{"id":64428,"date":"2018-08-30T21:30:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T03:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=64428"},"modified":"2018-09-05T09:52:43","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T15:52:43","slug":"i-arrived-in-a-royal-realm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/08\/i-arrived-in-a-royal-realm.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I arrived in a royal realm&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_64431\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-64431\" style=\"width: 597px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2018\/08\/Oregon_coast.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-64431\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2018\/08\/Oregon_coast.jpg\" alt=\"Sundown on the coast of Oregon\" width=\"597\" height=\"448\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-64431\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sunset on the Oregon coast (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here are four partial descriptions of near-death experiences, taken from\u00a0Pim van Lommel,\u00a0<em>Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience<\/em>\u00a0(New York: HarperCollins, 2010):<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>1.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn\u2019t actually name. \u00a0It all looked hundreds of miles away. \u00a0And yet I could see everything in detail \u2014 even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight. \u00a0It was both far away and close. \u00a0Exceptionally beautiful. \u00a0The best way to describe it would be: a heavenly sight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">I arrived in a royal realm, or at least that\u2019s what it smelled like. \u00a0The 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. \u00a0(32)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>2.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">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\u2019t know. \u00a0Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I\u2019d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who\u2019d been deported and killed in World War II. \u00a0My mother showed me a photograph. \u00a0The unfamiliar man I\u2019d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father. \u00a0(32-33)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>3.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">At the age of sixteen I had a serious motorcycle accident. \u00a0I was in a coma for nearly three weeks. \u00a0During that coma I had an extremely powerful experience . . . and then I came to a kind of iron fence. \u00a0Behind it stood Mr. Van der G., the father of my parents\u2019 best friend. \u00a0He told me that I couldn\u2019t go any further. \u00a0I had to go back because my time hadn\u2019t come yet. . . . \u00a0When I told my parents after waking up, they said to me that Mr. Van der G. had died and been buried during my coma. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t have known that he was dead. \u00a0(33)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\"><strong>4.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">Suddenly I recognized all these relatives. \u00a0They were all around thirty-five years old, including the little brother I\u2019d never known, because he had died during the war when he was two years old, before I was born. \u00a0He had grown a lot. \u00a0My parents were there, too, and they smiled at me, just like the others. \u00a0(33)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Posted from Seaside, Oregon<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 Here are four partial descriptions of near-death experiences, taken from\u00a0Pim van Lommel,\u00a0Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience\u00a0(New York: HarperCollins, 2010): \u00a0 1. What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn\u2019t actually name. \u00a0It all looked [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1727,1011,900,903,978],"class_list":["post-64428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-afterlife","tag-life-after-death","tag-nde","tag-near-death-experience","tag-pim-van-lommel"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>&quot;I arrived in a royal realm&quot;<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; &nbsp; Here are four partial descriptions of near-death experiences, taken from\u00a0Pim van Lommel,\u00a0Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/08\/i-arrived-in-a-royal-realm.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;I arrived in a royal realm&quot;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; 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