Gone and back again

October 20th, 2003. (26 years to the day from the Lynyrd Skynyrd plan crash..)

I died.

I came back a little less then three minutes later - with the aide of several electric shocks to my chest.

My discovery? - Vast, infinite emptiness.. We are all simply energy. But we are ALL the same. We are not human. An absolute sense of being a part of something.. the ultimate sense of "belonging" - yet belonging as a connected mass.. not as a human.
Ours is an existence of happenstance.. chaotic culture.. existing not as individuals, but as elements - a part of something as large as any definition of the human concept of size...

Yin and Yang.

Orgasmic despair.

Pure bliss via the absence of any human connotations.. of ANYTHING.

This experience allows me - in life - to be fearless of "death".. to be at ease with my thoughts about the experiences of all my loved ones who have passed. There is no "suffer". There is no "heaven" save for the revelation of our true nature and the "comfort" of knowing that we are not "people" and cannot "know" anything.

I am not afraid of death. I do NOT want to feel ANYTHING close to the pain I felt with my heart attack.. but my apprehension is about the pain.. not the inevitable "destination".

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Others who have had similar experiences:

"Bob Schriever, co-founder of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, was refereeing a high school football game seven years ago when he went into cardiac arrest, died and was revived.

He, too, questions the dream explanation. "Why are so many people dreaming the same thing? How can so many people, and there's hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced this, how can we all be dreaming the same thing and describe the exact same thing?"

Schriever says these experiences are so profound that only someone who has gone through them can truly understand.

Seven years later, he is still consumed with his own near-death experience.

"I think about that every morning when I wake up, first thing, during the day, I don't know how many times and every night before I fall asleep. I think about that. People do not understand or appreciate what we go through."

For Mrs. Geraghty, it's a daily struggle to put the pieces back together again.

"I've been someplace that not everybody can go, and there's not a lot of people you can sit down and have that conversation with," Geraghty said. "My own daughter tells me, 'It's freaky, Mom.' I've literally lost friends over this the minute they hear it."

Geraghty says she became depressed once she left the hospital because her perspective on her entire life changed. She still gets depressed, she says, and is on medication.

"I actually went to my doctor and said to her, 'I think I'm losing my mind. This can't be really happening,' you know, and she said it's OK, it's very hard to understand when you've been through an experience like that."

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Depression? OK, I'll bite. But depression because of being privy to the fact that we are not what we seem to think. Possessing knowledge of the futility of it all.. how can I NOT be a little depressed?

What purpose life then?

I think, to release the energy within as love and compassion for the collective whole. Energy never stops.. it just changes.