My Near Death Experience
Jim Bruton
06 OCT 2016
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I appear on the concrete terrace of an abandoned and decrepit skyscraper, on my right knee but with my left foot planted firmly on the ground. I look up and see an amazing, panoramic skyline of a purgatorial city… the ruins of gray buildings stacked upon gray buildings, stretching all the way back to a brooding skyline. Apocalyptic clouds hover over the metropolis, storm-heavy.
In this gothic world, there are no sounds. I’m not deaf, it’s just that quiet.
Kneeling in its shadow all along, I suddenly notice to my left the only real thing of interest- a large egg-shaped structure formed of open latticework, filled with gears. Monolithic. Austere. And finely crafted-- the egg is maybe four stories high, its intricate lattice constructed of a hard material as gray as the world surrounding it.
In this gothic world, there are no sounds. I’m not deaf, it’s just that quiet.
Kneeling in its shadow all along, I suddenly notice to my left the only real thing of interest- a large egg-shaped structure formed of open latticework, filled with gears. Monolithic. Austere. And finely crafted-- the egg is maybe four stories high, its intricate lattice constructed of a hard material as gray as the world surrounding it.
A wave of nausea hits me and I say out loud, “I don’t think I can stand this.”
Inside the egg, there is an immediate whirring of the sector gears- the kind you see in clock-like mechanisms. Free-floating in space, these move in all directions within the confines of the egg.
Curious, I draw closer, studying the egg and its moving gears within.
“ What is this thing?”
As I stand before the egg, a disembodied VOICE responds within my consciousness.
This is the future birthing into the now.
I see the gears— some which appear solid and some not- passing through each other in a physically impossible manner. The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex- like a 4-D model of time. They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg.
This is the process of Becoming.
My fingers brush one of the more solid appearing gears. As I touch it, within my mind I see something like a video feed of future events. Then I double over in pain.
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering with a light clacking sound into a new configuration.
“What’s happening now?”
Each gear is the probability of a thought, word or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around what you have removed.
“How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?”
Why else are you here?
“I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.”
You are in the In Between.
“In between what?”
Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”
It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember.
“I have no idea.”
Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
“OK. Why do some of these gears- these futures that I touch- make me sick and not others?”
All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
“Where are the gears that feel good?”
You’re not here to feel good.
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car, LAUGHTER… they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less so and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
“It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Even though I now feel less pain, am I going to die sooner from doing all this?”
Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one.
“I don’t know how comforting that is.”
Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables over which you have no control, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.
“So what am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?”
What is clearly before you. Grace. No one deserves heaven- it can only be given by Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be chosen, at the expense of the world that separates us.
“This fixing my future is painful. And I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where or when these futures happen.”
Where is no more important than what or when. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
“It's as if this place was made so that I can only do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.”
If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
I watch a gear disintegrate into dust as it passes out of view, from the present into the past.
You can’t change the past. But you can make better choices in the future. Everything is interconnected. And pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with everyone, as I am gentle with you.
“Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?”
You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
I look up into the stone gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it. And I say out loud:
“I think I can live with this now.”
Inside the egg, there is an immediate whirring of the sector gears- the kind you see in clock-like mechanisms. Free-floating in space, these move in all directions within the confines of the egg.
Curious, I draw closer, studying the egg and its moving gears within.
“ What is this thing?”
As I stand before the egg, a disembodied VOICE responds within my consciousness.
This is the future birthing into the now.
I see the gears— some which appear solid and some not- passing through each other in a physically impossible manner. The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex- like a 4-D model of time. They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg.
This is the process of Becoming.
My fingers brush one of the more solid appearing gears. As I touch it, within my mind I see something like a video feed of future events. Then I double over in pain.
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering with a light clacking sound into a new configuration.
“What’s happening now?”
Each gear is the probability of a thought, word or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around what you have removed.
“How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?”
Why else are you here?
“I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.”
You are in the In Between.
“In between what?”
Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”
It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember.
“I have no idea.”
Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
“OK. Why do some of these gears- these futures that I touch- make me sick and not others?”
All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
“Where are the gears that feel good?”
You’re not here to feel good.
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car, LAUGHTER… they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less so and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
“It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Even though I now feel less pain, am I going to die sooner from doing all this?”
Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one.
“I don’t know how comforting that is.”
Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables over which you have no control, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.
“So what am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?”
