Mathilde M NDE

Experience Description

In mid-May of 2006, I had a meningitis.

I refused to be transferred to the hospital, as I felt the need to remain in silence. I wished to remain aware and as conscious as possible, without any morphine drip.

I took this decision knowing the risk it entailed and the pain I would suffer. I have no rational explanation for that. I was just intuitively confident. I wasn’t scared at any time.

During the first night, I was suffering a very high fever and unbearable headaches. I understood that my body would not withstand this shock for long.

Calmly, through conscious force of will, I decided to let go.

I wanted to experience this ‘other’ reality that mystics have been telling humanity about for centuries. As soon as I wished to go, I entered into an infinite energy. It was as if I was sucked up by a very bright vortex. At incredible speed, I went through the cosmos, passing by plants and stars.

Everything stood still around me. I had entered a bright and calm universe, where I felt myself floating.

Time does not exist in this other reality. For a moment, I knew that I had no thought anymore. I had no more personality (although I retained the memory of my identity). I had no more body, which I had left. I did not suffer at all anymore.

Silence had engulfed everything.

Consciousness remained. I was totally alert, linked to this luminous flow to such an extent that I dissolved in it.

I was a refined, sublime consciousness. I bathed into cosmic energy, and simultaneously was wide open. I was limitless, as if I had contained all the space in the universe. I perceived, felt, and had all properties of a living being, but acted in a dimension located out of matter and out of time.

The feeling was tender and peaceful. The light I saw, through non-sensorial perception, located on another level from me, was intense. It was radiant but not blinding.

A golden color illuminated the immensity and allowed my consciousness to embrace the whole scope of it. The entire universe was visible.

I had a feeling of lightness. My ill body didn’t matter because I was no longer something that could suffer.

There was fullness and freedom for this instant outside of time.

My consciousness had left space-time. It had entered another plane of reality, extending infinitely. This feeling of openness expanded toward the universe, extending even to wholly containing it. In that moment, my consciousness was this bright space.

The light freely went through my consciousness, which had found its source. The light nourished my consciousness and gave it profound bliss.

I immediately felt loved by this Supreme Consciousness. I understood that this light was the absolute Love I felt.

It was very beautiful and very sweet. True tenderness came from this light.

I felt pure love, unconditional acceptation, and great compassion.

‘Somebody’ outstretched their arms to me. However, there was nobody who loved me and I had nobody to love.

There was just understanding. Respectful, unrestrainedly open, unintentional Love.

This immersion in total love brought me endless joy. I had an immense gratefulness to be loved. I was flooded with peace.

This feeling cannot be accurately described as it is situated beyond anything we may know in our terrestrial existence. It brings an absolute feeling of safety, a well-being close to the one felt in a motherly womb.

During this experience, I did not see the tunnel, which most people who experience near death relate. I did not meet any beings of light, no dead beloved who would come to welcome me and talk to me. I had no guide. I did not see, either, a fast review of my past life. I had no memory, and no scenes of my life came to my consciousness.

I was out of the body, but I did not see myself looking at it. It did not exist to me anymore.

I just bathed; I would say ‘eyes wide open’, in the bright energy that enveloped me with its love.

We should consider if this reality in which I was immerged was adapted to my consciousness level, or if it was the ultimate reality and there is no other?

I know that I desired to remain as long as possible this indescribable happiness.

I was indeed aware that I was in a state very close to death. I heard me saying to myself that I had to go back to earth. I do very well remember that I hesitated. How could my brain receive all of this information when its activity is supposedly suspended?

I felt so good! I lay inside this bright reality. I desired that this blissful state would last.

Coming back meant suffering, and indeed the return was harsh.

I could make the decision. Its love for my loved ones Earth made me come back.

Vivid memory of my identity kept me related to my loved ones who stayed on earth.

This direct and spontaneous perception of the light gave me the ability to deeply understand what Life really is.

It enabled human beings, animals, plants, and me to know the unique source that generates us all. To know is to unify one’s consciousness, not to merely comprehend objects through thoughts, concepts, and language. This experience was my knowledge.

All living beings are part of this light. It goes through us all.

During my recovery, sitting in front of my garden, I felt life acting in blackbirds that joyfully answered each others. In wasps flying in to drink water in saucers. In the gracious tiny flowers which grew in a spiral.

The same energy supports everything. The same all-encompassing Consciousness.

