My own �near death experience� happened in 1974 when I was 21, after years of crises and illness. I was on the brink of an academic career after graduating from high school with top grades � all As. But I didn�t want it: A future in an office inside a hall at an institute, spending all my time on academic subjects that had very little meaning for anyone else. I didn�t see the point in a life like that. Instead, I wanted to do something to create a better world. I had worked for a humanitarian organization doing practical aid work throughout Europe, on biodynamic farms.  

These experiences made it clear to both me and others that I probably wasn�t a very good farmer, and that I didn�t fit into all the ranks and hierarchies in a workplace. A difficult person, in other words.  

I had worked with intellectually disabled people on a biodynamic farm associated with the anthroposophist Camphill movement in Ireland, in order to take a break and find some direction in life. I wasn�t able to do either one. I worked and lived with intellectually disabled people, carried out farm chores with them and participated in anthroposophist activities on evenings and weekends.  

The strict routine exacerbated my health problems, triggered by a long-term anoxrexia nervosa, at a time when not much was known about the condition and so it was not generally treated. The couple that ran the place had taken me in without meeting me first, and they didn�t like what they saw. They misinterpreted my health problems as poor behavior and they tried to cure me by dragging me out of bed and forcing me to work when I was sick. There was no one I could ask for help, and I couldn�t and didn�t want to run back home with my tail between my legs.

In many ways my anorexic and bulimic behavior made me a non-person, an outcast, since I wasn�t able to eat with others and instead stole food at night. The couple that ran the farm had complete power. They were the first ones to react to my behavior. Although I worked as hard as I could, by the time autumn arrived my anorexic body gradually had become so weak I wasn�t able to carry out my duties satisfactorily. People reacted with disgust and rejection. Children just sniffed and turned away when I said hello. The intellectually disabled noticed the reactions of others and instinctively pulled away from me. Even the dog growled at me. Often when I entered a room I noticed that the conversation suddenly stopped. It was obvious from peoples� faces what they were talking about.  

Throughout the autumn my stomachaches grew worse � a cutting, burning pain. It got so bad I couldn�t sleep and had trouble carrying out even the simplest jobs. I was seen by the local doctor. He felt my stomach and said: �It�s an ulcer�, without doing any other tests. So now my condition had a name. Even though the name didn�t lead to any changes, it seemed as though the others accepted me lying in bed with an �ulcer�. That way they didn�t have to deal with it any longer. I retreated further and further. The stomachaches often made me curl up in pain during group meetings, and they no doubt attracted a lot of negative attention.  On the farm in Ireland my condition was a kind of non-subject. Earlier in the fall they had emphasized that I had to participate in all the meetings. Now it seemed that my absence was a relief for everyone. I grew weaker and bed-ridden, but the problem, to others, was gone. No one understood how serious it was.

The days passed and no one looked in on me. I neither ate nor drank. I�m about 6 feet tall, but my body weight was down to 99 pounds. My stomachaches grew worse and I had no appetite. In the middle of December, during the busy days before Christmas, no one had time or energy to look in on me. I lay in bed day after day, alone, unable to get up. My energy evaporated. I had the feeling that life was draining from my body. I had finally come to an end after a long period of confusion, poor nutrition and self-destruction.  

Looking back I see that this was a textbook case of entering into a death process. I grew weaker. All of the bulimic behavior and eating at night disappeared. My appetite for food and drink dissipated by the middle of December. The weakness in my limbs grew worse. After a while it was a huge undertaking just to go to the bathroom � something I seldom had to do since I hardly ever ate or drank. My interest in my surroundings disappeared and I just lay dozing most of the time. The few times someone did come to see me it was as though I was looking at them through a blurry filter and it was difficult to speak. When I lay in bed, I had a feeling I was sinking slowly into a deep, deep darkness. The darkness held no fear. Finally I had a thought:

If this is death, I�m not afraid.

