“I arrived in a royal realm”

Here are four partial descriptions of near-death experiences, taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010):

1.

What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn’t actually name.  It all looked hundreds of miles away.  And yet I could see everything in detail — even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight.  It was both far away and close.  Exceptionally beautiful.  The best way to describe it would be: a heavenly sight.

I arrived in a royal realm, or at least that’s what it smelled like.  The atmosphere, insofar as you could call it that, was divine, a flowery, sweet-smelling environment, which was completely three-dimensional and about a thousand times more beautiful than my favorite holiday destination in spring.  (32)

2.

During my NDE following a cardiac arrest, I saw both my dead grandmother and a man who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know.  Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who’d been deported and killed in World War II.  My mother showed me a photograph.  The unfamiliar man I’d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.  (32-33)

3.

At the age of sixteen I had a serious motorcycle accident.  I was in a coma for nearly three weeks.  During that coma I had an extremely powerful experience . . . and then I came to a kind of iron fence.  Behind it stood Mr. Van der G., the father of my parents’ best friend.  He told me that I couldn’t go any further.  I had to go back because my time hadn’t come yet. . . .  When I told my parents after waking up, they said to me that Mr. Van der G. had died and been buried during my coma.  I couldn’t have known that he was dead.  (33)

4.

Suddenly I recognized all these relatives.  They were all around thirty-five years old, including the little brother I’d never known, because he had died during the war when he was two years old, before I was born.  He had grown a lot.  My parents were there, too, and they smiled at me, just like the others.  (33)

Posted from Seaside, Oregon