I understood during this ‘trip’ the significance of the universe, which I perceived as a very consistent whole. I could access absolute knowledge, including this, instantaneously. Since then, this understanding gives me an intense feeling of life and the certainty that I am part of a harmonious whole. I belong to a meaningful cosmic unity.

That epiphany comes after thirty years of questing, sometime tinted with anguish, for the meaning of the existence. Thirty years during which, undergoing strong inner tensions and being supersensitive, I looked for answers by reading the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist mystiques.

Those books guided me along the path.

I also wrote two books, about Queen Saint Radegonde, and Mary the Egyptian. They helped me enter more deeply into myself.

During that quest, I met an enlightened person whom I consider as my spiritual mother. Born in 1913, possessing a vast culture and a higher spiritual level, this psychic taught me what is essential. This knowledge was planted as if in soil within me that was becoming fertile thanks to my readings.

Through intuition flashes since childhood, including visions of deceased beings as well as dreams, I could learn that different levels of reality do exist.

I thank all teachers who taught me.

This long inner reviewing and harmonization work has helped me feel better prepared to takes the steps of my existence. It has given me a greater understanding of life.

Just before my illness, I had the feeling that I was at the end of a cycle that began thirty years ago. I felt that I was at last ready to experience a deep, inner transformation.

My receptivity allowed me not to be upset or confused by what the experience offered, and to fully live it as a true spiritual revelation.

I have the feeling that this experience is indeed part of my life path.

From there I brought a great peace back, an ongoing feeling of total love. Like love was wrapping me up in a warm coat.

I keep the feeling of wonderment, and an immense gratefulness for life.

I stopped mental concentrations to understand. I stopped discursive thoughts, meditations, and introspections. I didn’t have to seek the path anymore. There is no path to follow toward what we are for all eternity. There is nothing to tend to.

All trying and failing have been swept by this light, which radiates Love.

So many errors, so much pain that could have been avoided for so long.

In my everyday life, I experience everything just as it was before. I came back with a full understanding of my experience. So, I don’t have to struggle to adapt my daily life to my new consciousness. I never, intended to be part of society at any rate. Not since childhood.

I just pay less attention to thoughts, feelings, and moods that come and go, leaving no trace.

Now I know, through direct experience, that the original consciousness is empty. It is just consciousness of self. It does not project in time or in action, it is not spread by attention and identification with objects as our ordinary consciousness in daily life is.

Original consciousness may only extend in the void that exists between two thoughts, or two feelings. The mind is suspended there, the object is absent there, and time is no more projected there.

This unintentional openness is our true nature. Consciousness is left to itself.

Self-consciousness has nothing to do with the coming and going of the ego. The ego is fully absorbed by contingencies and driven by events.

Consequently, all conditioning set for immemorial times, all aspects of personality may freely come and go. My consciousness does remain bonded to the supreme Consciousness, in the very heart of daily life.

My mind is not continuously agitated anymore by parasitical thoughts, which usually take over the entire consciousness field. The racket of thought ended.

I feel lighter, more relaxed, and bondless, in harmony with my deeper being. I feel no need to relate myself to a forged identity that has no genuine reality.

Natural consciousness of the absolute persists each day. Even within usual tasks, there is a background of serenity and inner silence.

I know that each moment in life is grace.

Before, life seemed simple to me, and uselessly complicated by human beings. It seems even simpler to me now. I see it in light and beauty in life.

Of course, I still see disorders in our world. I still see the chaotic play of good and evil, but beyond that, I sense its bright essence.

I feel more painfully the cruelty imposed on other human beings and animals. Our origin is common. It’s an illusion to believe we are separate. When we hurt another living being, we also hurt ourselves.

Life is a whole. How beautiful it is!

I am not homesick for this other dimension I have known. I don’t feel hurt, nor difficulty to live everyday life, because I understand that there is no difference between this world and the other side.

Since my experience, I do not feel distant from people. On the contrary, what I saw linked me more consciously to all that exists.

I feel the energy that flows through me, as it does through us all on this planet. Everything is saturated with cosmic essence. Everything comes from this source and goes back to it.

This energy in which we bathe, it is Love that continuously goes through us, whether we want it or not. Whether we are conscious of it or not.

Our task here is to relate to this Love.

There is nothing to look for, nothing to be avoided, but all is to be accepted in our presence to the world.

Because of that, there is no good/evil duality, nor inner/outer separation.

These differentiations are only visions of the mind intending to differentiate things.

All is equal in essence.

The spontaneous awakening induced by this experience does not belong to time, because the source exists at this very moment. The awakening always existed.