A friend of mine wrote to me a few years back and described me in this way: �You were both braver and more frightened than the rest of us.� He may have been right. I was afraid of most things. Strangely though, when death approached I felt no fear. No depression. None of K�bler-Ross� stages � the ones I�ve read about in books � except the final stage, acceptance. Maybe I had gone through all the other emotional stages in earlier years? The only stage I can remember now is acceptance. In this feeling of acceptance was a kind of sadness about the thoughts and pictures running through my head. Sadness about what could have been, what should have been � what didn�t happen.

My clinical condition worsened quickly in the days and weeks before Christmas. I was an outcast in the little society and the others were too busy preparing for Christmas to even notice my existence, apart from a passing thought.

My symptoms increased and my immune system began to fail. All attempts to take in food or drink were stopped by the stomach pains � which seemed to get worse when I drank water. I was bed-ridden. After a while I had a lot of trouble just taking a few steps to the toilet. My arms and legs wouldn�t move � as though they were made of clay. I gave up, in a way. Gave up wanting to live, gave up fighting the pain and weakness. The thought �I�m going to die� arose more and more in my consciousness, until it was the only thought I had.

I sank into a deep resignation, accompanied by an acceptance of what was about to happen. I found a clear parallel to this condition in a poem by  Karin Boye:

 I listen, I hear life escaping

steadily faster now.

The calm steps beyond -

death, it is you.

Before you were far away -

I held you all too dear.

Now, when I no longer yearn,

now you are there.

Dear death, there is in your essence

something which comforts: mildly,

what you ask for if one has grown up

or lost all of life!

Dear death, there is in your essence

something which purifies clearly:

that which is not with good or evil

you lay bare and naked.

Follow me and let me hold your hand,

it is deeply comforting.

You make what is beautiful bearing and large,

you make the ugly small.

It is as if you wanted something from me.

A present is certainly what you want:

a curious little key -

the little word yes.

Yes, Yes, I wanted to!

Yes, Yes, I want to!

I lay down my piety before your feet -

so that life will go on.

This  �Yes� came from somewhere deep inside � a feeling that all my struggles had been for nothing. There was no use in fighting. I had to give up and drop into the current, away from the life I knew. The current carried me to an unfamiliar destination � �death�. I gave myself up to the growing current of pain and weakness that increased to a point where the pain was so strong it filled my whole mind. I noticed that  �I� and my body split apart. The pain became more abstract � it didn�t bother me in the same way.  

The dying process was not a dramatic transition. I just became completely bed-ridden, lost all use of my body and my mind and body split. There was no feeling of going away or dying. It was more a feeling that my body was dying. That my spirit was leaving my body. This is why I�ve never been able to understand life after death as a philosophical subject or debate. It was so obvious to me that �I� who was witnessing it all was not dying. The most essential part of me was leaving the body. I think this is why the Indian wise man Ramana Maharsi has been so important to me � his description of a near death experience he had at the age of 16. It was fundamentally exactly like mine.  

The thoughts that came were: �I�m letting go now�, �I�m on my way toward something else.� The physical world slowly disappeared. It was a gradual transition. Another thought was how few things really matter! In my state I could travel through the universe. A feeling of sinking and rising at the same time. The great velvet darkness, nebulas. Everything was present and available, but nothing was more important than my own mind, my attitude, my closeness, my senses. What was most striking in this state was the absence of regular emotions. It was more a feeling of mind meets mind, being meets being. A new thought came to me: �Nothing can take existence away from me. I am. From eternity to eternity. Nothing that happens in any world can change that. This is how it is. �

A few years later I was to find an odd echoing of this state and phase of my existence in a poem written by Tor Jonsson, a kind of last testament before he took his own life at the age of 37:

 My loneliness storms toward the edge

My life was a dream without clear knowledge

Therefore I no longer own the earth �

But life I shall never, never lose.

He knew, just as I knew in that moment: I am. The source of life will never be lost. This source is not created. It cannot die. After this experience I was left with a number of realizations that have never left me. In many ways it has made a materialistic perspective impossible. It was as though this stage in the death process represented a kind of overview. The basis for all of it. Then I entered into more specific levels, like meeting myself layer by layer.