What is clearly before you. Grace. No one deserves heaven- it can only be given by Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be chosen, at the expense of the world that separates us.
“This fixing my future is painful. And I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where or when these futures happen.”
Where is no more important than what or when. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
“It's as if this place was made so that I can only do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.”
If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
I watch a gear disintegrate into dust as it passes out of view, from the present into the past.
You can’t change the past. But you can make better choices in the future. Everything is interconnected. And pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with everyone, as I am gentle with you.
“Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?”
You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
I look up into the stone gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it. And I say out loud:
“I think I can live with this now.”
I wake up in a hospital. I am told that my plane crashed and the doctors run down the list of all my injuries. I discover that I was put into a coma upon my arrival and was kept there for 1 week. For that entire time, I was in the In Between and did not stop yanking out those gears in order to feel less sick. But time doesn’t seem to move at all there and it’s not like I had a physical body that needed to rest, eat or sleep.
I am moved to a rehabilitation hospital and for the next few weeks, the experience of the In Between begins to push through. The Integration, or Coping, began almost immediately in my realizing how differently I felt about so many things and responded accordingly. To the doctors, the nurses, family, friends and memories.
One morning I awoke to find a photo of me taped to the wall, obviously put there by my wife. She wanted me to remember who I was in an effort of encouragement and healing.
I am moved to a rehabilitation hospital and for the next few weeks, the experience of the In Between begins to push through. The Integration, or Coping, began almost immediately in my realizing how differently I felt about so many things and responded accordingly. To the doctors, the nurses, family, friends and memories.
One morning I awoke to find a photo of me taped to the wall, obviously put there by my wife. She wanted me to remember who I was in an effort of encouragement and healing.
As I looked at the picture, I reflected on how many lifetimes ago this already was. To my wife, this was the best version of myself- perfect for a match.com profile. But over the next few days, I began to feel differently about the man in the photo. Instinctively, I felt that my best version was the depersonalized conscious being in the In Between, stripped of everything. Knowing neither joy nor sorrow, but flowing in the Impossible Now beyond time, in a perfect state of Letting Go.
This change was reflected when a friend asked me if I had a bad premonition on the day of my flight. I answered that there is always a sense of caution when test flying an experimental aircraft but I was feeling guided to answer, “Beyond premonition, what if I had full knowledge of what was about to happen? Would I have had the guts to get into the cockpit anyway?” I felt this was the right answer, though I can’t say I would have made it.
In case you are wondering from that photograph, my vague answer is that I was an independent contractor. My public face was that of an NBC News war journalist.
This change was reflected when a friend asked me if I had a bad premonition on the day of my flight. I answered that there is always a sense of caution when test flying an experimental aircraft but I was feeling guided to answer, “Beyond premonition, what if I had full knowledge of what was about to happen? Would I have had the guts to get into the cockpit anyway?” I felt this was the right answer, though I can’t say I would have made it.
In case you are wondering from that photograph, my vague answer is that I was an independent contractor. My public face was that of an NBC News war journalist.
Anyway, back to the present.
As I regained my wits, I thought about what brought me to the hospital….
A few years prior, I met a widow with 3 babies and they grew on me. Enough that I decided to change course, marry her and retire from the war business. Wanting to help me settle down, Dana suggested I build an airplane I’d been fascinated by since childhood.
So I built my a replica 1917 Fokker Triplane like the Red Baron flew, with my own paint scheme of black and white stripes.
As I regained my wits, I thought about what brought me to the hospital….
A few years prior, I met a widow with 3 babies and they grew on me. Enough that I decided to change course, marry her and retire from the war business. Wanting to help me settle down, Dana suggested I build an airplane I’d been fascinated by since childhood.
So I built my a replica 1917 Fokker Triplane like the Red Baron flew, with my own paint scheme of black and white stripes.
I then built my second one, an improved copy of a 1933 French Flying Flea. It was more whimsical in design and looked like a lot of fun.
I didn’t like its handling on the first test flight so 3 days later on Thursday October 6th, I decided to go up again to try and master its quirks.
I took off and flew one pass around the field. Halfway back around, my engine suddenly stopped. I restarted it but it quit again. Due to the poor glide ratio of its vintage design and with only forested hills all around me, the one place I could aim for was a small lake in a nearby Boy Scout camp. There was no making it back to the airstrip. Trying to compensate for the steep rate of sink, I overshot the lake by 10 feet and crashed into the large tree trunks at the water’s edge.
