My Unexpected Journey

Spirit
Oil & acrylic on canvas, 48"x48"
by Darren Beck, 2006

People often ask me what it’s like to have a near death experience. Honestly, my NDE led to particularly intense, vivid, light-filled and blissful visions. Many last for quite a long period of time.

This really isn't meant to describe my religious beliefs. It's my attempt to find a language to describe an experience for which there are no words.

It's only a few days after surgery and already they have me in rehab. Here I find myself writing about my experience. I want to always remind myself what I felt, saw, heard, and experienced. It’s a state of being I hope never to lose and for which I will always strive.

And, to you who offered me and my family your prayers during our recent medical crisis, how do you say “thank you for saving my life?” The only way I could attempt to thank you is to find a way to describe the experience.

I want you to know how deeply you affected my health, my heart, my soul, my life, and comforted my family. We never could have gotten through this without you. It was your love and prayer that eliminated all the fear that could have easily been incapacitating. You provided the support to my family we so very much needed, giving us the strength throughout this ordeal to take the next breath. There's a deep, intangible and almost unexplainable awareness that your love and prayer energy saved my life, to bring me through to see another sunrise.

My real unexpected journey began during the hours leading up to the surgery when much to my bewilderment, my astonishment, I could actually feel your prayers! It's hard to find proper words to describe the feeling. I felt an actual energy web supporting me, like I was floating suspended in a hammock, like I was suspended in space supported by your love, so completely tangible, was profound.

During the heart stopping surgery, and for years after, everything was bathed in light, everyone and everything glowed in a golden haze, at the center always was a sparkling bright light.

I literally felt a “lightness of being“; fear of death and all my fears in life were gone; I experienced instead a deep sense of knowing and safety, a centered calm and trust; complete freedom, a sense of all possibility; much enjoyment; good humor; all my experiences in sensory technicolor; I felt such gratitude, sometimes awe, for everything creative, the arts and the beauty I saw everywhere in the world; central to everything love and creativity are sustaining and limitless; I experienced a familiar lifelong omniscience; coupled with a desire only to serve.

I experienced a clarity and timelessness beyond past, present, future. I describe it as linear time suddenly shifting “vertical”. The experience instantly shifts to a place where:

All past/present/future,
Everyone,
Everything, 
Everyplace, 
All Knowledge, 
All Joy, 
All Peace, 
All Abundance, 
All Love,

is available to everyone at every moment, in the present.

I found eternity in the present and experienced Heaven on earth.

So you might recognize the same state of being in your own daily life, I can describe the experience this way:

Next time you find yourself in an elevator with a beautiful stranger, when your eyes meet and suddenly time stands still. The time/space continuum suddenly shifts “vertical”. You are instantly transported to weightlessness. There is an immediate, palpable and unexplainable connection. Something good has just happened.  You feel breathless. You feel safe. You feel beauty. You feel Love. You two strangers share a simple wordless smile; and in that Union you have momentarily glimpsed Heaven.

We should attune ourselves to those everyday miracles, those Holy Instants in which we feel in our hearts that something good has just happened, or when we find ourselves smiling for no apparent reason. Someone asks “Hey, why are you smiling!?”, and you reply “I don’t know. I just am.”

It happens everyday. Use your free will and choose to live every moment of your life in that space. You will find Heaven on earth.

Please be kind, be calm, be loving every moment of your life. The efficacy of every thought you have, every action you take, every prayer you pray has far reaching effects; effects never imagined possible.

We never could see how far reaching, how deeply moving are the ripples of our individual thoughts and actions, how they intertwine and affect the lives of others, the Joy of others and indeed the heartbeat of the world. The concentric waves of our daily thoughts will effect someone, somewhere, at sometime. What we say, what we do, and even what we think may touch someone whom we will never meet.

I now know we all possess an innate ability to change the lives of others, as well as our own, through simple faith, prayer, and love. You are more beautiful and more powerful than you can imagine.

In love & light,

✨Namaste and Shine-on!✨
- Darren