Suddenly it was as though I�d reached a point where pain, weakness and despair all turned. Perhaps this was because of the loss of body awareness: First I experienced rising and sinking at the same time, so that I was outside my normal body and inside another body where I could observe my familiar body. From this point on I sank and rose aware from my usual awareness of body and mind, time and place. Something unfamiliar took hold of me. Slowly I settled into a series of levels that had no end, contours or depth.

Yet there was level after level, like deeper, quieter and softer twirls in a spiral. It was as though each of these levels had their own specific content: I went through all I had lived, all I had sought, my triumphs and failures, dreams, hope and disappointments. All the episodes were clear to me like a multidimensional panorama. But what was important or unimportant had little to do with appearances. Each level I slid through had its own state of consciousness. The first levels were more about outward things, episodes and events in a chaos, like a kaleidoscope. After a while I sank deeper and clearer pictures and realizations arose, and I was shown what was truly important. Earlier in the fall I had gone through some extreme emotions related to what I felt had been unfair treatment by the couple who were running the farm. Even when seriously ill I was dragged out of bed and beaten by the father of the house, in order to get me to work. He kept on with this for a while until he realized there was no point. He didn�t understand what was wrong, but he saw that force and violence wasn�t working.

Luckily he did understand that something was wrong. He couldn�t deal with it there and then. My anger over what I experienced as injustice, not just toward me but also toward the intellectually disabled who were often subjected to random acts of power and violence, was now gone. Since looking into the face of death, it was as though all emotions disappeared, apart from the conciliatory sadness that was a sort of backdrop for everything. The basic atmosphere was reflected in a line I had heard in a play by August Strindberg: �Pity the people.� A new perspective sunk in, a kind of conciliatory feeling about it all. It was as though I could see for the first time, through new eyes. I saw why and how my parents had done what they�d done, and also the teachers who had reprimanded me in front of the whole class with false accusations. All the anger and disappointment was gone. I saw how they had tried, in their own way, to do the right thing. Their methods hadn�t been very good for me. In fact they had misunderstood the whole situation. But it no longer mattered. There was a conciliatory and forgiving feeling permeating everything I saw.   

The deeper I went, the less I noticed distinct episodes � but rather the meaning or source of each � those that mattered, relating to what and whom had awoken my deeper emotions.  It seemed there was an intimate connection between that which awoke inner emotions, that which held meaning and that which made life progress and gave it importance. Those moments that others thought were important to me were merely random moments, while small, hidden experiences which no one had noticed lit up as meaningful.  Parties and family gatherings seemed trivial.

But there were clear recollections from one summer when my parents had rented a farm. My three younger siblings were 4, 2 and 0 years old and my parents had left me to my own devices. Their sense of guilt made me wonder. There were no children my own age nearby, and I was left to my own devices most of the day. In my solitude I took long walks and explored the landscape. I had a series of experiences that formed my perspective on life forever. These experiences I later found described in books by and about mystical topics like Master Eckhart. In short, my life, the way it was shown to me now, seemed completely different � often the opposite of the way I was taught to live. Reality seemed different than what I had been taught or heard about. I saw my own hidden intentions in the actions I had undertaken. Many of the episodes where I had seemed kind and good presented themselves as episodes where I hid my true motives and had therefore manipulated both myself and others. Other episodes where �the difficult Audun� was in charge, held something real and true, something that would last, even though the result was chaos and negativity.

I understood why I had retreated from everything and no longer wanted to live, because what I needed in order to survive did not exist anywhere. And at the same time I realized that this was the fundamental experience that had led me to this point, to my death day, when I left this life on December 20^th 1974. It was the thirst for something, a spring I could not find. A couple of years following this experience I found a few lines from a poem by Karin Boye which reflects my �near death experience�:

I am sick from poison.

I am sick from thirst,

For which Nature

Never created drink.

Karin Boye took her own life. Was it because she was never able to quench that thirst?  Was there a spring that could quench my own thirst?  I slid further into deeper levels, but the questions remained unanswered.

On the next level I experienced a feeling that I recognized from when I started working with the dying: Whatever had mattered to me disappeared and lost its meaning. Ambition, drama. What remained when everything else was gone were the people I met that had meant something to me, the relationships that had influenced me. And what I felt, in encountering these episodes that had been my life, was that I had something to give, but no one was there to receive. I had loved and been loved, but I had not really been there. Something was missing. The core, what I call �I am who I am�.