I took off and flew one pass around the field. Halfway back around, my engine suddenly stopped. I restarted it but it quit again. Due to the poor glide ratio of its vintage design and with only forested hills all around me, the one place I could aim for was a small lake in a nearby Boy Scout camp. There was no making it back to the airstrip. Trying to compensate for the steep rate of sink, I overshot the lake by 10 feet and crashed into the large tree trunks at the water’s edge.
As you can see from the photos, when I stopped crashing, there was no aircraft left around me. Only the rear portion was intact, to which I was still seat belted. A good Samaritan named Greg was fishing nearby and ran over to help. He called 911 and kept me propped up so I could gasp for air until LifeStar flew in to rescue me.
I say “gasp for air” because both my lungs were ruptured, all of my ribs were broken, there was a hole in my lower back from being hit by a 70 mph engine battery, the skin on my chin was hanging down in shreds and my right leg looked like a pretzel. Other than that, I was fine.
I say “gasp for air” because both my lungs were ruptured, all of my ribs were broken, there was a hole in my lower back from being hit by a 70 mph engine battery, the skin on my chin was hanging down in shreds and my right leg looked like a pretzel. Other than that, I was fine.
LifeStar, our medivac service, landed as close as they could and pulled me out of the wreckage. We then flew to Hartford and an awaiting trauma team. Upon my wife’s arrival, the surgeons informed her that I needed days of 6+ hour operations and that they could lose me at any time. So they put me into a week-long coma and that’s where my NDE begins...
So again, here I am recovering in the hospital and absorbing this huge experience. I began writing down what was coming back to me as soon as my wife could bring me my laptop. At the same time, some of the after-effects of my NDE began to appear.
As you know, many people return with heightened senses, physical, mental or spiritual. If you were psychic before, you are more psychic after. I wasn’t understanding it at the time, but my enhanced “super power” was empathy, or to be more specific, likeability.
The first person I shared my NDE with was my morning shift nurse, Jen. She was truly the A-team. I realized that many times she was just hanging out to talk about life, the universe and everything. And I appreciated how busy everyone there was. So one day I asked if I could share something with her and she readily said yes. While I was telling her about my NDE, she began to cry and when I asked why, she said she didn’t want me to die, because I was magical. I have her what I know now to be an INFJ stare and asked her to explain. She said that every patient gets one doctor and only 15 minutes per day of their time. She had seen 3 doctors regularly in my room for up to an hour, and when eavesdropping by the door, we were talking about everything under the sun but my medical case. She had never seen anything like it. In fact, one of the doctors wanted to start a business with me so much that I lay in bed on many international conference calls with my leg in a cage (an ex-fit), doped up on serious pain killers, somehow sounding intelligent to everyone. Now that was a miracle.
And so it went. The staff were very kind to me and I remember in the middle of one night, an older nurse came in to check on me and actually kissed me on the forehead. I pretended to be asleep because I didn’t want her to be embarrassed or concerned. I was very touched by her kind gesture.
Eventually I was discharged home and the In Between continued to reveal itself to me. I felt that I was more there than here, and that It wasn’t a place you go to or come from but a place you simply are. In a rather haphazard way I began to research my experience and somewhere along the way I realized that I had a Near Death Experience. But the validation of it against some of the more common milestones eluded me.
For instance, there was no Tunnel, No Meeting Dead Loved Ones, No Unconditional Love and No Boundary of No Return.
As to a Life review, I feel the pain of the worst choices possible in my future which logically are the fruit of my past.
A feeling of unconditional love. Just like in a military boot camp, there is no feeling of love from your drill instructor. Its design and purpose are to help you survive what comes next, to strengthen your resolve to push on and to create not so much courage, as Heart. That and to make better, informed, decisions to ensure your survival and success.
Honestly, in contrast to so many NDEs, mine wasn’t about feeling any emotion of joy or love- it was about Mission and Purpose, with an almost ruthless edge to it. I was focused on the process of setting things up to be right than experiencing the content of right living. I mean, you can build a swimming pool without ever getting wet.
By design, I was put into this gray and colorless place to not be distracted and really- there was one thing and one thing only I came to realize I could do. And the way in which I would do it was not with any sense of morality but by using the pain of these potential choices. That was more humbling that I have words to express.
