10

A MID-COURSE CORRECTION

Kelly made the connection with our next experiencer through social networking. Diane Goble, aged 76, lives in Sisters, Oregon, USA. She is the author of several books and has appeared on many radio shows and YouTube. What started out as a fun day nearly ended in tragedy and was to change Diane’s life.

In 1971, two months before my 30th birthday, I drowned and had, what I now understand to be, a near-death experience. Religion didn’t play a big part in my life until I was 10, when my 8-year-old sister was accidentally killed. My parents didn’t handle their grief well and I was lost in a fog of unresolved grief for several years. As a teenager, I began seeking answers by attending various churches … Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian. I didn’t find any. When I was in high school, a friend invited me to mass at his Catholic church. There I began to find some peace of mind, if not the answers to my questions. I can’t say that I ever actually believed in any of their biblical stories.

Still, I married in the church, had our three children baptized there, then left after a priest told me I had to make my own decision about birth control (I had to take it for medical reasons). I never went back, never gave God or religion a second thought … until two months before my 30th birthday when I drowned in a raging river and had an out-of-body experience in another realm where I was shown the truth about who we are and why we are here. I chose to return to my body with a message to share and a mission for my life, which I promptly forgot upon my return.

The experience changed me so profoundly that within three years I lost my husband and my home, and my ex temporarily took my children away, implying that I was an unfit mother. He pretty much thought I was nuts. On top of that, I had been a stay-at-home mum who hadn’t “worked” for ten years. No one would give me a job. Alone and afraid, I turned to alcohol, drugs and sex as I searched for answers that weren’t out there to be found.

When I was a child of 11 or 12 growing up on Long Island, New York, I would catch caterpillars and keep them in a cage so that I could watch their amazing metamorphosis take place up close. I found it fascinating that a creature could transform from a worm-like pest into a puddle of mush, then emerge as a graceful, colourful winged butterfly. Today, that’s how I would describe the transformation process I went through during and since my NDE. Everything I had been was melted into a soup and reconstituted into a more evolved human being than I was before.

I ran into a good friend I hadn’t seen since high school in Coral Gables, Florida, 20-some years after my NDE, and after a dinner spent catching up on each other’s lives, she asked me, “Who are you and what have you done with my old friend Diane?” I’m not the same person I was before my NDE. Some personality changes were evident right away; other effects evolved as I made life changes. It seems to take a person about seven years to integrate an NDE into their physical life experience – as though the fog begins to lift and the path ahead becomes more clear, and the person discovers their ability to act on what they learned on the other side, and do it consciously. After going through hell, completely changing my life and pretty much losing everything I had, I returned to education within a month of that seven-year anniversary. I was guided to study psychology to try to understand what the hell happened to me. I still hadn’t heard of such a thing happening to anyone else, so I still wasn’t talking about it. I was just trying to survive, alone in a strange new city (from Chicago to Los Angeles) with three small children.

Even my return to education was guided, not planned. I threw my back out lifting heavy food containers at a fast food restaurant I was managing, lost my job and was unable to return to work full time for a year. When I could stand upright for more than a couple of hours, I started volunteering at a battered women’s shelter to give me something to do. This helped me realize I wanted to become a counsellor to help other women who were trapped in the cycle of abuse.

I was able to get enough financial aid – student loans and work-study jobs, and clean enough houses every week – to support myself and my children over the five years it took me to earn a BS in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Community-Clinical Psychology at the age of 42. I had dropped out of college aged 19 because I didn’t think I was smart enough. Now I was on the Dean’s List every semester – and, except for a few classes, I hardly needed to study. I seemed to know everything intuitively.

For many years I had an intense interest in physics, subatomic particles and astrophysics, having had flashbacks of my NDE just looking at the images of the Powers of Ten. I’d read books on theoretical physics while my kids played on the beach. Years later, I realized that I received all this information during my journey through the Hall of Knowledge during my NDE. I was just stepping it down into human language, but I understood it from a higher perspective … I could see the bigger picture.