Something became clear, something I�d never had the opportunity to discover � that no one had done anything wrong. Neither me nor anyone else. But I was a person who had not fit in anywhere. What I had inside me, the contribution I might make, had never emerged. That which gave life meaning, purpose and value had never become visible. My grades from school and sport achievements were of little value. I understood that I was a person who would never be able to continue without finding his own voice in the world. Many people can live a life without meaning. I could not.

When I stand before a gathering of people who have come to hear my voice, these stages in my death experience force their way into my consciousness. The lecture comes to a halt. A gratitude that has no words and that knows no boundaries overwhelms me: The fact that I�ve been allowed to live in a world as myself, as who I am. That I�ve had the opportunity to find my own form of expression, unrestricted, flowing from the source. And last but not least � That my true expression has found reception, in the people listening to me in the room. I will never get used to to. It will never become routine. I have gone too far into death, and the odds that I would ever experience this have been too poor. Nearly every time I awake with this feeling, in this life I live here and now, I am in awe.

The next stage I entered I have given the name forgiveness or reconciliation. This stage is also with me in my current life. I can be temperamental and difficult, and have a tendency to develop conflict filled relationships with other people. But over time this has changed. Even with those people with whom I have had difficult relationships, we hug when we meet. I am no longer able to create any animosity toward people I have struggled with in the past. In fact, I believe that near-death experience has had something to do with this.  

Let me explain. Everything that people and other living creatures had given me became evident, and reconciliation following forgiveness, mixed with wistfulness about what could never be. A life that was about to end. I slipped past people who had meant something to me and made my farewells. All the regret, aggression and bitterness, all the self-recrimination and accusations toward others were gone. This was forgiveness toward myself and toward others.  

The next stage I have called the inner circle. In meeting the dying, this is what often remains: The core relationships, a wife, children. A nun with cancer, who was dying, spoke about her encounter with Christ, deep within the courtyard of death. As many other who come to this place, I was confronted with the depth of my relationships with my parents and siblings. I was in many ways quite distant from them at that time. Leaving my parents and my siblings, those who had been my foundation, went right to the core of my own foundation � a tree deep in my heart slowly torn up by its roots. These were people who stood closest to me, who had influenced me most through the first two decades of my life. I saw the ribbons that bound us and the gaps between us. It was a warm, sad acceptance and parting. I knew I would never see them again where I was going.

I slipped into a room I call silence, where there were no words and scarcely any emotions other than the feeling of silence. The silence had the quality of darkness and stars in the sky. A few years later I described this stage in a verse of a song I wrote when the past and future were sucked into a single moment where only silence spoke.

I am 

I am the shine in every star

I am the velvet dream of darkness

I am the distant mist

Behind the quiet current of time.

Now there were no more people, no connection to the earth I knew or the life I�d led. There was only silence, no karma, no cause or effect.  I recall only a thought in the midst of silence: Freedom. I rested in this place for what seemed like eternity. Then I was pulled into a spiral like a snail shell. Karin Boye described this part of the death process in her poem:

THUS DO WE DRIFT...

Thus do we drift, lost souls,
from camp-fire hole to camp-fire hole,
know nothing of our next rest
and nothing of the journey's goal,
but know that our hearts are drawn
inexorably, without choice
in towards the sea of an unknown home
that murmurs deep in the seashell's voice.

 

Within the �seashell�s voice� was peace, a feeling of coming home. This peace was underneath, behind and inside, filling me. I had been so incredibly insecure, done all kinds of things to avoid being rejected � often making sure I was rejected by showing asocial and unacceptable behavior. Here for the first time I experienced a place where there was no rejection, no judgment, no high or low self-esteem. It was impossible to even imagine rejection where I was. Everything fell into place. 

The next level that opened up was a room of love which filled everything.  That such love could exist was beyond anything I could have imagined. Had someone described such a thing to me, I would not have had the capacity to comprehend it. Every cell vibrated on its own frequency. Everything in and around me was filled with this love. I both saw and felt it at the same time. Later I realized I�d had no memory of my body, nor was I conscious of any life on earth.