So again, here I am recovering in the hospital and absorbing this huge experience. I began writing down what was coming back to me as soon as my wife could bring me my laptop. At the same time, some of the after-effects of my NDE began to appear.
As you know, many people return with heightened senses, physical, mental or spiritual. If you were psychic before, you are more psychic after. I wasn’t understanding it at the time, but my enhanced “super power” was empathy, or to be more specific, likeability.
The first person I shared my NDE with was my morning shift nurse, Jen. She was truly the A-team. I realized that many times she was just hanging out to talk about life, the universe and everything. And I appreciated how busy everyone there was. So one day I asked if I could share something with her and she readily said yes. While I was telling her about my NDE, she began to cry and when I asked why, she said she didn’t want me to die, because I was magical. I have her what I know now to be an INFJ stare and asked her to explain. She said that every patient gets one doctor and only 15 minutes per day of their time. She had seen 3 doctors regularly in my room for up to an hour, and when eavesdropping by the door, we were talking about everything under the sun but my medical case. She had never seen anything like it. In fact, one of the doctors wanted to start a business with me so much that I lay in bed on many international conference calls with my leg in a cage (an ex-fit), doped up on serious pain killers, somehow sounding intelligent to everyone. Now that was a miracle.
And so it went. The staff were very kind to me and I remember in the middle of one night, an older nurse came in to check on me and actually kissed me on the forehead. I pretended to be asleep because I didn’t want her to be embarrassed or concerned. I was very touched by her kind gesture.
Eventually I was discharged home and the In Between continued to reveal itself to me. I felt that I was more there than here, and that It wasn’t a place you go to or come from but a place you simply are. In a rather haphazard way I began to research my experience and somewhere along the way I realized that I had a Near Death Experience. But the validation of it against some of the more common milestones eluded me.
For instance, there was no Tunnel, No Meeting Dead Loved Ones, No Unconditional Love and No Boundary of No Return.
As to a Life review, I feel the pain of the worst choices possible in my future which logically are the fruit of my past.
A feeling of unconditional love. Just like in a military boot camp, there is no feeling of love from your drill instructor. Its design and purpose are to help you survive what comes next, to strengthen your resolve to push on and to create not so much courage, as Heart. That and to make better, informed, decisions to ensure your survival and success.
Honestly, in contrast to so many NDEs, mine wasn’t about feeling any emotion of joy or love- it was about Mission and Purpose, with an almost ruthless edge to it. I was focused on the process of setting things up to be right than experiencing the content of right living. I mean, you can build a swimming pool without ever getting wet.
By design, I was put into this gray and colorless place to not be distracted and really- there was one thing and one thing only I came to realize I could do. And the way in which I would do it was not with any sense of morality but by using the pain of these potential choices. That was more humbling that I have words to express.
Memories of Depersonalization & Tendency toward Process/Quantum Physics.
When I was told that the who, what or when of the choices I was removing was less important than seeing and understanding how things fit and refit together, how everything was interconnected, this reinforced a natural tendency for me to less distracted by content and more intent on process. So with that, my insights into the In Between were improved by the enjoyable research of what I call a consumer grade level of quantum physics.
I began reading about entanglement and super positioned probabilities overlaying a single moment in and out of time. As I followed these threads I felt I was understanding more about my inner experience.
Those gears of possible futures flowing ghostlike through each other are what quantum physics calls the superpositioning of probabilities within an emerging event. From those simultaneous waves of possibilities, eventually one will collapse to become a particle of reality. This is what “choice” is.
I mentioned that some of the gears were less in focus than others. Now I understand that you can’t focus on a probability because it is a representation of several possibilities, which aren’t yet in a single place to be focused on but whose meanings are clear- until one is chosen and supersedes the others to become the singular present. It seems a poetic statement that the housing of all the gears birthing from the future to the present appears in the shape of an egg.
When I was told that the who, what or when of the choices I was removing was less important than seeing and understanding how things fit and refit together, how everything was interconnected, this reinforced a natural tendency for me to less distracted by content and more intent on process. So with that, my insights into the In Between were improved by the enjoyable research of what I call a consumer grade level of quantum physics.
I began reading about entanglement and super positioned probabilities overlaying a single moment in and out of time. As I followed these threads I felt I was understanding more about my inner experience.
Those gears of possible futures flowing ghostlike through each other are what quantum physics calls the superpositioning of probabilities within an emerging event. From those simultaneous waves of possibilities, eventually one will collapse to become a particle of reality. This is what “choice” is.
