Spiritual Realms

Different realms are experienced in Near Death Experiences.  We don’t know the number of realms that exist but some of the key ones that have been experienced and reported back on are listed below.  These include:

  1. Tunnel and light
  2. Heavenly realms based on Earth
  3. Halls of learning
  4. City of light
  5. Earth level realm
  6. The plane
  7. The blue-gray place
  8. Custom locations
  9. Multi-dimensional experiences

1. Tunnel and light

Perhaps the most commonly associated realm experienced in Near Neath Experiences is the tunnel and the light.  This isn’t necessarily an afterlife realm that we would normally go to and reside in when we die, but seems to be a way people can travel from the Earthly realm to an encounter with the Light.

Tom Sawyer – Encounter With The Light

“So whisking through this tunnel, the next thing that I will describe to you, is that way off, and paradoxically to infinity, was this minute little speck of light. That light was very profound. It was the first identifiable object that I was able to perceive or see. So I was eagerly anticipating what is that. And isn’t that beautiful. And with that realization it was even more profound because that little speck of light way, way off in the distance was very importantly the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced in my life.

It was absolute and total beauty. It was white, sometimes we like to dress up white by saying blue-white, like we try to grade diamonds and such. It was absolutely pure. It was brighter than something that would immediately blind you. It was the brightest thing that I had ever experienced. Brighter than 100,000 carbon arcs or welders torches, various things of brightness that we can measure. It was at least the equivalence in brilliance of a super nova.

It was also, other than beautiful, it represented a type of love that I had never experienced. Now I can use the phrase unconditional love. Although I wasn’t familiar with this phrase at the time of the accident…

There was some type of a deceleration in this tunnel because the next thing that I want to describe to you is I was motionless, I was stopped at the end of the tunnel. And I had a realization, let’s just call it intuitive again, that behind me was this tunnel. I did not turn around to verify it, turn around and look at it, it wasn’t necessary. Much more importantly was before me, and covering the entire vista before me, totally engulfing everything, was the light.

As I approached the end of that tunnel, I realized that the light itself was emanating from outside the end of the tunnel. It was not the very end of the tunnel. It was engulfing whatever the realm was outside this tunnel.”

2. Heavenly realms based on Earth

Visits to heavenly realms similar to an Earth environment are most likely a visit to actual afterlife realms rather than a higher state specific to the Near Death Experience such a direct one-to-one experience of the Light.  These afterlife levels appear to contain features similar to what we experience on Earth such as mountains, trees, plants, rivers etc. but often in a more vibrant format.  Some people who have had Out of Body Experiences (OBEs) have also managed to visit these realms, although this is not that common.

Nancy Rynes

“I abruptly found myself standing in a spectacular landscape unlike any I’d ever experienced. Warm breezes drifted across my skin. Beautiful vistas of meadows and distant mountains surrounded me. And a pervasive, loving presence overwhelmed me in its intensity… Surrounding me was a landscape of gently rolling hills, flower-filled grassy meadows, towering deciduous trees in full leaf, trees taller and more grand than any here on Earth, and a sense of a light mist floating through as if it were a humid summer morning. The sky gleamed a very light, pearly blue, similar to what you might see at the ocean’s shore, with wispy clouds and a very bright but somewhat diffuse light.” (pp. 23-24)

“My surroundings captured most of my attention. Below the surface forms and colors of everything in the landscape, I somehow also saw or sensed vibrating energy. I’m not sure how to describe it. It seemed I could see the surface of a leaf, for example, yet also see below it to an energy, a vibration of love or compassion or kindness that made the leaf take on a subsurface radiance. Everything had this radiance: trees, grass, sky, flowers, and clouds. Colors seemed intensified by this radiance. The feeling of love flowed through everything and heightened this radiance. Through it all I sensed and somehow physically felt an incredibly profound feeling of peace, rightness, goodness, and love flowing through my body.” (p. 24)

