Atheist Dies & Finds There Is Life After Death (Near-Death Experience)

I remember being in surgery and at that moment I felt love I thought I must have died on the operating table the second thought now here's my analytical science mind still kicking in so wait a minute if I died what's all this because first of all I don't believe in anything second of all my parents told me that you're going to go to hell because you're an atheist now so I'm not experiencing either one of those and that's when I really began to wonder what the heck was going on and why am I here I

asked that question in my mind but then there was an answer to the thought I had and the answer came kind of from around me in the atmosphere and it was the answer of this is your home you're a part of me you're a part of us welcome home when it said that welcome home I lost it because I remembered that's when it came back to me and I knew immediately oh my God that life that I had on Earth was just an illusion that thing that I was doing down there on Earth was really

just a temporary [Music] state I'm Nancy Ryan I grew up on a small family farm out in the middle of cornfields very Northwest part of Chicago I was a very weird kid I was very spiritual I looked around and saw that divine presence everywhere I would tell my family oh my gosh gods in the trees spirit is all around us they kind of looked at me funny because we were Catholics and my family was pretty pretty Catholic they weren't just cafeteria Catholics or they weren't just weekend Catholics when I was about 15 we started having

a lot of those news reports about priests who were abusing kids that were really becoming prevalent especially in the Chicago area and that's when I actually began to question my previous Viewpoint about is there a god you know did was I just imagining all of that uh and so by the time I would say I was 16 or 17 I had pretty much decided that God didn't exist because if he did exist how could this happen and that cemented my movement away from religion or spirituality I went into college and got a series of degrees

in geology so I became a really rational scientist very material focused by the time I was in my mid 20s I was a pretty uh pretty firm atheist after college I worked for the Department of energy for a while doing very scientific things out in the Western United States and it was mostly became scientific writing because I was actually quite good at writing and a lot of scientists weren't so I would do editing for them for the journal articles they were writing or books they were writing and that pretty much kept me through you know

the rest of my career up until my mid-40s I was 46 years old and I had moved to Boulder Colorado I was beginning to feel a bit disatisfied with where I was in life some things had not gone well um my marriage had ended and I was in that point of really questioning what was going to come next for me so I started looking for another job I thought you know what I needed really was was another job a different job somewhere else or you know maybe in Denver or something a little bit later that

month you know CH between Christmas and New Year's I took a week off from work so I went out for a bike ride just do a little bike ride around town drop off some stuff at the library and run a couple of errands and then go out on a trail ride I went into a traffic circle the bike lane that I had coming in just completely went away and the the roadway got really narrow so I rode into it very cautiously and I kind of eased my way in noticing that there was some traffic coming

in from my right from the highway into this traffic circle and it looked like they were slowing [Music] down at the last minute that lead SUV instead of stopping she actually sped up I was in a really bad spot because I was right there at where she was coming in and all I could do like there was this instinctual response as I put my hand out I have no idea what happened from the time I put my hand out till I ended up on the hood of her vehicle so somehow I flipped up off the

bike up onto the hood of her vehicle looking in at her and she's texting I'm actually trying to pound on her windshield and she she kept driving she didn't see me like like literally right in front of her and I couldn't hang on I just the the hood of her vehicle was so slick so I slipped down desperately trying to grab on to something but I couldn't find anything to grab on to and I hit the pavement and I heard the crack of my helmet and all of a sudden she was over the top of

me somehow my backpack got caught on something underneath of her vehicle and at the same time that happened I reached up with my right hand and grabbed her axle I don't know how long she technically dragged me it was at least 60 ft and what finally happened is that the guy that was in a truck behind her saw what was going on was able to get around her and he drove his truck around the traffic circle the wrong way and just stopped in front of her so I kind of owe my life to this guy

as soon as she stopped I started trying to wiggle my way out from underneath of the vehicle I got to the point where my shoulders were out from underneath the front of her vehicle and at that point a woman came up and she just said I'm a nurse just stay where you are and I thought what's the big deal you know I'm just going to get up and walk away and she said no you were just in a you know you're in a serious accident I just need you to stay on the ground so when

the paramedics came they of course were starting to try to figure out what was going on with me medically and and as soon as one of the the guys touched the side of my neck I just screamed at the top of my lungs it was just so painful and that's when I realized I was in pretty bad shape so they brought me to the trauma center I had a head injury I had the cracked collar bone five ribs that were broken in multiple places I had a collapse lung but the main the main damage was