Slowly I became conscious of myself, my body and the room I was in. I lay in pitch black darkness but noticed that something had changed. �Has someone turned on the light?� I thought. It was as if the light had been turned on, but I did not see a lit lamp. It was as though a light was gradually emerging. The light grew and became overwhelming. I had to sit up and the weariness and pain faded away in this meeting with the strange light that filled the room. But then I realized that the light had taken on a physical form. The dark room was lit up by a figure which filled me and the room � all the rooms. This figure was human, but it was woven with light and in fact it was light, as if every cell in its body was created from molecules of light. At this point I refer to Ritchie�s description: This light was so bright that it could rip retinas to shreds in a moment. Later I read something from Dostoevsky: �No man can bear the eyes of God�, and thought:

It�s true. No human could bear such light.

The small sense of fear that rushed through me in this sudden meeting was quickly washed away by the radiance from this being. Whoever or whatever it was, I knew with every fiber in my being that this being wished me no harm. I noticed that the being turned toward me and spoke without words in direction communication, cell to cell. Usual speech was unnecessary.

I didn�t know who this being was. But all fear disappeared in this encounter with a consciousness I can only describe with three words: Wisdom, compassion and love. Following this experience I have carried within me a sort of inner reference concerning the meaning of these three concepts. This moment is actually the gist of the life I have since led. Not a memory of something I experienced as a 21 year old, but that single moment: All I have been and can be, all I need, all I seek is in this moment. No fear, no want, no loss could be conceived of in this moment. It was unthinkable to seek anything but this. I have had many confusing and difficult periods later in life, but the connection with this single moment always pulls me back to the place where all is perfect. In this moment I was again shown my life as it had been, but now I saw it as a panorama, a synthesis of all my experiences and their meaning. I saw all the episodes the my illness had brought: Being an outcast, only being able to eat at night, breaking in to steal food, being taken out, punished and made to feel ashamed. Now I saw those episodes with a deep empathy and understand of the forces responsible: The longing, the need to exist. I later heard a song by Leonard Cohen that described my sick behavior:

You know who I am

You`ve stared at the sun

Well, I am the one

Who loves changing from nothing to one.

An insight became clear: You must never judge another person. There is always a reason for what they do.  

At this point in my experience the moment and the figure formed to make one silent question for me:  

�What is the purpose of your life?�

The answer came spontaneously and unexpressed:

�This!�

I felt a reply from the light being:

�Then it shall be.�

And so began a silent lesson on life�s hidden relationships. The knowledge I received in this moment was like the lessons I have later read about spiritual science, but it had a unique quality that I have later tried to impart through classes and seminars.  .  

Before this experience I had spent a year in anthroposophist environments and tried to read the work of Rudolf Steiner. Again and again I had to concede that I hardly understood a single word and had to put away the book after a few wasted pages. Following my experience I started on Steiner�s two most challenging works, �Theosophie� and �Geisteswissenschaft im Umriss�, and read them as easily as if they were comic books. I could reiterate and interpret them as well, so I was considered a kind of provocateur in anthroposophist circles. Without attending the obligatory study groups, I went straight in and explain Steiner�s ideas in a manner that must have seemed arrogant coming from a kid like me. Something had changed my ability to understand spiritual subjects.

After I was shown the spiritual words and all their connections, a silent question began to form in my mind:  

- �What should this be used for?�

The answer came at the same moment:

- �To bless and heal other people�.

A feeling came over me that gradually became more physical. Then an insight dawned on me � I had a task that should and must be carried out on earth.  

In a strange way, it is as though the light being and I made a kind of pact in that moment. A contract for a plan: The light being made it clear to me that I would get my life back on the condition that I used it to impart this wisdom and empathy I had experienced, in order to heal. At the same time I would work to broaden the field of medicine to include a spiritual perspective. In other words: Offer my little contribution to a wider audience. It was this inner knowledge that was given to me as an imperative. It was an order. I had no choice. I saw pictures from my future life, with me eagerly working as a doctor in a hospital, with something that looked like healing with my hands. At the same time I saw pictures of me holding lectures and seminars with big and small groups of people who were inspired and interested in my message. A message about an integrated field of medicine with an interwoven spiritual dimension as a practical tool to relieve symptoms and cure illness. Several times over the past few years I have suddenly, during a class or consultation, had a strange feeling of having been in this situation before. A kind of deja-vu feeling. And then I realized I have been in this situation � that these moments were included in my life panorama. Is life more planned than we think? I don�t know, but these experiences make me wonder.