“The Beauty I saw and felt in those first moments really does deserve a capital “B.” It wasn’t just pleasing to the eye, there was something deeper to it, more harmonious, more blessed, and more powerful. Everything felt tied together by an enormous amount of love and peace. Somehow I knew that the beauty of the landscape around me was the product of unconditional love on a cosmic scale.” (p. 24)

“I continued to feel a deep sense of unconditional love flow through all things around me: the air, the ground below my feet, the trees, the clouds, and me. I didn’t know how it was possible to feel love as if it were a physical presence, but I did. My being vibrated with love to its core. Every molecule of me seemed bathed in love. I couldn’t block it out, nor would I have wanted to. I continued to feel the energy of love flow around me like a gentle current, washing through me, and eventually capturing me by the heart. I felt supported by some kind of loving presence so powerful, yet so gentle, that I cried again. I had never experienced such unconditional love and acceptance in all of my years on this Earth.” (p. 25)

“This figure approached silently from slightly behind me and to my right, coming in to view as if she emerged from mists. Her hazy, gradual fading-into-being seemed somehow natural for this place. She greeted me with an energy-embrace of pure love. Love emanated from her and surrounded me. She didn’t touch me with her hands or enfold me into a hug, she simply sent me waves of loving energy as a welcome.” (p. 26)

3. Halls of learning

George Ritchie

“We were moving again. Or rather, the scene in front of us was— changing somehow. Opening up. It was the quality of light that was different, as though the air had suddenly become more transparent, enabling me to see what had apparently been there all along.” (p. 80).

“Now behind, beyond, through all this I began to perceive a whole new realm! Enormous buildings stood in a beautiful sunny park and there was a relationship between the various structures, a pattern to the way they were arranged, that reminded me somewhat of a well-planned university. Except that to compare what I was now seeing with any thing on earth was ridiculous. It was more as if all the schools and colleges in the world were only piecemeal reproductions of this reality. We seemed suddenly to have entered an altogether different dimension, almost another kind of existence. After the clamor of the wartime cities and the shrieking voices of the plain, here was an all-pervading peace. As we entered one of the buildings and started down a high-ceilinged corridor lined with tall doorways, the air was so hushed that I was actually startled to see people in the passageway. (pp. 80-81).

“I could not tell if they were men or women, old or young, for all were covered from head to foot in loose-flowing, hooded cloaks that made me think vaguely of monks. But the atmosphere of the place was not at all as I imagined a monastery. It was more like some tremendous study center, humming with the excitement of great discovery. Everyone we passed in the wide halls and on the curving staircases seemed caught up in some all-engrossing activity; not many words were exchanged among them. And yet I sensed no unfriendliness between these beings, rather an aloofness of total concentration. Whatever else these people might be, they appeared utterly and supremely self-forgetful— absorbed in some vast purpose beyond themselves. (p. 81).

4. The City of Light

George Ritchie

“Up until this point I had had the impression that we were traveling— though in what manner I could not imagine— upon the earth itself. Even what I had come to think of as a “higher plane” of deep thoughts and learning was obviously not far distant from the “physical plane” where bodiless beings were still bound to a solid world. Now, however, we seemed to have left the earth behind. I could no longer see it. Instead we appeared to be in an immense void, except that I had always thought of that as a frightening word, and this was not. Some unnameable promise seemed to vibrate through that vast emptiness. And then I saw, infinitely far off, far too distant to be visible with any kind of sight I knew of, a city. A glowing, seemingly endless city, bright enough to be seen over all the unimaginable distance between. The brightness seemed to shine from the very walls and streets of this place, and from beings that I could not discern, moving about within it. In fact, the city and everything in it seemed to be made of light, even as the Figure at my side was made of light. (pp. 84-85).

“two of the bright figures seemed to detach themselves from the city and start toward us, hurling themselves across that infinity with the speed of light. But as fast as they came toward us, we drew away still faster. The distance increased, the vision faded. (p. 85).