I get the big picture quickly when I enquire into any subject because I have access to a larger knowledge base than people who haven’t had an NDE, which includes a download of universal knowledge. The experience may activate new brain cells or a little-used area of the brain – perhaps a DNA switch was triggered that opens the window to the soul–mind connection. It was a huge Aha! moment for me as I travelled toward the light with a beautiful Being of Light by my side. I remember laughing at myself for forgetting this, and I recall also thinking how great it would be if we realized while we were still alive that when our body dies, we don’t! Maybe then humans would be more compassionate toward each other and make peace a priority. I would call that higher-consciousness thinking.

In 1979, while volunteering in a nursing home, I wrote an article, which was published in a journal, in which I suggested the need for a little blue pill that would allow dying people to have control over their own death. It was based on conversations I had with elderly residents. In 1992, I became a hospice volunteer and continued to volunteer off and on for over 20 years in Florida, California and Oregon. I am a member of Compassion & Choices and advocate for a National Death with Dignity law in the US. I write a blog called “Let’s talk about death and dying …” in which I discuss the pros and cons of this argument.

During my graduate programme, I was able to intern with a group of psychologists studying Family Systems theory, and partnered with a former minister presenting and selling personal growth and motivational programmes. I also studied Transpersonal Psychology and later earned another Master’s Degree in Clinical Hypnotherapy, specialized in past-life regression and became an ordained minister. I opened The Stress Management Center in St Petersburg, Florida, in 1986 (before anybody knew that stress was such a problem), then my sister and I opened a mind–body–spirit integration clinic the following year (before anyone realized these all work together). We were way ahead of the curve. Some of the work we did 30 years ago is only now entering the mainstream. I realized I was a pioneer, a change agent, even then, and it has continued to this day.

In 1987 I had a spiritually transformative experience during a deep meditation at a Harmonic Convergence gathering that brought my NDE back into full consciousness. I later picked up a book by Ruth Montgomery, Strangers Among Us, in which she described similar unexplained experiences, and I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy. This has happened to others. And I began talking about it … telling my story as if it had just happened yesterday. I could still see it all clearly, and I realized how it had changed me and my life course.

It wasn’t just some random thing that happened to me. It was meant to awaken me to my higher guidance as part of my soul path, because my soul’s purpose for coming into this life was to assist in the awakening of human consciousness to our spiritual nature. As I, Diane, continue to awaken, I become aware that what I am working on for my own spiritual growth is manifesting in the physical world, spreading exponentially across the planet.

I’m not suggesting that makes me special; unusual, maybe, but there are actually millions of people around the globe reporting NDEs and all of us together are trying to let everyone else know that this is who we humans really are: spiritual beings with the ability to exist independently as biological beings in an environmentally stable physical environment. We are all here to learn to love, not to kill each other off in as many ways as possible. There are no evil forces or angry Gods or predator extra-terrestrials lurking out there, wanting to destroy us. We are rising above our animal nature and developing into fully integrated spiritual-human beings. I see these times as that of a great awakening of humankind to its Divine Nature and an opportunity to bring peace to the planet. First, everything has to turn to mush and then the beautiful fully realized butterfly emerges.

If I hadn’t had an NDE, I might have continued along my path as an unfulfilled, dependent housewife in the Chicago suburbs stuck with a philandering husband whom I had fallen out of love with, and I certainly would never have taken the path I did. On my own, I continued to study the world religions, philosophy and physics to reassure myself that what I learned on the other side was in sync with knowledge discovered by earlier humans. I began speaking at Light Centres, churches and personal growth conferences and became a spiritual teacher.

While doing this work, the message I was given by the light to bring back to share with others came back to me: There is no death! We don’t die! Yes, our bodies die, but we are not our bodies. A physical body is the form we wear so we can experience life as a physical being in a physical dimension. Who we really are is the spiritual being that never dies. My experience of my conscious awareness shifting to a higher perspective, and observing the search for my body going on from above, happened simultaneously as my body was taken by the river. There was no time lapse.

The last thing I remembered was very calmly deciding that drowning was the better way to go and, with my last breath, yelling for the man holding my wrist to let go … my body was sucked down into the violent turmoil beneath the big yellow raft that was trapped by the churning hydraulic action of the water and everything went black (which was exactly what I expected, having dismissed religion and become more of an atheist … just lights out!).

Then, as if I just blinked my eyes and opened them again, I was looking down from above the treetops at the raging river below, the raft trapped by the hydraulic with the two men still in it, the other woman from our raft struggling in the rapids moving downstream. I could see my husband and my then 16-year-old sister, and other people running back upriver from the calm pool below the section of rapids to find out why all our equipment was flowing downstream.

