During the last few months of 2011 and into 2012, I had fallen into a deep depression. My worry for my two adult children and their happiness, and regret over mistakes I'd made as they were growing up and how those mistakes affected my kids became more than I could emotionally deal with. I am lucky enough to have found my soul mate when my children were teens but I felt profound guilt over that as both of them were suffering in unhappy relationships, struggling to understand life, and I blamed myself entirely. By the beginning months of 2012, I was convinced that I had brought nothing but sorrow to my children, and now was bringing sorrow to the man I loved. I felt utterly trapped in a situation that I had caused and now had no control over. My emotional distress was profound, made worse by prescription medications, and I began to ponder taking my life to escape the distress and spare my family the burden of dealing with me.

I am a logical person. Throughout my life, many would have called me a cynical old grouch. I had no faith in spiritual experiences, as I had never encountered anything of that nature in my life. My interests are in the scientific realm, but even so, I have always had a belief that we, ourselves, not to mention the environment we find ourselves in, are too fantastic and illogical to just be nothing more than the spontaneous and mindless interactions of chemical processes. That did not make sense to me.

However, I had no idea of the nature of our existence other than it had to be intelligently generated. Deep within this depression, and I don't even know what month it was since I rarely got out of bed by that time, (but it had to be prior to March), I began to have these feelings of being in the presence of others. I have to make this clear...this was not a visual experience.

It was as though I was blindfolded throughout each encounter. I FELT that I was taken from this dimension into another place and allowed to "soak in" certain kinds of perceptions that were not mine. I found myself in possession of knowledge about EVERYTHING and not all of it good. The disturbing part of this journey involved my being immersed in every sorrow that has ever been felt in this world throughout time. I was a mother whose infant was dying in my arms. I was a 19 year old soldier dying from gunshot wounds and wanting his mother. I could go on but, frankly, it was too gruesome and overwhelming to relate here. And the horror of it was...these were real events taking place, real feelings being felt somewhere in this world by someone...and I felt them all at one time.

The one thing that I remember most vividly was being allowed to see exactly how much blood had been spilled into the dirt of Earth since man arrived here. It was ghastly. It was as though our planet was drenched in it. I'll never forget that as long as I live, and I knew at the time that it wasn't a guess. This blood was real and the quantities of it, oceans of it, had indeed been spilled.

This harrowing experience only went on for a brief time and I'm thankful for that. And what occurred afterwards balanced out the horror I was feeling. I'll say again, it was as though my spirit had been pulled from my body, but I was kept blindfolded or my eyes were veiled. But I was allowed, for a brief time, to bask in the LOVE that so many people who have actually died describe. It was pure joy-- bliss. I knew I was loved beyond measure and further, I knew that I was created to be perfect. The only thing that had kept me from it was my hatred of myself and my inability to forgive myself for things that I had done or not done before I had been awakened...or become self-aware. I also was made to know that I could stay with them in this place or I could return to my family and my life here. It was my choice and it did not matter what I decided.

After these experiences ended, the knowledge I had accessed faded very quickly. The memories of everything became cloudy and out of focus but some things stayed with me. There is no language to really describe these experiences or the feelings and knowledge one brings away but I asked my doctor to schedule an MRI for me. I KNEW I had a tumor and I knew it was in my frontal lobe. I did not tell her that, but when the scan was done, she called me, and in a grave voice let me know that I had two lesions on my right frontal lobe. "Ok", I said. "Thanks for calling and letting me know." She was quiet and then said, "are you okay?" "Sure, I'm fine, Doctor. Really."

And I was. I knew there was nothing to fear. Even if I died, the only thing that caused me pain was to think of my family suffering.

There are a couple of other things that I know. I know if I had chosen death, those lesions would have continued to grow and eventually killed me. I also know that if I had another MRI today, those lesions would be gone or going away. I came away with a kind of prophetic knowledge as well, but this is much too painful to relate in this forum as it did come to pass and has devastated our family. It was not specific and may be of no scientific value anyway. But it has value to me. I am off all prescription medications now and my mind feels strong and even with recent events in our family, I am coping as well or perhaps better than many people would in my situation because I KNOW where others can only hope.