NDE: A Brief Examination

Plato believed that philosophy was a preperation for Death, a kind of theurgic rite of its own.  I am not talking about the “philosophy” of European intellectuals like Neitzsche or Kant or any other connotation that word has sadly received over the generations.  I am talking about its true meaning, which is the pure love of wisdom.  This love of wisdom must not end at the door of reason, it must go far far beyond it, into the domains of light and beauty that our fallen minds can now barely comprehend.

I am a big fan of the website www.nderf.org  I visit regularly because the NDE has always interested me. I had my own NDE when I was 14 years old after nearly drowning.  Every once in a while I come across an NDE that I make mention of here.  I would like to quote an excerpt of an NDE left by a man named Roberto from Italy. It is one of the latest NDEs listed on the nderf website.  After suffering a horrible car accident Roberto writes:

“About the car accident – I remember only the sound of the truck I was driving crashing. Then, for me, drifting from life into death was painless. I found myself standing in a canoe, which I first thought must have fallen out of someone’s trunk. But I was not on the road any more, I was on a dark, calm, tropical river, like the Amazon. I was working hard, pushing the boat forward with a long pole that reached down to the river bottom. I remember I was wearing a straw hat, white trousers and a rope as a belt. It was a sunny day and I was navigating this river by its dimensions and features, which I seemed to know well. Its banks were lush with thick vegetation. I was immediately struck by the intense colors, much brighter and richer than the ones I was used to. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the fragrant, moist air. As I removed my hat and wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, I felt a sensation of peace and bliss that I had never experienced before. I watched the birds, flying high in the sky, and then, staring at the horizon, I could see the mouth of the river flowing into the ocean. I felt myself so loved and so free. It was as if I had always been in that place; I had no memories of the life I just left behind. My canoe was floating onward and there were no sounds except for those of the wind, the birds singing, and the sloshing of the water on the pole as it broke the water, and then a little rushing sound as the boat surged gently forward. At my right, far away, I noticed an inlet to the river, and a 30 meter long wooden bridge over it.

Standing on this bridge, there was a man waving at me with the hat he held in his hand. I returned his salute. Then something incredible happened! In just an instant my face was only a few centimeters away from the face of this man! The first thing he said to me was, “WELCOME! WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!” He was elderly, I think about 70-75 years old, with greyish hair, and blue eyes. As we gazed at each other, I sensed his face emanating a sort of a positive light that transmitted a feeling of peace. Space and time did not seem to exist. I remember that in order to move, it was enough to want to be in a place in order to actually be there. I did not speak using my voice but only my thoughts. I could see my body, but I felt myself as a soul and, as such, I could tell I would not need to eat or to sleep – I was totally free of any limitation. I couldn’t tell how long I had been there, but back on the Earth, I had been in a coma for about 35-40 days. In my new reality, I was living in a wooden shelter, and I remember that it could rain or be sunny at the snap of one’s fingers, and when the rain stopped, the leaves were immediately dry as if it had never rained. Then one day I found myself face to face with that man. I suddenly experienced a feeling of anguish, realizing he was telling me that I was going to have to go back to my old life on Earth. My hands were in his and his face was reassuring. I told him that I did not want to go back, because where I was, I felt so good! Suddenly the man disappeared, and in his place, I saw a being of light that said to me, “I AM SORRY, BUT IT HAS BEEN DECIDED OTHERWISE.” Gripped by anguish, I tried to keep holding on tightly to his hands, as if that could keep me from having to leave, but in the next moment, my hands were empty. I raised my eyes and I saw a multitude of such beings of light surrounding me and caressing me. I could feel their sadness about my having to go back.

I begun perceiving a force drawing me, pulling me, and taking me back little by little. Then I was speeding through a tunnel of white light with my arms ever outstretched toward those beings. I kept stretching my arms out to them until the very end, even as they were vanishing. Back in my body, as I opened my eyes, pain seized me. My physical being was devastated by severe traumas from the accident. And for weeks, amongst puzzled physicians, I kept stretching my arms out, again and again.

One of the most interesting comments that Roberto makes is this:

“It was as if I had always been in that place; I had no memories of the life I just left behind. “

His statement here is very important at least in this examination of the event.  Upon death the human consciousness in many cases dissolves completely, this is not to say that the individual at the most fundamental level dissolves.  What Roberto is saying makes perfect sense, and at the very least tells me that he is being very honest about what occured to him during his post mortem excursion into the Celestial Earth.  The implication of this statement is that Roberto had an immediate transference to his archetypal (Seraph) form in a world that is a thing of total freedom and beauty.  In my very brief experiences of this archetypal domain or Celestial Earth, there is an overwhelming sense of freedom, a kind of idyllic life that is near perfect in its expression of the divine.  It is Arcadia, but instead of breathing air, one breathes in God and what follows is the utmost feeling of freedom and bliss.  While the sun in the physical world is a mere hot ball of flaming gas, the sun in that world is the Nous, the Son, and is a literal being and source of life through which all beings express deep joy in the knowlege of their own freedom and deathlessness as expressions of God that mirror his being throughout eternity. 