really to my neck and my back the doctor basically said well every process in your back is cracked and you've got major damage to your neck vertebrae and then your lower back vertebrae so they called in a surgeon who decided that he he could fix it was going to go in there clean up all of the broken bits and then put titanium rods up and down my back on either side of my spine and that surgy was scheduled for the Monday after this accident so like 3 days later I had an unbelievable fear of death

coming up to this that was the biggest fear of my life was the fear of death I was absolutely mortified by that one fear it paralyzed me in so many ways so going into this surgery I was really scared and almost had myself convinced that I wasn't going to make it they were Wheeling me in they got me moved onto the operating table the anesthesiologist came up and you know as soon as he administered it within like 3 seconds I was you know drifting off in a normal surgery that I've had I've had a few

before it was just gray nothingness and then they were waking me up in the recovery room this time I drifted off and I was even more awake than I was before the anesthesia and it was that moment that I realized something really weird is going on here I woke up and and what I'm looking around at is this beautiful Hillside it's sort of like in a meadow so there's low grass and flowers all around me but I'm on the hillside looking out over a series of rolling mountain ranges and I thought well this is kind

of a cool hallucination I could do this while I'm in surgery the first first thing I noticed was this wave of Peace it felt like you know standing in front of a fireplace when the fire is on and that heat kind of coming through you it felt like I was being hugged but there was this big moment of feeling acceptance and really just unconditional love coming into me and um it was powerful and that's when I knew something was not [Music] right and I thought oh my God I died I thought I died I remember

being in surgery and at that moment I felt love I thought I must have died on the operating table the second thought now here's my analytical science mind still kicking in so wait a minute if I died what's all this because first of all I don't believe in anything second of all my parents told me that you're going to go to hell because you're an atheist now so I'm not experiencing either one of those and that's when I really began to wonder what the heck was going on and why am I here I asked that

question in my mind but then there was an answer to the thought I had and the answer came kind of from around me in the atmosphere and it was the answer of this is your home you are a part of me you're a part of us welcome home when it said that welcome home I lost it because I remembered that's when it came back to me and I knew immediately oh my God that life that I had on Earth was just an illusion that thing that I was doing down there on Earth was really just

a temporary State and this is real it just it was like so obvious I all of a sudden saw someone kind of materialize out of fog and she was very ephemeral so vaguely a human and she had what appeared to be long hair but I was never able to see her face because it wasn't about her it was about me learning what I needed to learn and that's what she said we you know it's time for you to learn what you need to learn in order to go back and make your life one that would

be worth living and those are pretty much her exact words and I'm like whoa I'm not going back there what are you kidding me I am not going back to that place she said well you've already agreed to go back and I said I was kind of going back to my my younger my younger self when I was kind of a pain to be around with my parents as I was always challenging them so I was challenging her like I don't want to go back there and I don't remember agreeing to go back she said

well you did that before you were born into your life and so let me show you and it was this weird movie moment where like in the air in front of me sort of materialized almost like a movie screen and she showed me me planning my life before I was born so in a way the experience was sort of planned out and I got to see that and there was a point at which I looked behind me and all it was behind me was fog it was this foggy gray whereas in front of me it

was this really vibrant maybe it was a forest or a canyon I was walking in or a mountain or something but behind me it was just gone and I asked her about that I like what's up with this and she said the place that you are in now is not the Ultimate Reality of where you're going to go it's sort of a she called it a holding place and she said in this place it is your place of learning and here what we do is we're making this an environment that is comfortable for you to

learn in things that you enjoy places that make you feel comfortable and that will allow you to learn what you need to learn in order to go back and make your life one that's worth living she would teach me things about not only this spiritual place I was in but that everything was based on an energetic structure not a physical one everything you see around you it's an illusion the more I thought about it the more I knew it to be true the equivalent amount of time that was out on the operating table because I

did code my blood pressure tanked my heart rate stopped the Flatline part lasted at most about 2 minutes if we were to do here what I did as far as places that I traveled and things I learned it would take about 2 or 3 months here to do that but it also seemed like forever there you know it was a completely different experience of quote time what I realized from that is that it's not that time passes differently it's that they are on the at the spiritual level outside of our perception of time I went

to one place where I stood there and all around me I saw the map of my life it was like this virtual reality map like an old timey you know nautical chart laid out all all around me and I was at the center and there was this big I think they call it a compass row and I'm looking all around it and there's these different Pathways that I can see from one end of the map to the other and I knew those were all of the different paths I had taken or I should that could

