My experience occurred 3 months after my mother committed suicide due to mental illness. I was 19 years old at that time.

I had a difficult childhood which involved being beaten and psychologically abused, poverty, having my mom in a psychiatric hospital and jail due to her mental illness, bullying, my parents’ divorce, and as a teenager I resorted to anorexia nervosa and self-harming to cope. When my mother committed suicide, it was more than I could endure, and I started to even think about suicide myself. I was looking for God, trying to find answers and comfort, but the pain was extreme. The love I had for my mom was incredibly deep, so her death was incredibly hard for me.

One night I went to bed and I suppose that I "woke up, but with my soul only" (to express it the best I can). I looked to my right and I saw an incredibly beautiful bright light that made me feel better and better as I looked at it. The light didn’t come towards me; neither did I moved towards it. I just realized it had always been there, the same way as when you lose your keys, but they are right in front of you and you finally realize they were there. I thought to myself, "How could I have not seen it for so long, because obviously, it was always there?"

Then I realized the light was on my left, underneath me, in front of me, everywhere! The light then started to rise in me. (I didn’t have a body, but I had a sense of occupying a certain "space" similar to that of my body. I also had a mental image of my body.) The light rose higher and higher in me (by rising, I mean that it started to engulf me; I became one with the light). The more I became one with the light, the better I felt. It rose up to what my mental imagery envisioned as the equivalent of my hips. At that point, I started to be afraid of losing myself in the light; that is, of losing my individuality. As I felt this fear, the light gently dropped to the equivalent of my feet. I then realized that I could totally trust the light to not force anything on me. But, when the light was at my feet, I didn’t feel as good as when I was more wrapped in it. It then started rising again up to the equivalent of my "neck," the level at which I felt comfortable.

At that point, I started having a very blurry memory of having lived a life on Earth. It was incredibly blurry, much like when you wake up and you know you had a dream, but can’t manage to remember what it was. I felt puzzled because I knew the only thing that existed was the light and I wondered how it was possible that I had lived anything else but the light. As I felt the questioning in my being, in front of me, I would say the equivalent of 40 meters, the light dropped – unravelling to reveal a beautiful garden with flowers, butterflies, bushes. It was not a picture, nor a hologram. I knew it was a real place and, had I wanted to, I could have walked-floated in it. I didn’t do it though, because I had a sense that if I moved further from where I was, I could not go back. I never thought in terms of death, or not going back to my Earthly life. I only thought in terms of losing my identity-personality. But seeing this garden gave me the answer to my question.

I realized that the light contained everything, including my life on Earth. Therefore, it made sense that there was only the light, yet that I had memories of a life. The instant I understood this, the light wrapped up the garden, and I only saw the light again. I knew it was eternity and that it was incredibly vast, that I could walk-float for eternity to extreme distances and that it would be exactly the same light. I decided to not move further, again, because I wanted to keep my sense of identity.

After that, I don’t remember anything. I just woke up in my bed, not really knowing where I was for a couple of minutes. I then acknowledged the incredible experience that I just had and regretted my decision to not move further in the light.

Besides showing me its peace and incredible beauty, the main message that I got from my experience with the light is that we are in it right now, which is consistent with when Jesus said that the kingdom of God is among us. I always feel home now. The light is everywhere. I could be at the other edge of the universe and I would still be in my home, in our home, our magnificent eternal kingdom.

What I understood from my experience is that when we "die" we don’t "go" anywhere. Our conscious awareness stops focusing on the physical spot of the universe that is our body. It can expand in the whole light or it can focus on anything it wants or creates, such as the garden I saw.

What I understood, in the light, is that it is everything. By being everything, it’s as if it was nothing in particular. The way to generate creations is to not focus-look at certain aspects of the light. The best analogy I have is that of sculpture. In high school, in my art class, we had to do snow sculpting. The teacher gave us blocks of snow and told us that our sculpture was already in it, we only had to unravel it. We don’t add snow to sculpt, we cut out the part of the whole block of snow that is not our sculpture. It’s the same thing with the light and creation.

My education is in experimental medicine. Therefore, I always try to understand things from a science perspective. Perhaps the light that permeates everything and which to me I know is everywhere, perhaps it is the (dark) energy that permeates the whole universe. Who knows, but one thing I know is that we are in it right now and that it is ultimately the only thing that exists. Everything and everyone is part of it.

My experience of the light cured my depression and all my suffering. I understand now how every experience of my life was a blessing and how it allowed me a variety of experiences and to grow. I have no fear of death, nor a fear of when I will die. I know we always choose if we want to come back. If our body is so damaged that it can no longer take our soul, we will just go back to "a spot of the universe" where it is healthy enough, which is probably a parallel reality according to quantum physics. Again, I believe the light contains every possibility, every timeline, every location. So we only die and stay "dead" when we want to. My only fear is the way I will die.

I only shared this experience with my spouse, because since I was not near death by any means when it occurred 11 years ago, I thought nobody would take it seriously. But I think it makes no difference since ultimately there is no death, just a shift in the spot in the universe our consciousness is focused on, expanded into everything.

Ultimately we all are already in eternity, in heaven, in the light and it is the ultimate home. =)

Love to everyone. =)