I mentioned that some of the gears were less in focus than others. Now I understand that you can’t focus on a probability because it is a representation of several possibilities, which aren’t yet in a single place to be focused on but whose meanings are clear- until one is chosen and supersedes the others to become the singular present. It seems a poetic statement that the housing of all the gears birthing from the future to the present appears in the shape of an egg.
The In Between shows the quantum reality of time, entanglement and how all things are interconnected. Obviously there is more to its purpose than this, but it’s amazing how logically consistent the model is, the deeper I dig into it. There are entangled things that are a universe apart, and when you change the state of one, you instantly change the state of its entangled mate, no matter the distance in space or even in time. There are things that happened at the beginning of time that are, not will, affecting other things at the end of time. Literally, in between the two is only the present.
As we travel along the arrow from one to the other, are we are not traveling only toward an end, but also back to the Source, in that the two are entangled?
Taking it a step further, if something is happening at the beginning of time that is also happening at its end, then everything in between must be happening all at once.
We use Time as the artificial construct to play the story out with a beginning, middle and end.
And if after all that, people still ask, “How do you know it wasn’t a hallucination?”….
As we travel along the arrow from one to the other, are we are not traveling only toward an end, but also back to the Source, in that the two are entangled?
Taking it a step further, if something is happening at the beginning of time that is also happening at its end, then everything in between must be happening all at once.
We use Time as the artificial construct to play the story out with a beginning, middle and end.
And if after all that, people still ask, “How do you know it wasn’t a hallucination?”….
… After-Effects & Integration
It takes a while to recognize a pattern. I’ve definitely experienced some of the more common after-effects, most notably with electrical and electronic devices.
The text message on the left was with Jen, an NDE friend ,who suddenly thought to text me when I was 20 minutes away from PMH Atwater’s home. I was driving and the FB Messenger app suddenly popped up. As my friend was typing, all of a sudden my own blank text field began to fill in with letters. To be 100% honest, I was so startled that I almost went off the road grabbing my phone to delete the message because honestly, I had no idea what was going on, what it was about to say next and then if would Send to my friend something terribly wrong for which there would be no defense. So what you see here is an exact mockup of what I saw and experienced- my text at the ready to Send. And I have no idea who typed that, or whether it was intended for my friend or me.
The email on the right came shortly after. Viktoria is a Hungarian researcher in Austria and this was her 2nd email to me. Or was it? Note the date of 3/10/19. The email begins with “Happy 2018!” and was sent by my first wife 11 years prior, in response to my asking where I might find other fellow followers of our spiritual path in the NE USA. I have asked a lot of really smart people in the IT world, those with the highest Cisco certifications in Unified Communications, and they have no answer as to how these 2 emails could have come together and merged. And it’s interesting that both are spiritually related. I mean, the body of the text could have been any email of any content. So what was this all about?
With regard to electronics and electricity, where do I begin?
Light bulbs- constantly.
Within a 6-month period, I had to replace our HVAC system and 4 of the 5 damper motoes in the ducts that direct the air. The team that designed the new system looked at why and eventually, just shrugged and said, “power surge, maybe?”
Then the microwave blew up, after I was talking about the In Between to our son, put in a cup of coffee that needed reheating- for only 30 seconds- and when I reached in to remove it, the coffee exploded out of the cup and I also had to replace the microwave.
When first speaking to PMH on the phone, it was in FEB 2019. I had started my car before our call to warm it up for a drive. At 4:40pm, toward the end of our call, I felt my energy state increase, right as she commented on this happening. Then we talked about the Impossible Now and being Present. At 5:00, we concluded our call. As I walked out to my car, I looked up at the porch light and it died. Then I got into my car to discover than one of the digital clocks was fine and the other frozen at 4:40pm. Remember, my car had already been started and was running during the call- so the clock had been OK up until 4:40pm when for some reason, it just stopped.
I recently started working onsite at a customer of mine and one morning I was working on their computer, my computer and using my iPhone as a hot spot. A new friend I’d made walked up to say hello and all of a sudden both computers started going crazy and so did my phone. As I was trying to prepare for an important conference call, with some frustration I simply said, “this is due to my NDE” and he literally said, “I know”. I asked him how he knew and he said, “I died as a baby”. So we had lunch shortly after.
