“The man that died and came back”

 
Ted Martins shares a fascinating near-death experience story:

I was twenty years old and working for the US Forest Service building trails in the mountains north of Los Angeles. When the crew broke for lunch, I got into the rear passenger’s side of one of the vehicles and we proceeded to a tavern a few miles down the mountain. The view was magnificent above the smog with clean lush green valleys stretching for miles into the distance.

It was then that a spent bullet bounced off a rock next to the road, came up through the open window where I sat and hit me in the forehead, mid frontal, just above the eyes. The bullet obliterated the superior sagittal sinus and caused massive frontal lobe brain damage. This all happened two hours from base camp in the wilderness of the Angeles National Forest.

The instant it happened, I thought to myself, who and why would anyone hit me on the back of the neck with a sledge hammer? My spirit was immediately transported miles above the scene where I looked down upon smog-choked Los Angeles, the Pacific Ocean, Catalina in the distance and observed a 360 degree view of the curvature of the earth. The sun was warm and bright in a cloudless sky, which was reflecting off the ocean to the South. I wanted to go there, so I did and became engulfed in its loving warmth.

Occasionally, my consciousness would return to my physical body only to find it blind and lifeless with my companions frantically trying to stop the blood flowing from the gaping wound in my head. I would then leave my body again, where I observed the orbit of the moon as it circled the earth, and then return to my body to find it still lifeless and pulsing with pain. On each successive return, I would be propelled further from my physical body where I looked down on the orbit of the moon then the solar system would be my view, then the galaxy followed by the universe, cosmos and beyond.

Finally, a helicopter arrived and I could see that my body was strapped into one of those stretcher basket things outside which transported my lifeless body to a hospital where it was immediately rushed into the operating room.

It was a room with no windows, one door and a ceiling with curtains hanging down and I wondered what the curtains where for.

Floating above the operating table, I could see the doctors, nurses and technicians scurrying around with carts of various instruments and they began crowding around this dying individual. I could see they were truly concerned.

As I was looking around this windowless room with the curtains hanging from the ceiling, I noticed a ventilator emitting a gentle cool breeze and a sign next to it that said, ‘You Are Dead’.

In a flash, I was back in my body and re-experiencing the excruciating pain as the doctors attempted debridement of my head wound, touching, poking, stinging. My entire nervous system was convulsing with each pulse of my heart and no relief available. It was then that I left my body behind, bounced off the ceiling, past the sign that said, ‘You Are Dead’ and took refuge behind a convenient curtain.

From within the folds of the curtain, I felt a warm and siren sound calling. Intrigued, I followed only to be led to the end of time.

I arrived outside a dark dimly lit tunnel with a light at the other end. I felt the movement of energy all around me and peering down I could feel the blackness was alive with a multitude of souls, all moving towards the light in the hope of redemption. As I flowed within this swarm, I became increasingly aware that they were alien in nature and that I was not welcome within their midst.

I left this sea of despair and arrived on an opposite shore where I met a ferryman with a waiting boat. We traversed this sea of despair for what seemed like eternity.

I was finally delivered to a barren drab gray exterior landscape populated by quonset-hut shaped buildings with loading docks, all orderly, efficiently placed and quiet. It reminded me of some type of military compound.

I was observing this environment, taking it all in, when something startled me and I took refuge in one of the quonset-huts.

When I entered a side door, a staircase presented itself and I immediately ascended without thought. On the third step, I hesitated looking back down to see the multitude of souls mired in what seemed to be a river down below. I turned and resumed the ascent to the fifth step where I became centered within enlightenment, a singularity, my universe became clear, I could see beyond time and there before me passed my life, the lives of my parents, the lives of my grandparents, my accomplishments, failures, wants, needs and desires both past and future.

It was a very beautiful and loving existence with all thought being as one. As I reviewed the past and future, it became clear that all was good, orderly and correctly defined; I was at peace within the cosmos.

I was returned to the gray exterior landscape where I was investigating this strange and wondrous place when I sensed activity and not wanting to be caught in this forbidden place, I hid behind one of these buildings. Once there, I perceived a perimeter surrounding this compound I was in. As I approached this barrier, I realized it was the delineation between life and death. I thought of the consequences involved with my being at this place and time but there was nowhere to go except back to the touching, poking, stinging of a thousand green hornets.

As I crossed this red line, I could feel the release of the physical pain contained within my mortal body as my heart ceased functioning. Thoughts lost meaning and where discarded as so much flotsam, as I drifted more and more into this void I became free from the rigors of life. I was encompassed within a great nothingness, devoid of self-awareness, true nonexistence – it was over, I was eternally dead.

But back in the room with the curtains, some idiot doctor, totally removed from my peaceful non-existence, decided they didn’t want a corpse on their hands and tried on several occasions to jump start my system, apparently the last one was the charmer (this may be where I observed the doctors, nurses and technicians crowding around frantically).

From my view point, the re-entry to life was somewhat like entering the beginning of time (Planck era), a spontaneous random coalescence of thoughts from a disordered nothingness coming together in a curved arc across space and time to form self-awareness. Today still, I believe my experience to be a variant of string theory but I lack the skills for quantitative documentation.

I find it is really hard to put my experience into words because there are no adequate words to describe the feeling or moment of death and rebirth. What I have described is futile in comparison to the actual event; I am humbled in its memory.

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Credit: NDERF