have taken up into this point and then there were a lot of Pathways kind of branching out from where I was but all going back to the same place and the point of that particular teaching was first of all we can take one of many paths in life and they pretty much bring us to the same place so it's it's not like there's a particular right path that you need to be on the other part of that was I noticed that compass rose was centered figuratively in my heart area and the point of that teaching

that she she finally went into that is you know you don't just use your brain your human brain to make decisions you also have to dig deeper into what we would call Intuition or that that inner know KN and she said balance those two out so that you're making decisions from a really holistic Place rather than simply an analytical decision up until that point in my life I had completely ignored that I didn't pay that any attention at [Music] all after that I had what people call A Life review now at the time you have

to understand I didn't know any of these terms I didn't know about ndes I didn't know about life reviews I had no idea all of this stuff so she brought me up this kind of Meandering Mountain Valley into what looked like a pond up in the mountains and she said well I want you to kneel down by the side of the pond and just touch the surface of the pond so I just did it and I just sat back on kind of on my heels and and just watched the surface the ripples going out I

could see on top of the ripples there were small little pockets all across the surface of the pond that to me looked like little videos vget of specific moments in my physical life but when I would focus on one I was back in it I was it wasn't like I was watching it from outside I was back in it experiencing it again from my perspective but also experiencing it from the other people and I could feel everything they felt as if it was mine and that really got to me because there were times when I

helped someone one or said something nice and I could feel that person's for a one of a better term I could feel their Spirit sore I could feel how buoyant they felt because someone said something kind and then it also I could see the the downstream effects of those actions too so if I said something positive and uplifting to someone I in turn saw how that allowed them to be more positive with other people so this teaching was you have an impact on the people around you not just physically but there's also an energetic or

spiritual component to every interaction that you have whether it's a verbal interaction whether it's there's something non-spoken it doesn't matter everything that you do has an impact and therefore be more conscious of how you impact others on the flip side so it was balanced out for me to learn from with things that weren't so great that I did there was a a time when I was a teenager and my younger sister and I got into a fight we fought like cats and dogs when I was a kid we just did not see eye to eye

and I loved her but we didn't get along very well and there was one point when I was I think I was probably like 17 and she was 14 I said something not so kind to her and I didn't think anything of it at the time it was just a way to get her off my back you know I just was I was really tired of the fight we were having so I just said something stupid and not very nice and she didn't react you know I didn't see any reaction in the moment for her

except she left but in my review I could feel the hurt that I caused her in that moment and this really this is the the second thing that always gets me when I felt her pain at what I said to her that was like biggest teaching moment ever and that's the one thing I wish I could give to people was understanding viscerally how you're in impact affects your your actions affect someone else your words affect someone else and in that moment I realized okay I'm changing the way that I interact with people right now like

that's it that that point woke me up like nothing else that was just this big aha moment and ever since I've come back here I remember that almost every day and it helps me formulate how I interact with people every day I'm very concerned and careful about how I interact with people all of a sudden for the first time in my whole you know experience there I looked up and there were clouds in the sky we were just kind of looking around you know like when you were little kids looking for Animals up in the

clouds and so we did that for a while and then she got up and she said well it's time for you to go now I was not happy to hear that I thought I was I thought I had passed some kind of test you know and was going to stay there I was really planning on doing this end run around my teacher I I was like planning can I just like run around her and just keep running until until I find where I'm supposed to go um that was one of the things that I wanted

to do and I I also thought well if if I pitch a fit enough they'll just let me stay I started getting a little bit weepy with her so at that point she laid hands on my shoulder that was broken my ribs and right up like right up here cuz the top of my sternum was the part that was cracked and then she sort of sent me [Music] back and I woke up in the recovery room I was actually screaming when I woke up I was yelling and I was not happy I was really angry

to be back and the nurse who was helping me she literally jumped back but I kept yelling where is she where is she I don't want to be here can I go back can I go back and they thought I was having some kind of psychotic episode I'm sure the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me a little bit he got me calmed down but I kept asking I said can you please send her back to me can you please send her back to me and they had no idea who I'm talking about I had

a friend in the waiting room so they went and got her and she I feel so bad for her so they brought her in and I said that's not who I'm talking about I don't want to see her I want to see the woman I was with during surgery and they're like what in the world is going on so finally I realized well okay then my rational mind kicked in and I you know I remembered everything that happened but I thought okay you need to shut up because they don't get it they don't understand what

you went through so I just stopped talking I was in a Lutheran Hospital and the next morning one of the chaplain stopped in from the hospital she poked her head in like you awake and I and I could tell who it was and I said oh thank God you're here out loud and she she came in and we talked about what happened she was amazing she was really amazing if she hadn't reacted in the in the positive way that she had I may never have told anybody ever again but she was very accepting very positive