5. Spirits stuck at the Earth level

George Ritchie

“In fact the streets were impossibly crowded. Just below us two men bore down on the same section of sidewalk and an instant later had simply passed through each other… I noticed this phenomenon repeatedly, people unaware of others right beside them. I saw a group of assembly-line workers gathered around a coffee canteen. One of the women asked another for a cigarette, begged her in fact, as though she wanted it more than anything in the world. But the other one, chatting with her friends, ignored her. She took a pack of cigarettes from her coveralls, and without ever offering it to the woman who reached for it so eagerly, took one out and lit it. Fast as a striking snake the woman who had been refused snatched at the lit cigarette in the other one’s mouth. Again she grabbed at it. And again . . .” (pp. 66-67).

“Gradually I began to notice something else. All of the living people we were watching were surrounded by a faint luminous glow, almost like an electrical field over the surface of their bodies. This luminosity moved as they moved, like a second skin made out of pale, scarcely visible light… Then I noticed a striking thing. A number of the men standing at the bar seemed unable to lift their drinks to their lips. Over and over I watched them clutch at their shot glasses, hands passing through the solid tumblers, through the heavy wooden counter top, through the very arms and bodies of the drinkers around them. And these men, every one of them, lacked the aureole of light that surrounded the others. Then the cocoon of light must be a property of physical bodies only. The dead, we who had lost our solidness, had lost this “second skin”” (pp. 69-70).

“I watched one young sailor rise unsteadily from a stool, take two or three steps, and sag heavily to the floor. Two of his buddies stooped down and started dragging him away from the crush. But that was not what I was looking at. I was staring in amazement as the bright cocoon around the unconscious sailor simply opened up. It parted at the very crown of his head and began peeling away from his head, his shoulders. Instantly, quicker than I had ever seen anyone move, one of the insubstantial beings who had been standing near him at the bar was on top of him. He had been hovering like a thirsty shadow at the sailor’s side, greedily following every swallow the young man made. Now he seemed to spring at him like a beast of prey. In the next instant, to my utter mystification, the springing figure had vanished. It all happened even before the two men had dragged their unconscious load from under the feet of those at the bar. One minute I had distinctly seen two individuals; by the time they propped the sailor against the wall, there was only one. Twice more, as I stared, stupefied, the identical scene was repeated. A man passed out, a crack swiftly opened in the aureole round him, one of the nonsolid people vanished as he hurled himself at that opening, almost as if he had scrambled inside the other man.” (pp. 71-72)

6. The plane

George Ritchie

“We had left the Navy base with its circumference of seedy streets and bars, and were now standing, in this dimension where travel seemed to take no time at all, on the edge of a wide, flat plain. So far in our journeying we had visited places where the living and the dead existed side by side; indeed, where disembodied beings, completely unsuspected by the living, hovered right on top of the physical things and people where their desire was focused. Now, however, although we were apparently still somewhere on the surface of the earth, I could see no living man or woman. The plain was crowded, even jammed with hordes of ghostly discarnate beings; nowhere was there a solid, light-surrounded person to be seen. All of these thousands of people were apparently no more substantial than I myself. And they were the most frustrated, the angriest, the most completely miserable beings I had ever laid eyes on. (pp. 73-74)

“At first I thought we were looking at some great battlefield: everywhere people were locked in what looked like fights to the death, writhing, punching, gouging… Although they appeared to be literally on top of each other, it was as though each man was boxing the air; at last I realized that of course, having no substance, they could not actually touch one another. They could not kill, though they clearly wanted to, because their intended victims were already dead, and so they hurled themselves at each other in a frenzy of impotent rage… Up to this moment the misery I had watched consisted in being chained to a physical world of which we were no longer part. Now I saw that there were other kinds of chains. Here were no solid objects or people to enthrall the soul. These creatures seemed locked into habits of mind and emotion, into hatred, lust, destructive thought patterns.” (pp. 74-75).