Life in the Archetypal world or Celestial domain is very different form life here.  All the aspects of life that deal with maintenance (eating, sleeping, waste, etc.) are completely absent.  All individualities in that world begin to possess every other individuality in an empathic way.  The “friends” one has in that archetypal world are like nothing we could experience here on earth because we do not possess the extent of empathy that allows us a thorough understanding of others.  Furthermore, there seems to be varying degrees of expression, some appear to be earthlike and there also appear to be worlds of pure light that neither words nor forms can truly express.  I have had scant experiences with these forms of light, but even brief experiences of it are very transformative.

In my own case I was standing near a river and jumping on some rocks in order to cross it.  The world appeared to be very natural and the “cities” appeared very natural and peaceful. The blades of grass that I saw were made of green shards of light.  The entire domain was alive, it was as if the earth had been perfected.  My vision was completely clear, I felt unimaginably healthy and carefree.  Admittedly there was a sense that a discontinuity had just occurred.  While I was aware that I was a particular individual in this celestial world, there was the sense that the world I had entered was the real one and everything up until that point (my life in the physical domain) had been a kind of dream as if a separate current had emanated from me that “fell to earth”.  I sometimes wonder if on the night of July 4, 2011 I had potentially come close to dying to be allowed such a powerful though brief experience.

I think that what happened to Roberto was a transference from his “fallen material form” to his Seraph. This is why it seemed that he had “always been” in that idyllic domain and had never actually left. None of us have really left that domain, and if we had fully left it everything about us including our thoughts would be subject to the laws of the physical domain, which they clearly aren’t.  What I suspect happened to Roberto was that he had joined his Seraph who essentially never left.  He had experienced his real life in that archetypal world, a world whose proximity is very close to the “Inner Sun”  (Nous) and not under the influence of Tolma or a downward tendency to a purely material existence.  “Heaven” always remains it is just a matter of uncovering it.  For all intents and purposes, life in the physical domain is actually a residual effect of life in the Archetypal realm.  That’s not to say we aren’t loved, because we are.  I am simply illustrating this metaphysically the best way that I can.

The ”metaphysik” of the Seraph is that every human individual has their divine counterpart living in the archetypal world, which is the real world for lack of better terms. This Seraph is actually the true core of our identity, a sort of perfected version of our own human individualities.  I would liken the world of the Seraph to Plato’s world of ideal forms.  I would also venture to call it the “Noetic Universe” a term someone I recently met had used and I found apt. This numinous/noetic universe exists within a person and is not prone to time and space just like the mind/soul is not prone to time and space.  It is through this Seraph alone that we experience the divine and come to wisdom or maturity.  While large portions of our physical individualities will die away, that core identity, which is really our supreme identity does not.  For the most part I believe that we do lose our memory after death and often very quickly turn away from what we were in the physical in order to integrate into that fuller existence.  The bliss of that world and of reintegration with it causes a very rapid transformation.  It should also be said that the idea that we ”leave people behind” when we die is rather foolish as well.  All human beings, whether they realize it or not are centered in this world of ideal forms.  I have long suspected that death doesn’t separate us from those that remain in the physical world. The core of every individual is already in the Celestial Domain making death not only the ultimate reintegration, but also the ultimate reconciliation.  I believe that this journey toward the One, a journey into the endless eternity of the Deus Absconditus, eventually moves us beyond all form into domains that even now cannot be comprehended by our present degree of “being” or the degree of “being” of our Seraph. As Henry Corbin believed, this is a journey of an endless intensification of being.

For me personally the struggle has always been attempting to understand why a fall into materialism was necessary.  That may be because as a husband and father of four that my mind is deeply set in this world.  While I find incredible beauty in this world,  I do not ascribe kindness and joy to the physical domain because I have personally witnessed very bad things here.  There are things so dark and ghastly that  attempting to put them into any persepctive of necessity seems impossible.  The idea that we must “learn” lessons in order to grow strikes me as a very base metaphysical understanding, novice in its outlook.   It posits a belief that humanity are merely “children of the earth”, which is frankly ridiculous to anyone that has personally witnessed physical death or disease in people that they love. This domain, no matter how you slice or dice it, exists in an incomplete and even tragic form. For this reason alone it is important to look beyond mere appearances into the things that really and truly matter, which is to say matters of eternal significance.

Read more: Transmissions From The Imaginal