When my husband jumped out onto a rock to look for me, I found myself at his side trying to tell him it was no use trying to save me. When I put my hand out to hold him back, I realized I didn’t have a hand, I didn’t have a body, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m dead!” And with that realization, I was pulled away from the river, away from the forest, away from the planet as if speeding through the universe toward a brilliant, welcoming, white light far, far in the distance.

The feeling was awesome, exhilarating, amazing. I was filled with peace and joy, and an overwhelming feeling of being loved and completely accepted as if I were being welcomed home. It seems that in death, the soul learns it is not a body. I instantly knew where I was going and that I had done this before – left my body and returned home, thousands of times. Reincarnation, which I had dismissed previously, suddenly made complete sense. The Bible, which I had read but thought of as no more than a storybook, suddenly made complete sense – they just left out a few significant details.

I sensed a presence beside me and realized I was accompanied by a beautiful Being of Light, whom I sensed was my guardian angel. I instantly knew this loving being had been with me all my human lifetimes. It wasn’t any identifiable religious figure, had no gender or form … it was pure radiant light-energy. We communicated telepathically. Every question I had was answered before I could ask it, but it was more like I was remembering everything I had forgotten when I took on a body and now it was all coming back to me. I understood how it all works, everything made perfect sense, all the missing pieces fell into place. I promised myself I would remember all this in my next life.

Together we travelled through healing centres where I was shown how arriving souls were welcomed and comforted by their spiritual families, guided through their life review process, and healed from any traumas caused by misunderstandings about the life they had just experienced. We also visited several areas where these beings were being rehabilitated before they moved on to other aspects of spiritual life in other dimensions.

All of this was familiar to me because my soul has lived so many lifetimes; it was therefore just about remembering. I didn’t know it then, but I was being given information that would be helpful to me upon my return. I did not have a life review, but I was assured that I was completely loved and accepted by the Being of Light.

We travelled at a high rate of speed through a warm, velvety darkness toward a sparkling light that intensified as we approached. It appeared to be a crystal structure, a group of spires that appeared to grow larger as we approached. It felt refreshing, cleansing, calming, smooth. The Being of Light and I communicated telepathically about going back into Diane’s body and continuing my this-life journey. I was quite fine with where I was and eager to continue exploring more of this dimension. I was told I could choose to stay with the love I had already experienced during that lifetime and let that life go … or I could accelerate along my spiritual journey by making different choices and taking a different path for that life by going back to Diane’s body.

The Being of Light conveyed that we were in front of the Hall of Knowledge and that, if I chose to go back and resume this physical life as Diane, I would be given higher-consciousness knowledge about the transformation of humans to spiritual-humans, and a special gift from the light to share with humankind to awaken others to higher-consciousness thinking. I would become one of many light workers arising on the planet, sharing our inner wisdom with other humans about who we really are and why we are here … and, by the way, bring peace to the planet.

Wow! My first thought was that this sounded like a mighty interesting mission, and before I could consider the consequences, my energy was pulled into this now-gigantic crystal structure so tall that its spire reached into infinity. Inside was like a hologram: nothing solid, images floating, emerging, fading. It was like being in a really ancient library; there were shelves of books and scrolls with historical events rising and falling in space. I sat at the feet of the masters … Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Galileo, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha. I listened to them speaking. They listened to me. It seemed to go on for a thousand years and yet there was no time, it was all happening at once. Aspects arose from the ground of being and dissolved as I continued to spiral upward, absorbing knowledge and expanding my consciousness as I went.

I sensed that I was approaching the pinnacle and wondered what would happen next, when my energy suddenly crashed through the top and it looked like shards of broken coloured glass went flying every which way in the darkness … and at that exact same instant, my head popped out of the river about 100 yards downstream from the raft.

I had no memory of my physical body being in the water after I went under the raft; of struggling to get out from under it, fighting the rapids, avoiding the rocks, getting slammed into rocks, struggling to breathe, fighting the current, until my head popped up in the calm pool below the rapids – a span, I would guess, of three to five minutes (estimated after recently viewing a video of a kayaker navigating that same section). I grabbed onto the nearest rock, coughed up a little water, and waited until my husband finally figured out where my body had ended up and ran back down to help me out of the river. They all thought I was dead. I didn’t need to be resuscitated. I had no bruises or broken bones or concussion. A good thing, too, because we were miles into the forest on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere and this was before cell phones and search-and-rescue helicopters.

But I could hardly speak about it because I didn’t understand what had just happened to me. I’d never heard of this happening to anyone. I couldn’t find any other words at first other than “I went somewhere else.” The local river people suggested I survived because I surrendered to the river.

It seems I had to lose everything my ego thought was important in the years to follow, but I came to find meaning in seeing the world from this higher perspective, and being able to share that with others to help in the awakening of humanity to its spiritual nature. It has been an amazing bonding experience. I learned to identify less with my ego, my body and the physical world, and to follow my soul path, not my insatiable human desires, and that’s what brought me peace of mind and the ability to live my soul’s purpose for becoming Diane.

Also, by coming back I didn’t have to wait until my next lifetime to remember that I’m a spiritual being experiencing life through a form in the physical dimension, which gives this life a whole new meaning once one comes to terms with that. I didn’t talk about my experience for 15 years, but, once I got started, I couldn’t stop.

In 1989, I began writing a book I called Through the Tunnel: A Traveller’s Guide to Spiritual Rebirth (1993) based on the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and offering an NDEr’s perspective on the art of conscious dying to help others realize that death is a transition rather than an ending. While I was writing it, other information continued to come through that had nothing to do with this book. I finally realized that several other non-corporeal beings were communicating information to me telepathically for another book, so we made an agreement that I would transcribe their book if they would then help me finish mine, which we did. Theirs is available as an ebook titled Sitting in the Lotus Blossom (2010).

In 1996 I started my first website, which became www.BeyondtheVeil.net. I wrote about my NDE, included similar stories people sent to me, and provided resources for spiritual seekers and seniors seeking information about end-of-life care. Since I was one of the first people to go online with this information, I was inundated with emails from people all over the world (140 countries) who hoped an NDEr could answer their existential questions about God, death, the afterlife, reincarnation, paranormal experiences, the meaning of life and spirituality. It became a full-time (non-paying) job that went on for over a decade. I posted their questions and my responses in my Seekers Open Forum on the website and recently included some in a book, now titled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cosmic Consciousness (Kindle, 2016).

In 2008 I created an online training course to teach the art of conscious dying to holistic practitioners, yoga teachers, nurses, hospice volunteers and so on, to help them in their work with patients nearing the end of their lives, and I trained a number of practitioners around the world to carry on this work. After the US economy collapsed, no one could afford to pay for a course for which there were no jobs, so in 2015 I put the course into a workbook for caregivers and patients to learn the art of conscious dying together, titled Beyond the Veil: Our Journey Home. Now there are doulas and death midwives and transition guides galore, and I’m hoping the workbook will become a training textbook as well as a guide for those living with a terminal illness.

I put my spiritual lesson about reincarnation from my website into an ebook titled Reincarnation and the Evolution of Consciousness (2013), which describes my understanding of birth, death and rebirth, as the path to becoming Divine-humans. It is through experiencing the many aspects of love through relationships with others and, really, all of nature that we are learning to express unconditional love at all times, in whatever dimension we exist.

I realize now, looking back over the 46 years since my NDE, that my mission was to be a catalyst for change based on what I experienced during my NDE, which played out in the twists and turns my life took back on Earth. I was always the pioneer … stress management, holistic healing and integrative medicine, NDEs, past-life regression and reincarnation, spirituality, conscious dying and transition guides/death doulas/spiritual midwives, Death with Dignity (DWD). Now we have DWD laws in four states in the US and in many countries around the world, while filling out Advance Healthcare Directives is becoming the norm. I activated the energy field and used my writing skills to spread the information through books and the internet, which serendipitously came along at the right time to accelerate the evolution of consciousness among humanity. If you think about it, I had millions of visitors to my website mostly from 1996 to 2010 … I planted a lot of seeds over the past almost half-century.

I never made a living or received any support for my work, and I don’t travel or follow the speaker circuit to promote my books either, so I’ve recently turned the marketing over to the universe. I’m just the writer, you folks do the marketing! And after decades of thinking that I was computer-literate, I can no longer keep up with the changing technology, either cognitively or financially, so I just need to heed my own advice to let go and let God.

Since my NDE, my values have changed. My beliefs have changed. My personality has changed. What I will tolerate from others has changed. My attitude toward life is different. It took off in a completely different direction. I’m smarter, more adventurous, more open, more forgiving, more aware, more alive. I swear like a sailor. I have no fear of death because I know we don’t die.

I had lived life unconsciously, waiting to be told what to do, what to think, who to be, where to go or not go, what is true and not. But in the light, I saw face to face and my spiritual nature was reawakened. I was no longer afraid, no longer alone, no longer incomplete or unsure of who I really am. I know I’m not judged, but accepted completely and filled with unconditional love. The veil dropped away and no longer was it just a reflection or wishful thinking or some religion telling me what I should believe or how to please God. I knew fully that love is all there is and that we are all somewhere along the path to becoming that.

Over the years I’ve come to think of my NDE as something of a mid-course correction. I had strayed from my soul path. My soul decided to wake up in this life as Diane and be part of this awakening of human consciousness, but Diane wasn’t paying attention. Diane was completely unconscious. I needed to be reminded of who I really was and why I was here so that Diane could use her spiritual gifts to pass that information along to others through the simple message that we don’t die! This isn’t all there is.

What a difference that would make in people’s lives, in the ways we treat each other and our planet, if everyone realized just that. We’re all one. We’re all connected. There is no other.

It may have even been pre-planned. Something along the lines of: the first 30 years Diane gets to live her human life any way she wants, then she’ll have an NDE to reawaken the memory of her soul mission and completely change her life for the rest of her lifetime to follow a spiritual path. I surely would not have done any of the things I did had this not happened to me.

Now, at the age of 76, when I think about what lies ahead for Diane, I feel that it’s time to wrap things up here. I accomplished my mission. I’m at peace. I’ve done everything I came back to do in this life, though Diane still has a few things left on her bucket list. I live a peaceful aesthetic lifestyle in a small town at the foot of a beautiful snow-covered volcanic mountain range in northwestern United States. I spend more time in contemplation and writing than anything else these days, but I do still participate in activities with family and friends and continue to do volunteer work in my community. I prefer to live alone, not to be in a relationship, and don’t like being in crowds or noisy places. I don’t have a TV, but listen to the radio often enough to know that the world is deep in the mush. So I’m hopeful we are on the brink of the collective tipping point and that the awakening of higher consciousness among humanity will emerge from the soup as millions of fully realized Divine-human beings break out of their cocoons and spread light, love and peace all over the planet.

Diane’s life drastically changed as a result of her NDE, and not all of these changes were easy. She was propelled from being a stay-athome mother of three young children to literally losing everything. Despite her mothering duties, she was still able to excel in her studies. Interestingly, she remarked that her studying was more of a recalling of the information she was exposed to during her experience in the Hall of Knowledge. This information was then passed on by putting it into a practical form to benefit others. Diane is a classic example of a woman ahead of her time, whose NDE led to the innovation of many new practices which are beginning to gain momentum years after she first introduced them.

Like so many other NDErs, Diane was afraid to talk about her experience and tried to forget it. Incredibly, it took 15 years to realize that she was not alone in having had such an experience, when she happened to read a book that described other such cases. Prior to the experience, she was not particularly religious and didn’t believe in God or an afterlife and had no reason to go to church. Her views subsequently changed and Diane is now certain that it is only the physical body that dies and “what we were before we were born is eternal”.

Diane believes her “soul mission” is to assist in the evolution to a higher state of consciousness, which will lead to peace on Earth. Incidentally, this too is often declared by other NDErs. She has already contributed greatly to society and her work speaks volumes. She began teaching self-development to businesses and set up one of the first stress management centres where she taught meditation, personal growth and employed a massage therapist. She set up a website and now teaches about the art of conscious dying, which considers the acceptance of death as opposed to unnecessary prolongation of life through technology. This work is now becoming more widespread all over the world and is resulting in improvements in end-of-life care.

Diane wisely adds that had she not had an NDE she would never have known there was more to life than what her life was; she would have been content with that. So many people have benefited from Diane’s efforts and revolutionary work since her NDE. Her life has been hugely enriched as a result of it, and this is something we can all explore further. Have you ever thought that there must be more to life?