The order (or so it felt) to become a doctor was surprising, and would have been completely unacceptable to me before. Because of my good grades in high school, my teacher told me I ought to study medicine.

- Never � I know I�ll never do that! was my reply.

All contact with the health system had been negative, humiliating and disgusting, and I felt intensely uncomfortable whenever I was in the hospital corridors.  Now I had been told to do something and had no choice. This was knowledge implanted in every one of my cells. This was my life�s calling, what I was supposed to do. The overwhelming light faded and my contact with the light being became weaker. It was as though something pushed me through a spiral, through a cyclone of levels and worlds. I was barely conscious of it all and then slowly I woke up in bed.

Although I was still weak, I gradually regained strength in the days that followed. The stomach pains which had increased month by month before my experience were all gone. I could eat again. Something awoke within me. Everyone on the farm noticed my change. The intellectually disabled began approach me again. That moment I had experienced was with me day and night. I had previously had some major conflicts with the leadership at the Camphill farm. Now they offered me a kind of reconciliation. In the little anthroposophist society there emerged a new understanding and respect. There was something about me that made it impossible to treat me badly. I began to eat meals with the others and no longer ate at night. The growling dog and the children approached me in friendship � like the final scene of some sentimental American film. When I returned to Norway to retake the subjects I needed in order to get into medical school, they all told me they�d miss me, and they meant it.

Earlier I had tried meditation, but had never been able to do it right � the few times I�d tried. Now I seemed to understand meditation from within. I started my own type of yoga and meditation at least two hours every evening and worked on the farm during the day. Soon I arrived home in Norway to take the subjects I needed and started medical school in August 1975 � eight months after the most significant life changing event I�d ever had.

The first couple of years following me NDE, I must have been intolerable, though I didn�t mean to be. The classic example of someone who has seen the light and wants to tell the world about it. I never told anyone about the entire near death experience, only the short version about the meeting with the light being and its message. I adjusted my tale for audiences who considered themselves Christians, and they were told about my meeting with Christ. For the secular audiences I told about a spiritual dimension and a spiritual being. After my NDE I noticed that my relationships has changed. At home everyone could see in my eyes that something had happened. The most significant change during the following years was the feeling of fundamental love and acceptance toward other people. My decision to study medicine was met with surprise and skepticism by those who knew me. I was viewed as too sensitive and uptight to be able to work with people in this way. Another side effect of the anorexia had been a kind of distancing from my body, so it took me many years before I was able to master the practical abilities I needed as a doctor. But from the first moment I began to work with patients, I was told that I seemed exceptionally empathic, something that surprised me. The labels �egotistical� given to �the difficult Audun� were difficult for me to shake, so I hadn�t given much thought to my empathy. But I�ve received this kind of feedback throughout my career. I think that if it�s true, then it�s possible that I was given this insight through my NDE, and also from my twelve years of illness without any help.  

At the time of your experience was there an associated life-threatening event?   Yes 

Was the experience difficult to express in words?  Yes     The dimensions and communications need another language to be explained properly. An example: Thoughts were not "fast", rather multidimensional, all occurring several levels at once.