Last year, I was sharing my experience with my 85-year old mother in Charlotte and right then the transformer outside her condo blew up, which had never happened in her 30 years living there. She called a friend to talk about it on her POTS phone, and that too stopped working, and many of you know this also never happens.
I also had 1 week of 5 cash registers failing in stores when I walked up to make my purchases. One of the stores was a local psychic shop where I went to buy a piece of hematite. They knew what was happening and gave me the stone for free if I would leave the store- it was all good natured.
The weirdest electrical/electronic experience was when an NDE friend of mine was driving to her boyfriend’s one evening and began texting me from her phone. As I texted back, she responded that her audio was suddenly going haywire. We kept texting and as she walked into her boyfriend’s home, his audio system suddenly began wonky. He yelled out with a laugh, “Tell Jim to stop it”, as he knew well how when I visited the lights would flicker constantly. Then her son called her, as he was on break from university, visiting her apartment. He reported that the audio system there was going haywire and it was even in the headphones. As I shared this with my wife in real time, she became very quiet. Then I was reminded that on the moment her husband died on the highway due to an accident a year before we met, the audio system at their home suddenly turned on, volume full up, as if between radio stations- white noise. As it was just after midnight, she jumped out of bed, went downstairs to turn it off, then went back to bed. The police knocked on her door about half an hour later, delivering the news that changed her and the children’s lives- but she made the connection between the time of her husband’s death and the radio suddenly coming on.
It seems that some of these types of after effects are calming down, but they’re being replaced by other experiences- and synchronicities of increasing importance.
My empathy- remember, this seemed to be my super power- has I believe revealed to be a pattern helping me to understand 3 strange experiences where my daughter, my son and my wife all appeared to change appearance, then back to normal again. Everyone else stayed the same. In deep thought on these instances, all 3 people were in a heightened energy state and very much having to project someone else than who they normally are. The 2 kids were at my wife’s holiday party thrown by her office- she leases jets to wealthy people- so they had to be dressed up and on their A-Game, meaning they had to be “grown up”- definitely not who they normally are. My wife’s appearance changed several times right in front of me when? About an hour before the premiere of a play she had the lead role in. So there she was, definitely in a highly energized state and even more definitely, already projecting the character she had to be. Understanding how increased empathy is very common among NDE’ers, I would be interested to know if this type of experience is shared.
As if this constant head-scratching isn’t half of what Integration is all about, then there are the constantly new insights and expiring attachments that change and update the answer every day to “Who am I now?” It’s been a challenge for sure.
I would like to say one more thing. That all the force of Will you need is found in the art of Letting Go. Always live Life in celebration of the individual spirit. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul.
Podcast Links:
Narrated:
Presentations:
Narrated:
- Near Death Experience Podcast by Chas Hathaway:
- Sam Reads Near Death Experiences Podcast:
- Kirsty Salisbury's Let's Talk Dear Death:
- Tricia Barker's Conversations with Near-Death Experiencers with Jim Bruton--Episode #46:
- Paranormal Talks:
- Part 1 of 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIpKTgeCcQ&feature=youtu.be
- Part 2 of 3: https://youtu.be/NFdgwVPy28Y
- Part 3 of 3: https://youtu.be/sybGLdumsHk
- Exploring Death with Lisa Jones:
- IANDS Radio Interview with Lee Witting:
- Simon's Past Lives Podcast:
- Hillbilly Horror Stories (yes, you read that right):
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/144-haunted-michigan-and-jim-bruton/id1146579746?i=1000437279999;
- Before listening to the entire podcast, Fast Forward to approximately 49:35 (minutes:seconds) and begin there. Fun and totally unpretentious and I really enjoyed the host- one of the best interviews, more like a conversation.
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/144-haunted-michigan-and-jim-bruton/id1146579746?i=1000437279999;
Presentations:
2020 IANDS Meeting in Durham, NC
The In Between, my Near Death Experience
Lecture Presentation - Friday, Feb 21: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
The In Between, my Near Death Experience
Lecture Presentation - Friday, Feb 21: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
2019 IANDS Conference in King of Prussia, PA
Revolutionary Experiences: The Power of Love and Consciousness
Lecture Presentation – Saturday, Aug. 31: 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm
Revolutionary Experiences: The Power of Love and Consciousness
Lecture Presentation – Saturday, Aug. 31: 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm