall-clock whose repeated movements of the second-hand consistently washed over my awareness as unending waves of sound and time. That repeated ticking, loud as artillery in the confines of the living room, came to dominate all other sounds and subsume the whole of my awareness, almost. My eyes became more sensitive to the lights, but before I could attempt to stir my vision grew more dim as if the room became swiftly swathed in shadow. My skin, and in particular the hairs of my arms and neck, became extremely sensitive to the tiniest air currents within the room, and then, as my heartbeat reached a straining pinnacle of trying to beat its way from out my chest, that peculiar feel like static electricity in my vicinity. Simultaneously, the newfound sensitivity of my hearing not only picked up more and more sounds from within and around the house but seemed to be increasing its range more and more towards the upper end of the spectrum - tones and hums and whines of higher and higher frequency.
While all of this culminated into a peak of physical hyper-awareness, I noticed something very strange. The time in between my heartbeats was becoming greater again - perhaps a welcome return to normalcy - but at the same time, so too did the perceived time in between those colossal, thunderous movements of the clock’s second-hand. As my experience of time began stretching out into a strange ‘in-between-time’, I found myself in a strange state of relative quiescence. Suddenly, like the bursting of a bubble, my hearing equilibrated once more (or perhaps was overcome), and I found myself encapsulated within a tranquil quiet unencumbered by my hyper-awareness of the moments before. Instead, there was a strange…ambience…which was sensorily interpreted by my senses of hearing and touch simultaneously as a semi-electric ‘charge’ in the air - one in which time found itself ‘slowed’, and space - ‘opened’.
When I say that ‘Space Opened’, what I am trying to convey is that while I remained sitting in the same room as before, occupying the same mundane dimensions as before, my awareness was now cognizant of what might best be described as other spatial dimensions intersecting and alongside - it was the same room, but I could now see that there was much more to it than I had known! As I looked both through and into the space around me, I was met with a new realization of just how vast were the gulfs of space lying between the Things we are normally so fixated upon, who remain miraculously supported upon and within that eldritch Space all the same.
Very impressed with all this in spite of some cause for alarm at my subsiding heartbeat (or perhaps in danger of becoming forever lost in the rapidly dilating Space between heartbeats, hell, I don’t know), I raised my hand before my face, and even this was sensorily interpreted in a strange new light. There was more of a delay - or reverberation? - between my brain’s volition to movement and the actual manifestation of this nervous impulse down my arm and to the tips of my fingers and, although I still felt this motion through that strange electricity-like ambient hum that also formed the background of my hearing, watching this willed motion actually unfold with my eyes was an act of beholding a spectacle more distant-seeming than a part of my own body should have been - never before had I felt quite so much like an electric brain manipulating mere nervous puppet strings to control a body that was not really me. In fact, this normal physical body now seemed downright alien - a strange and foreign thing put on like a masque, but not wholly identical with my original essence.
All of my physical senses at this point were growing very subdued, or rather phasing out as my awareness kept ‘shifting gears’ in a sense very similar to the way the range of my hearing had been rising to accommodate higher and higher frequencies of sound. I felt like my senses were shifting their attention to a much subtler field, and that these senses were more identical with what might be called my essence or soul as I began to leave my strange and temporary body-masque behind.
I blinked, and suddenly across my vision - not on the inside of my eyelids but ‘cutting out the middleman’ and displaying directly into the part of my brain which was prepared to process signals from the physical media - lay a bizarre and otherworldly visage! It was an entity’s head, simultaneously partaking of elements both insect and reptile. It was shaped more or less like the head of a praying mantis, but covered in numerous iridescent little rainbow-coloured scales. It should have been quite a shock, but honestly at this point it made just as much sense as everything else and I had already made up my mind to meet my fate with dignity and calm aplomb. Its mandibles moved, and sounds issued forth to me - not solely and imaginatively ‘within my head’ but falling directly upon the sensory medium of my ears! I could tell it was speech, it was structured and conveyed in some meaningful way, but I could not understand its language. It seemed almost ‘robotic’ in that it consisted of different beeping and mechanical tones, all through an intense electronic crackle like a megaphone. After this, I could not tell that its eyes betrayed any motion, but something convinced me intuitively that it was looking off to its right - my left.
…
