A friend recently shared a video of a man claiming to have been dead for 3 hours, and miraculously coming back to life. Fascinating stuff. Near death experiences (NDE) have become increasingly common; however this one is of particular interest because of the length of time the person claims they were dead. Johnathan Ashford’s video is very compelling material. He mentioned a life of selfish indulgence as a corporate executive before his NDE.

He narrates about an awareness of being dead, describing his grey translucent hands and face, which he initially thought was a hallucination. He has an intuitive knowledge of his death, and speaks of his passing as “graceful”. He speaks of a “velvety black darkness of no fear enveloping him”, like being carried and “loved and cradled”.  He awoke in a place which had form, which he describes like the highlands of Scotland or Ireland, with waving grass, as if it was underwater, and light everywhere. This description is not unlike the Elysian Plains or Elysian Realm, of Greek mythology where the dead heroes and people of status went after they died. It is also very similar to the scene in the Robin William’s movie ‘What Dreams May Come” where William’s character dies in a car crash and wakes up in an Elysian type realm.

Ashford describes meeting a character, at first observed sitting on a hill, and as he moves closer, he realized it was Jesus, or someone of the higher order in the spiritual realm. He is embraced by the light, and experiences utter bliss and contentment. At some point he is able to participate in a review of his whole life on earth, as an observer, but also is able to experience this review with all of his human senses.

Ashford describes being given teachings and revelations about why things happen on the earthly plane, and why things happen as they do. He further describes being enveloped in a light, and that it merged with him, and he merged with it, and he realized that “I am the light”.  The light he says knows all things everywhere, including the number of raindrops in the ocean, and it can tell you anything. It was for him, the essence of pure love, higher even than the Greek ideal Agape, that profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance.

Ashford explains that at the end of the teachings and revelations he was given a choice: either stay in eternal bliss, or return to earth and teach and help others. He chose the latter, obviously.

I have watched and listened to his account several times, because I am by nature a thinker, and have so many questions regarding his experience within the context of human history. I wrote him an email, seeking an understanding and a context for human suffering on the scale of the Holocaust, the Great famine in China, the Chinese Cultural revolution, Stalin and his murderous reign etc. The only reply I received was as a subscription to his newsletter with various dates for seminars and the opportunity to have a one on one session, but at a cost.

Do I doubt this account as an authentic near death experience? Perhaps somewhat, but I have no evidence to reject it outright, and for Jonathan Ashford it was probably very real.

But, for the billions of us on the planet what does it all mean? If our lives here are actually an earthly classroom whereby we are to learn to live by the golden rule, and love others unconditionally, why is it taking so long to learn this lesson? Further, if we were already living in eternal bliss from the outset, why bother to come here in the first place? Whose idea was it? Is it simply a vast spiritual research project being undertaken by a hierophany of spiritual beings to amuse themselves in eternal bliss?  

Accounts of NDEs go a long way back, even to antiquity; but, the cases are rare, in other words it is always the few. It is never whole populations, and whole cultures, and there are, as far as I know, no collective accounts of NDEs.

Perhaps the answer lies in another unfathomable question: do the deceased and the yet to be born have Near Life Experiences (NLE)? Perhaps it is a cyclic thing like the Buddhist concept of Samsara? But, this concept raises equally difficult questions. Why for example did a spiritual form and a host of others, existing in eternal bliss, reincarnate as Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, and murder 6 million Jews across Europe, and cause the loss of 60 million other lives in World War 2? Or, why did a host of spiritual beings reincarnate to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, and practice cannibalism by eating each other? And so the questions go on.

In his seminal account on the pilgrimage of psychotherapy patients, Sheldon B Kopp tells a story of a night he was on duty in a Psychiatric clinic. The police brought in a man, all dressed in white wearing a pointy hat and speaking gibberish. So, he was assessed and diagnosed with undetermined schizophrenia. However, the following morning around 30 people fronted up at the clinic wearing the same clothes, and all speaking gibberish. The man was released to them. The moral of the story I suppose is that one man’s account of anything could be considered madness, but a collective account could be the mark of sanity! Who knows? I don’t.