At what time during the experience were you at your highest level of consciousness and alertness?       In the meeting with the being, especially in the moment being given my life purpose

How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal everyday consciousness and alertness?      More consciousness and alertness than normal   I was given a new level of knowledge and insight "beyond the veil". Spiritual understanding has been natural since the NDO in 1974

Please compare your vision during the experience to your everyday vision that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience.   Clear sight, insight, inner sight

Please compare your hearing during the experience to your everyday hearing that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience.   Different, able to hear the language of silence, words and sounds not needed

Did you see or hear any earthly events that were occurring during a time that your consciousness / awareness was apart from your physical / earthly body?   No  

What emotions did you feel during the experience?   First sad acceptance, then acceptance, in the meeting with the being, words cannot describe the feelings, which were in a different range altogether. The questions below therefore seem flat and meaningless  

Did you pass into or through a tunnel?   No  

Did you see an unearthly light?   Yes  

Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice?   I encountered a definite being, or a voice clearly of mystical or unearthly origin

Did you encounter or become aware of any beings who previously lived on earth who are described by name in religions (for example: Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.)?   Uncertain   The being was made of light, compassion, wisdom. Whether it had any connection with Christ, I do not know

Did you encounter or become aware of any deceased (or alive) beings?   No  

Did you become aware of past events in your life during your experience?   Yes   I saw a detailed life review but with a different perspective, highlighting the inner potential of my deeds

Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?   A clearly mystical or unearthly realm

Did time seem to speed up or slow down?   Everything seemed to be happening at once; or time stopped or lost all meaning

Did you suddenly seem to understand everything?   Everything about the universe
I was given detailed teachings that I finally now have been able to verbalize the last two years, 35 + years after the NDO.

Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure?   No

Did you come to a border or point of no return?   I came to a definite conscious decision to "return" to life

Did scenes from the future come to you?  Scenes from my personal future 
Also the world`s future. Everything I saw, has been borne out as time has passed since 1974.

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness suggesting that there either is (or is not) continued existence after earthly life (�life after death�)?   Yes   It was a given fact

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness that God or a supreme being either does (or does not) exist?   Yes  

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness that you either did (or did not) exist prior to this lifetime?   Yes  

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness that a mystical universal connection or unity/oneness either does (or does not) exist?   Yes  

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness regarding earthly life�s meaning or purpose?   Yes   These were shown

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness regarding earthly life�s difficulties, challenges, or hardships?   Yes   These were shown

During your experience, did you encounter any specific information / awareness regarding love?   Yes   Love as the fundamental pulse of all creation

During your experience, did you encounter any other specific information / awareness that you have not shared in other questions that is relevant to living our earthly lives?   Yes   The importance of understanding the power of intention

Did you have a sense of knowing special knowledge or purpose?   Yes   I was shown the spiritual realms in detail. After the NDO I could not understand why others did not have the same knowledge

What occurred during your experience included:   Content that was both consistent and not consistent with the beliefs you had at the time of your experience   Shattered my belief system, but confirmed basic tenets of spirituality

How accurately do you remember the experience in comparison to other life events that occurred around the time of the experience?   I remember the experience more accurately than other life events that occurred around the time of the experience      

My experience directly resulted in:   Large changes in my life

Did you have any changes in your values or beliefs after the experience that occurred as a result of the experience?   Yes  

Are there one or several parts of your experience that are especially meaningful or significant to you?   That I was given life back, but as a contract: To do the life mission I have since devoted my life to (Physician in integrated medicine)

Do you have any psychic, non-ordinary or other special gifts after your experience that you did not have before the experience?   Yes   I see and understand the patterns of energy fields or auras, can read patterns of the deeper psyche, decipher "past lives" and work directly with group energy fields.

Are there one or several parts of your experience that are especially meaningful or significant to you?     That I was given life back, but as a contract: To do the life mission I have since devoted my life to (Physician in integrated medicine)

Have you ever shared this experience with others?   Yes 35 years

Did you have any knowledge of near death experience (NDE) prior to your experience?   No  

What did you believe about the reality of your experience shortly (days to weeks) after it happened:   Experience was definitely real  

What do you believe about the reality of your experience at the current time:   Experience was definitely real  

Have your relationships changed specifically as a result of your experience?   Yes   More universal approach to relationships

Have your religious beliefs/spiritual practices changed specifically as a result of your experience?   Yes  

At any time in your life, has anything ever reproduced any part of the experience?   Yes   Spiritual experiences  

Did the questions asked and information that you provided accurately and comprehensively describe your experience?   No  

What could a national organization with an interest in near death experience (NDE) do that would be of interest to you?         Continue exploring in a scientific framework.