It became very difficult for me to breathe, as though a stone were pressing on my chest.
My eyes were closed, and I focused only on breathing.
I stopped hearing what was happening around me.
The ambulance arrived too late.
Then came the moment when breathing became very painful.
I realized that I was about to die.
Everything was black.
I waited for the moment when I would simply stop,
but instead my consciousness shot out of my body and became concentrated in my head. I felt no pain, although I was still in my body.
I remember a thought flashing through my mind: nature had thought of everything.
The end was supposed to be painless.
Interestingly, throughout all of this I was conscious, in the sense that my thinking mind was completely clear.
There was no break in consciousness.
Then I saw white sparks in my head, followed by red ones.
My mind began flashing white, black, white, black, like an old television. At that moment I thought I would simply lose consciousness and die, and then I jumped out through the top of my head and rose upward.
There was a black, velvety emptiness there.
I thought that if I had died and had to endure this eternity, it would have been acceptable, but rather empty.
I looked back at my body and felt disgust toward it.
At the same time, I felt relieved to have gotten out and freed myself from my body.
I realized how it had been throughout my entire life.
Looking around, I noticed a small beam of unearthly light in the distance and moved toward it.
The light grew as I approached.
Although I felt safe, I was uneasy. I became worried that I needed to pray to a divine being.
I was concerned that the truth might be neither Buddhist nor Christian, but something else.
I thought I should pray to God to keep me safe, and worried about what the correct name for God would be and which religious tradition to use.
Now all of this seems rather amusing to me. Throughout the entire experience, nothing came to me with a name or a sign around its neck.
I also had a strong feeling that I had already died and done all this before.
The experience was very familiar.
I thought that I had died again and had done nothing with my life.
I also had a sharp feeling that I had killed myself in my earthly reality.
I had not killed myself, because I had died from a severe asthma attack. I saw that my life—everything that happened in it—had been caused by me, even the asthma attack and my poor health since birth. All of it had been caused by me.
I saw that my life had reached a dead end in some sense.
I had lost any understanding of what it was for. At that time I was a first-year student at Oxford, and in many respects I had no reason to look at things that way.
But I was miserable.
And so that form came to an end.
I had done it.
The light became enormous and was clearly some kind of being.
It rejoiced at my return and seemed to know me well. There was a lot of laughter.
An all-encompassing and utterly astonishing love, joy, intelligence, and power emanated from the being. I immersed myself in it and experienced this wonderfully joyful existence—and the whole being—as myself.
I felt what it was like to be this great, conscious, intelligent light.
Perhaps this experience was a gift.
After that, other events occurred.
I became myself again.
I was determined to reach the place where subjective and objective differences dissolve, or rather the point where judgmental relations between me and another can disappear.
It is difficult for me to explain.
I wondered whether I had had a previous life as a Buddhist.
They are rather strict about not being captured by postmortem visions.
Since I had never practiced meditation,
it seemed to me that I knew a great deal about concentration of the mind, which seemed strange.
In this postmortem state I was shown how a still mind produces a calm line, while a disorganized, unfocused mind produces a line resembling a mountain ridge.
I thought, “Ah, so that is how mountains are created.”
I was also shown the Earth from a great distance.
The Earth was enveloped by a great being that radiated a pink light around itself and the Earth.
It was a being of pure love.
I wondered whether this being enveloping the Earth was Jesus.
The pink light pulsed at the mention of that name.
I had the feeling that Jesus was very dear to this being. At that moment I understood that I really had died.
I was suddenly overcome with horror at the thought of the suffering this would cause my mother.
I began begging to be returned, and it happened immediately. I fell through what seemed to be air and an atmosphere of fog, slime, and flame, intensifying as I reached my body. I came to with relief as I was being carried to the ambulance.
I think the whole thing lasted from five to ten minutes.
From the questionnaires: How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare with your normal, everyday consciousness and alertness?
The body is a great, deadening burden.
Without it, a person can think and feel more clearly.
Mark’s experience
