Back in March 1992 I had what I believe really strongly where near death experiences.  I was trying to get media attention to my spiritual ideas and also trying to have some political impact during the election(primaries) happening at that time.  A lot of people where running as political outsiders and I felt I was the real outsider.  I wrote an article(letter to the editor) for the local newspaper in Roanoke VA. about how important character and really feeling empathy for people is to choosing a good political leader.  I was not happy by how slow they responded to it and sense psychically that they were rejecting it.  (This article was put in the newspaper as an op-ed quite a bit later).  I felt like I was not being listened to and that I could contribute a lot to helping make people sensitive to the concerns of those who often are ignored or not given any political voice.  I may have been quite a bit affected by the fact that Bill Clinton was only a few years older than me.  I did not see Bill Clinton as sensitive enough.  The pressure on me,  that led to the near death experiences,  started when I went downtown with a sign to draw attention to myself and started handing out a paper I wrote which was basically written to try to organize people who felt like outsider just like me, so that more voices could be heard.  I felt like I could relate emotionally really well to people who were being ignored and that I could really effectively speak for them.

I thought at the time of was really good at handling pressure since I had done so much intense spiritual training.  I always did best under pressure.  But, I just seemed to not be able to reach people and kept working at building up the pressure by trying to do more.  I took on not only the newspaper, but the local TV station, but got little in the way of results.  The pressure put my mind in a strange place and made me a little paranoid.  I started to loose my grip on reality and had to be careful how I was interpreting things.  I was lucky that I had an objective core that would not trust the way I was starting to misread what was happening around me and prevent me from rash actions based on incomplete information.   Often when people keep clear of you because of your intense state of mind one does not get good feed back to help one make sense of what is happening around you. Stress can do strange things to the mind.  I have a bad long term memory so I can not give you the details in a clear form.  Along with the stress was an anger(at being ignored and mistreated) that was as strong an anger as I could imagine.  I had no constructive way to direct the anger so it went inward creating a hug amount of stress.

Anyway the stress started to affect my heart which seem to be my weak point.  I have often pushed my limits physically and have used meditation and meditative breathing to settle my heart when I felt it was losing its rhythm and in trouble.  I had developed a lot of body sensitivity due to years of meditation and meditative walking.  I was born with a poor finer motor skills and believe my nervous system can not control my heart fine enough when I am really stressed.  When my heart is in trouble I can continue my meditative breathing continuously as long as I remain conscious.  The problem occurs when I sleep and can no longer maintain this type of breathing.  Anyway I got so much stress that I had to do continuous meditative breathing and was afraid to fall asleep and lose control with dire consequences.  I did feel at the time like I was connected psychically with a lot of people who would strongly want someone like me to just go away and disappear.

I did eventually get really tired and my body could not stay conscious.  So I lost consciousness and felt my spirit leave my body.  I do not believe all people have exactly the same type of near death experiences, but I tend to believe people who sincerely believe they had one.  You are the only one who truely knows you have had one.  I am very unique and have a poor visual memory which I am sure affected how unique my near death experience was.  I believe the spirit world and the dream world are the same to quite a degree and that near death experiences can appear dream like, but with a lot more intensity and realness in how they feel.  That we connect to the spirit world to a degree in dreams, but go completely into the spirit world in a near death experience.  In my near death experience, when my spirit left my body I had this vision of me shooting away on some kind of spacecraft away from the earth and felt like people/spirits that wanted me to gone where trying to force me(my spirit) to leave this planet for good.  I am sort of a spiritual warrior by nature so I managed to bail out and come back.  I felt my spirit pop back into my body.  I probably would have been in trouble if I left my body for long since I was home alone with no medical help available.  I believe my heart most likely stopped for a short period.

My second near death experience was more positive and happened I think a day later, if my poor long term memory serves me well.  This time I left my body and connected with my mother and felt her love.  I don’t remember any more than that, but I know it was similar to the first in how it felt related to leaving and returning to the body.  I do believe the act of leaving the body and coming back did relieve the stress in my body and helped my heart to get back in rhythm.  I did stay away from new sources of stress and started to take extra B complex vitamins again since I had discontinued taking them due to what some nutritional experts were telling people.

As a result of my near death experiences, and mental perception problems I had while under extreme stress I approached the spiritual differently.  I decided that I had to get rid of any of my beliefs that were based more on myth than reality or logic.  This was the beginning of a major overhaul of my beliefs and the begining of a period in which I was constantly questioning my beliefs and working to make them work better in helping me perform in this reality.  I wanted to have beliefs that really interfaced with this reality really well.   I also felt that my meditative walking, which I designed to help me handle really intense emotions and the stress that comes with them, did not perform for me the way they should and also felt that I better not stop doing intense aerobic type exercise again or stop taking my extra B complex vitamins.  I had stopped doing my intense aerobic exercises which involved walking swing really heavy hand weights a little while before this stressful period.  Not doing the intense exercise may have freed up energy that lead to me doing what I did that led to all the stress.  I write this experience because others are curious.  I really trust that I have a really good grip on reality and know that my near death experience is as real as the ones others have experienced.