The ridicule that I may be subjected to as a result of “outing” myself with this book is a risk I am willing to take. I simply don’t care as much as I once did about what the critics, skeptics, and disbelievers will have to say about me. Many who express doubt will be those whose minds are molded in the rigor of scientific inquiry. These are brilliant people who will never be convinced that what I have put forth has any foundation in reality.
Until they die, that is, and experience it for themselves.
For all their brilliance, and I say this with total respect for how the results of their mode of thought have advanced humanity, their understanding, in my opinion, remains unevolved. To my way of thinking, the conviction they maintain in the exclusivity of the scientific method does not so much diminish their innate ability to plug in to the energy of the universe as it dampens their desire to admit to the reality of such energy and our natural access to it. The overwhelming physicality of life on this plane—the tangible, the painful, the provable—deters many from reckoning with the capacity of the eternal within them. This is eternality.
I have been to a place where words are scarcely able to describe where I was and what I learned. Words are tools and, like other tools, when they fail at the task at hand, they need to be supplemented to make them work. Eternality is the quality of the eternal that resides within us all.
Think of this quality as an endless river that flows strongly and powerfully in some and not so strongly in others. Contained and unacknowledged, this energy is a dormant source of significant human power. I am not suggesting that those who have accessed this power are able to run faster than a speeding bullet or are able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I am suggesting something else, namely, that this same ability to be in contact with this inner flow, channeled most directly by enough people, has enough power to eradicate the greatest fear of every human being on the planet: the fear of death. We cannot eradicate death, but we can eradicate the fear of it.
If I had to narrow down everything I learned in the Garden to three key takeaways that people could use every day, they would look like this:
Everyone is loved, intensely. To feel the unspeakable love I felt in the Garden is breathtaking. It is also comforting, energizing, empowering, and healing. We have all been hurt by life at some point, but to know that we are loved without question or end goes beyond any medication or therapy known to humankind. To feel that love when your soul separates from your body makes you know you are truly home.
It is fair to say that I no longer fear death. I do still fear pain, of course. And I do fear that those I leave behind will miss me terribly, just as I miss my loved ones who have passed. But I do not fear the actual moment of death itself. I have been through it, and I know there is nothing to fear. As for the pain, I had no pain, none at least until I came back. The lightning strike did not hurt. Leaving my body did not hurt. And the two weeks I was gone were totally free of pain. It was my decision to come back to this realm that opened the door to the physical pain of the burns.
Getting struck by lightning, of course, is not the same as having a long, lingering, painful illness or gradually losing one’s mind. Thankfully, I cannot personally address that pain, and I pray that I—and everyone I love—will never have that firsthand knowledge. That pain I do fear. And I will always fear losing someone I love very much. That gaping hole it leaves in your heart is unbearably painful at times. But the actual moment of death and what follows it? Nothing to fear.
The knowledge that death is not final, that you will be back, that you will see loved ones again, and that they may even contact you after they die is all very comforting. As I have explained earlier, I believe that we cycle back with the same people in different lifetimes. Your beloved mother in this life may be your daughter in another.
I only recently came to understand how all this knowledge might profoundly help people. Allow me to end with this. I met a woman at a work seminar whose husband had died the previous year. We got to be friendly. Over lunch, she told me how much she was still suffering from the loss of her beloved husband. She had not slept soundly through one single night since his death. She rarely left the house. She had alienated all of her friends. Her religious leader had told her that her husband was “in a better place,” but such platitudes, however sincere, remained abstract and unconvincing to her. Because of my near-death experience, I was the first person to speak with her with complete conviction. I could honestly tell her, “I’ve seen that place. I have been there. And it is so much better.”
Recounting my experience to her and describing the love and peace that permeated the place where her husband was now was tonic for her. She called me a week later to tell me that the day we spoke was the first night she slept through the night in the year since her husband had been gone. She also was making social plans with friends to meet for lunch. The comfort I was able to bring her by giving her a firsthand account of the fact that there is More and that death is not the end of consciousness was very gratifying for both of us.
I sincerely hope that this book can be of comfort to people who have recently lost someone dear or who themselves may be afraid or suffering. If so, I think that my abilities will have borne much greater fruit than they did when I employed them in Seattle. There is so much more to life than what we see. Death is just a blip, a tiny point on the continuum. I pray that this is what I should be doing, that I should share my firsthand knowledge of these truths. I hope that by reading about my experience many people are able to find comfort moving forward. All is well.