A Spiritual Experience
I have tried writing this story several times over the past 33 years that happened just before my 50th birthday, that would have been around April, 1988. The details are as clear in my recollections today as they were at the time that they happened. My difficulty was in describing an experience called “ecstasy.” The Oxford dictionary describes it as an “overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement,” origin Greek “ekstasis,” meaning “standing outside yourself.” The complete experience happened in a dream that started with my own death and took me through the following several hours as a spiritual copy of myself.
I had gone to bed around 11:00pm on a Sunday evening. My wife had gone to bed earlier and was fast asleep. I think I fell asleep in about 20 minutes and the dream started. The first thing was I saw myself standing in space several thousand miles above the complete globe of the earth. My perspective is as if I am standing about 15 feet away from myself and I see myself with the earth behind me. I am dressed in my usual clothes that I wore to work as a carpenter – a plaid short sleeve shirt, a pair of jeans with a small rip in one knee and a pair of white sneakers. I realize I have died and I say, “What about my wife and family?” A voice with my own Scottish accent comes to me from 15 feet away and says, “your family are all fine,” which I accept and I guess that I can share my thoughts and questions with this other self. I have no idea where I go next but I turn with my left side to the earth and start to move very fast in that direction. I know that this other self is with me and knows exactly where we are going. When I look back, the earth and sun are about a quarter of the size they were a short while before, but there is no sensation of moving very fast. Other than when I look back, the sun is just a small blue dot and is indistinguishable from all the other stars in the universe. Very much as we see the sky on a clear summer night and we have no sensation that we are at that moment travelling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour.
I don’t know how long I was travelling through space, but it felt like it was between one or two hours. Eventually, I see a small orange-coloured dot, away in the distance. I know I am moving very fast toward it because it is rapidly becoming bigger. As I get close, it blocks out my view of the universe behind it and I think I have no way of slowing down and I am going to crash into it and become a small splat on the surface. At the last few seconds, I close my eyes and wait for the collision. It doesn’t happen. Instead, I am inside a massive sphere which is all in semi darkness. As I am standing inside this space, I first notice that the clothes I was wearing are all gone. I’m standing there like the invisible man. I try moving my legs and arms and they all function as normal. My other self or spiritual self, is still with me and we appear to communicate by telepathy. He tells me that all the energy in this place is spiritual and the energy closest to this inside wall is from all the lesser evolved forms of life and it vibrates much slower than higher life forms.
As I said, the whole place is in semi-darkness, away in the distance is a somewhat brighter area and he lets me know this is where I have to go. I just look in the direction and start to move. I don’t have to use my legs to walk, I just float through all the vibrating energy which appears to open up a pathway taking me to the light in the distance. When I reach it, it looks like a sphere or very bright light. I know I have to go into it and I just float very easily right into the centre of it. My other self or spiritual self comes in with me but stays just on the inside. Because it appears that my spiritual self and myself can share our thoughts I can see myself from where he is. What he sees is a form exactly like myself, David Fraser, but visible as vibrating energy.
I’m standing there feeling quite normal and comfortable when I start to feel a beautiful feeling come up through my feet then go up through my whole body, then turn around and come down again. It continues like a wave to move up and down, becoming more and more intense and absolutely beautiful, pure ecstasy. As this continues it becomes more and more intense, absorbing my whole being. My whole form starts to very slowly separate. As each cell of my form separates from the next cell, a burst of ecstasy goes through the whole form. This is happening hundreds of times as the whole form separates and slowly floats up to the top of this sphere and passes through to join all the spiritual energy of the million or trillions of those who have gone before. I can see this all happening through the eyes of the spiritual self still inside the sphere. After my spiritual self has seen all this and sees my departure, he says it’s time to return to my body back on my bed. Instantly I am back and I wake up. While I am wide awake I can see the air all around me vibrating and I am experiencing the same ecstasy going up and down my body as when my human form was changing to spiritual form, just in reverse. The waves of ecstasy were slowly becoming less and all the vibrating air around my body was also becoming less and seemed to be absorbing into my body. I experienced that for about ten minutes while wide awake.
I have written this complete account over the last two to three hours from memory, it’s exactly as it happened. The experiences of going through space and being inside that sphere of light and the transition from human form to spiritual form and from that day to this I have never had any worries about death or any concern about my health. At almost 83 I feel as well as I did at 63. Having had that experience, I have to believe that when my time comes I will again go through the same experience. No gods, no devils, no saints. We are all spiritual as is all life in the universe, all very natural.
David Fraser
Goulds, NL
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