and explained you know that I had died and she said well you had in near-death experience I'm like what is that she said well it's a thing you know people people die and we bring them back and then they have these experiences that was that was the first time I ever heard of nde she helped me to understand it was normal I'm not crazy it was a real experience and now okay now she said now you need to start thinking about what this means for you cuz it's cuz I knew and she was trying to

get me to understand but I knew that this could potentially blow my life open in a way that I would never have thought of before it was a complete shift of what I thought was real what I thought was true of everything I believed and I knew at that point it was like I had a choice I could go back to the way things were I could completely deny everything that had just happened I could completely deny the experience itself what I learned and just try to go back to the way things were before and

that seemed you know some somehow safe because it was predictable like I knew I knew that path I was on it I didn't like it but I was on it but this other path was a complete unknown if so if I knew I could Embrace what I learned and continue to learn from it but I had no idea where that was going to go and I I really worried about what that would mean for my career because I was in still in the Sciences I just assumed that I'd never be able to get a job

again in the Sciences because people would see that and oh she's crazy we're not going to hire her so I was really afraid of that path but about 2 weeks later when I came home from the hospital I realized well I'm going to give this New Path a go I don't know where it's going to go I'll see what happens I was out of the body cast in just like a I think 2 days over 4 weeks and they expected that to be 16 so it was very rapid very rapid healing what I started doing

was I would go out in nature every day and meditate that was one of the things I started doing that really helped you know kind of bring that soul level of awareness into my life the second thing and it's very it sounds very simple but it has a big impact is really truly learning how to be grateful in the morning I would start the day before I got up out of bed I would be very grateful for just being able to walk just basic stuff I would allow myself almost to meditate on it to really

think about and feel not just think but also feel the gratitude for that like I could have been a paraplegic from that ex and I'm so grateful that I can walk right now just those simple acts of gratitude allowed me to focus on what was good in my life right now and just little by little those Small Things allowed me to stay more centered and present the rest of the day it's about being aware of your actions in the moment without going on autopilot it's so very easy to be living your life on autopilot which

is where I was before so now I'm not hooked up into to dramas like I used to be um whatever goes on in our governments it's like yeah it's going on but I'm still at peace in my life concern yeah I have concerns about the world definitely but it doesn't change this core of Peace inside because I know it's important to be here in this reality it has things to teach us we all learn from it But ultimately we are not this reality we're a bigger level of reality I was learning really how to live

from that soul level of awareness rather than just my limited human level of awareness it's not that the human level of awareness was bad but it for me it was very fear-filled and and it was reacting to life rather than being proactive and I didn't want to be that way anymore and I wanted to live life from that level of that higher level of awareness because it felt better it was more peaceful it was more connected it was more love-filled and joyful it's a much better place to be U I'm not anywhere near as stressed

out and certainly not fearful anymore you know it's been a really great change for me I'm not driven by this being a material world anymore I'm not stuck on that um I'm I understand that there is a bigger picture not just to the world but to each one of us that fear of death that I carried really kept me from fully living living at least for me it kept me thinking small and safe and that's not necessarily where all of us are meant to be at all times in our lives there's that's perfectly fine for

some people and and at times in our lives that's perfectly fine but any decision based on fear it's not to me the most the the strongest decision that you can make it's somehow limited when I work with people individually I really try to get people into that space where their their decision making is based on a place of strength and and Trust in themselves and and maybe a place of compassion or love rather than oh I'm afraid that person won't like what I'm doing so therefore I'm going to do this this thing instead of the

thing I really want to do for the vast majority of souls that come here to have a life experience and it's funny because my teacher calls this a near life experience and so I just like to tell that to people they consider this nearly life but not real life so all of us who are here to have this near life experience we come here for a variety of reasons and and some people come here to learn a very specific thing a lot of us come here to experience things that we can't experience anywhere else or

that would be very difficult um having a child for example you know you don't you don't necessarily give birth while you're in heaven so a lot of people like to come here and experience having a family or raising a family this physical reality it's like a crucible meaning it's a very focused place where you can learn a lot of different things in a very short amount of time and so the the real challenge is narrowing down what it is that you want to learn while you're here all those different reasons or purposes that people can

have there's one core and that one core is to learn how to be here in this environment and still live from a place of love and compassion not just for your immediate family but for everybody else and that's the core purpose that we all [Music] share [Music] night