Sansego made a comment yesterday, asking for a post on near death experiences – NDEs. We thought we had posted something on NDEs last year, but couldn’t find it. So here is one of the best we’ve ever read, which we included in 7 Secrets. We hope Gypsy doesn’t mind our posting it here.
Before we get to that, here’s an odd little synchro. When I went to Sansego’s blog to link it to this post, I discover the title of his current post: Near Death Experiences.
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In the summer of 1966, Jenean Gilstrap was a 23-year-old mother with a newborn daughter. One night she woke up, unable to breathe, and her husband rushed her to the hospital. By the time a battery of tests had been performed, she was breathing normally, but the final diagnosis was that a large gallstone had slipped out of a duct and obstructed a breathing pathway.
Shortly afterward, she went into the hospital for surgery. She remembers talking to her surgeon before she was put under, then nothing until she felt an excruciating pain in her stomach. “I remember thinking my surgeons had lied to me about the procedure. This felt as if my stomach had literally been ripped apart and a ball of fire shoved down inside it. I felt extreme coldness on the outside of my right hand, but I wasn’t able to move or speak. Then I heard someone frantically say, ‘She’s going down! I can’t get her up!”’
Jenean started rising out of her body from the top of her head, and was able to “see” everyone in the room, including herself, her body. “As I continued to move upward toward the ceiling, I remember looking down at myself and feeling as if the ‘me of me’ were being pulled away like a soft glove being slipped off.” She continued to watch all the activity from her spot in the upper right corner of the operating room.
At first, Jenean was frightened. She knew she was dying and didn’t want to be dead. “I was young and had just begun my life with my children. As I continued to have this mental dialogue with myself, I became more aware of my new surroundings and self. I focused less on my body, where the doctors were still scrambling and shouting orders. I felt surrounded by a white softness that became an all-encompassing, purely unadulterated whiteness of light.”
The light called to her. She could see a silver-gray cord that connected her soul to her body. But the farther she moved from it, the greater her realization “that the thing called “death” was not the end of anything. It was the beginning. There was nothing to fear.”
She heard voices around her, relatives who had been dead for years, some of whom she had never met in the physical world. “But in this world, I knew who they each were.”
At the moment of complete surrender to the light, a voice asked who would raise her children. That’s when she returned to her body. She was angry at the doctors for bringing her back and catapulted out again.
Jenean remembers following her body out of OR and down a hallway, where her family could see her one last time. “I could hear them plainly and was infuriated that they were making plans and arrangements for me. “In that moment, I knew I was going back, that no one was going to raise my children but me.”
When Jenean regained consciousness, both surgeons came to see her and told her they’d “almost lost her.” She replied that they had lost her and related what she’d heard in the OR. They confirmed her experiences and said that they’d heard of such things, but she was the first patient to ever talk about it.
Some months later, Jenean woke one morning with the warmth of the sun coming through her windows, birds singing in a nearby tree. “I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and realized that, at the age of 23, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt the warmth of the sun or heard birds singing. I knew I had to leave my unhappy marriage and take my children away from the unhappiness and into the warm sunshine and singing birds. I turned from the mirror, went to my closet, packed one suitcase and a diaper bag and walked out of that house, never looking back.”