I understand at last, after this thirty year quest, that there is nothing to be reached, nothing to get.

Everything is already there, because all everything is this vibrating energy.

The light exists for all eternity. It is full of compassion. No method is necessary to know it. We already bathe within it. We are this reality, since the beginning.

Nothing ever separates us from our essence, except our mind that generally makes distinctions between the innumerable forms of existence. The mind differentiates.

The light towards which I felt sucked is the essence of my consciousness and of the consciousness of each being.

Indeed, we are in everything, and each thing is in us.

I feel the consciousness of each living being, including animals, as my own consciousness. The same energy goes through each thing, viewed as an infinite fragment of the big cosmic All.

Life resides in consciousness, and this consciousness exists for all eternity, outside our personality with its convictions, aspirations, regrets, and memories.

In this state, that I have known, we cannot identify ourselves anymore by means of our body. Not to our social role, culture, profession, passions, or even to our gender, character, or persona. We only believe all of this to be our personal identity.

Consciousness does not depend on this empirical ego. It possesses a sense of itself.

This understanding frees from all anguishes, all fears, and particularly from fear of death.

Death is no more an end but a mental creation, which, just like others, goes back to the space from where it emerged.

Unlike what the philosophers assert since the eighteenth century, death is not the end of everything including consciousness. It is not total annihilation.

There is no break, only a passage from one state to the other. Our consciousness continues to live, to sense, by totally integrating itself with cosmic energy.

This consciousness, which some people call the Self, is always at work during the experience of another reality, if you can sense it, eternally present under the garment of personality, then fear from death vanishes.

I know now that the border between life and death has no meaning. There is only Life that flows through us all.

This certainty, only given by the experience, that someday I’ll find again the grace to be so much loved, is a gift.

I feel that the ego gradually stretches. I feel that the ties to this ego, such as its memory, its desires, and its expectations, just naturally vanish.

Consequently, why should this experience lead me to separate from the world, to leave my job or even my family, or my friends?

There is nothing to give up, nor to flee, or to grab to as to identify oneself.

It’s only the mind that projects in the past to compare it to the present, or to the future. The mind creates duration and distance, for it needs a path to be followed. There is no path to go to Self.

There is no answer outside. Now, events have lost their fascination power.



I was touched by a truth that never can be reached through thought, but by direct experience, I set myself free from the confusion and considered the oppositions generated by the mind.

This awakening to the unity of all things sets me free from the idea that thoughts, feelings, and ego are really me. It set me free from this body to which I do not identify myself anymore. The pain of my body does not impede my joy. Nerves on my right leg remained inflamed for over six months after the meningitis. The body also seems to be penetrated by this consciousness, this cosmic essence. After all, it has been the instrument of this experience.

I am willing to accept what is, with no fear or rejection or wish.

I got a deep feeling of being, needing not to project myself in a future I would imagine, nor to relate myself to the new person I became, even if that one is at peace.

Indeed, the Me from today, transformed by her experience, exists instead of yesterday’s Me, with her errors and her clumsy quest.

Both are personalities, envelopes, covering the consciousness that does exist for all eternity.

I indeed lived a mystical experience. My own consciousness melted into the Supreme Consciousness.

Ancient time prophets and spiritual masters most certainly lived similar experiences. They are the source of their teachings.

I know that the elements, which usually feed our consciousness, were not active during this experience, leaving the light spread into that void. There was no thought, feeling, action, or will to distract me.

We generally reduce our consciousness to all these elements, the effects of which we see on our personality and our existence. Psychological time applies all its power thanks to the omnipresent thought, which ceaselessly projects and objectifies each state, each experience.



We usually equate our consciousness to the objective universe, which it deals with.

My consciousness was silent and inactive during this experience, and indeed present though. It was, I would say, a consciousness conscious of itself. Somehow an undifferentiated, impersonal consciousness.

What this experience brought to me is the capacity to deeply understand that a part of consciousness does exist, which cannot be equated to our mind. Not to our action capacity or to the objectified universe which it usually deals with. It is located at another level, to which we do not access through the materiality of our terrestrial existence, the space-time dimension in which we think and act, which creates like a separation wall.

Nevertheless, each being is free to set their consciousness at strictly human levels or to open it on the immense space, in order for it to reintegrate its essential nature.

It is differently arranged in each of us, according to the room our ego leaves it.

It always brings reality to the place it is located.

It is the very Life, located in itself, united to the light of Love.

Mathilda M