“Whatever anyone thought, however fleetingly or unwillingly, was instantly apparent to all around him, more completely than words could have expressed it, faster than sound waves could have carried it. And the thoughts most frequently communicated had to do with the superior knowledge, or abilities, or background of the thinker. “I told you so!” “I always knew!” “Didn’t I warn you!” were shrieked into the echoing air over and over.” (p. 76)

“They could not actually hold on to their victims, any of these insanely angry beings. There were no fences. Nothing apparently prevented them from simply going off alone… Perhaps this was the explanation for this hideous plain. Perhaps in the course of eons or of seconds, each creature here had sought out the company of others as pride-and-hate-filled as himself” (pp. 76-77)

“Gradually I was becoming aware that there was something else on that plain of grappling forms. Almost from the beginning I had sensed it, but for a long time I could not locate it. When I did it was with a shock that left me stunned. That entire unhappy plain was hovered over by beings seemingly made of light. It was their very size and blinding brightness that had prevented me at first from seeing them. Now that I had, now that I adjusted my eyes to take them in, I could see that these immense presences were bending over the little creatures on the plain. Perhaps even conversing with them… All I clearly saw was that not one of these bickering beings on the plain had been abandoned. They were being attended, watched over, ministered to. And the equally observable fact was that not one of them knew it.” (pp. 77-78)

7. The blue-gray place

Dannion Brinkley

“The third time I ventured heavenward, just like before, I went directly to what I refer to as the blue-gray place. The other times I was aware of it as an empty space, and I moved through it rather quickly. This time I felt as though I’d been deposited there, and I realized I was not alone. It quickly became apparent to me that this deep sanctuary was actually, in and of itself, a completely separate level of consciousness.” (p. 75)

“Personally, I’ve come to terms with this netherworld as the place where we can dwell as long as it takes for us to recognize ourselves as immortal spiritual beings rather than physical and mental beings. It is not where we are punished for our sins; it is a region of celestial consciousness where we purge our personal misconceptions of reality, based on free will. Here we are capable of releasing ourselves from all earthly misconceptions in order to reconnect with our essential purity, our supreme nature. Safe within this fertile void, souls are watched over and supported as they go through the process of shedding human characteristics and attitudes that impede the expression of their authentic divinity. (p. 76)

“During my encounter with this mystical region, what captured my attention first was the way the thick, slow-moving energy zapped my strength. It left me feeling weak and anxious. Then I was abruptly overtaken by the uncomfortable presence of countless souls milling nearby. They seemed caught in a vicious repetition of recycled depression, dejection, and desperation. After a period of intense observation, I was suddenly impressed with the details of their stories.” (p. 76)

“Ceaselessly I sought to understand the reason those people were held hostage to agony. All victims of a devastating absence of hope, these souls had lost sight of their self-respect, refused to express a genuine appreciation of life, or sacrificed the refuge of a meaningful spiritual foundation. Thus they had also collectively detached themselves from the security of their eternal source.” (p. 80).

“I finally got it! The trapped souls I beheld between Heaven and Earth were not being detained against their will; they were held by and according to their will. The agony they experienced was of their own making. To enter the Kingdom as a child one must possess, like a child, a heart pure and true. In other words, one must have an open, loving, cheerful disposition toward life and all the while maintain a belief that life is a gift to be generously shared and vigorously celebrated.” (p. 81)

“My heart breaks for them still. If only they could see, with a few faithful, optimistic thoughts focused in the right direction, they could trade in this state of nothingness for true peace in the light. If there is just one lesson from Heaven you could commit to memory, let it be this: our thoughts create our attitudes, and together they create the quality of life we experience – both here and in the Hereafter.” (p. 84)

“The third near-death experience was by far the most sobering yet enlightening one of all. I realized, for the first time, that we do not necessarily leave this side of life and end up in the glory of Heaven, as angels of infinite light. In my previous experiences, I’d been ushered straight to the presence of divinity. I was shown the future and the part I was to play in it before they sent me back. But on my third visit to Heaven, I learned that when we leave this side of life for good, we pick up life on the other side with pretty much the same issues and attitudes to work through.” (p. 85)