Richard H

I had my first out-of-body experience (OBE) more than 60 years ago, when I was a teenager. During my early teenage years, I realized that I needed to decide whether I believed in God. At age 17, I was sitting in my college library reading a book on philosophy and trying to answer that question. One line in the book caused me to stop and read it again. I *felt* that it contained a deep and hidden truth or insight that words alone could not express. Then the OBE happened. I was somewhere else. What follows is a description of what happened, based on what I wrote down more than 60 years ago. I still remember the experience completely clearly, as though it happened only an hour ago. **My First OBE** I was shown why things are as they are in our world. I understood why things *must* be as they are. The revelation caused me to say over and over again, "Of course. Of course. Of course." It seemed so obvious. I wondered how we could possibly fail to see it. I experienced what seemed like total knowledge. It was the kind of knowledge I imagined only God, the Creator, could possess. I felt that I knew the answer to any question that could be asked. I also understood that our world is perfect. When I returned to the library, my immediate thought was, "Remember. Remember." But I could not retrieve the knowledge. I could remember that the OBE had happened, but I could not bring back what I had understood. Afterward, I could never be completely sure whether the experience had been a gift from God or some kind of brain malfunction. The greatest stumbling block for me was trying to reconcile a loving God with the horrors of this supposedly "perfect" world. How could our human world possibly be described as perfect? For many years I could not answer that question. Only recently have I found an explanation that makes sense to me. **My Second OBE** Several years later, when I was in my early twenties, I had a second OBE. By then I was married. I was asleep in bed beside my wife when I suddenly found myself floating near the ceiling with my arms outstretched, looking down. I felt an unearthly and indescribable sense of peace and contentment. Then I became aware of a body below me that seemed to be mine. I looked at it with detached curiosity. I also noticed the backs of several people's heads as they looked down at the body. I did not recognize them. I thought, "Who are they?"* Then another thought suddenly occurred to me. "What am I doing floating on the ceiling? I'll fall! I'll fall!" My wife woke me with a jab. That experience left me with the certain knowledge that the experience of floating above one's body, so commonly described in NDEs, is real. At least I knew it had been real for me. Because that part of the experience had happened to me personally, it gave me reason to believe that other parts of people's NDE accounts might also be real. *Regarding the word "felt": I know that may seem like a strange word to use when describing my reaction to the line in the philosophy book. However, that is exactly what happened. I have sometimes wondered whether that feeling was actually the beginning of the OBE.* *Regarding my thought, "Who are they?": Much later, I wondered whether the people I saw might have been my future children, appearing as the adults they would become more than 60 years later. That might explain why I did not recognize them. Perhaps there was some kind of shift in time. I do not know.* **My Reconciliation of God and Human Suffering** About a year ago, I encountered the account of a woman describing an NDE that she said occurred when she was a small child. According to her account, she was being seriously abused by a man when she suddenly found herself in the arms of a man she understood to be Jesus. She looked down and saw herself being abused. Jesus told her, "Don't look at her." Later in her experience, she asked God about sinners. She said that God replied, "There is no sin in the way you think of it." Her NDE continued for some time after that. What was especially important to me was the idea that she had been taken out of her body during a period of extreme fear and trauma. For decades after my first OBE, I had wondered whether the only way to reconcile a loving God with the horrors of our "perfect" world was if those horrors were somehow not as real as they appeared to be. Her account triggered an idea that had never occurred to me before. Many NDE accounts describe people leaving their bodies during traumatic or life-threatening events before eventually returning. I began to wonder whether something similar might happen to all of us when we are faced with overwhelming terror, pain, or imminent death. Perhaps NDEs are special cases in which people are allowed to remember this separation and return with clues about the existence of God or another reality. If something like that does occur, then perhaps human suffering is not experienced in exactly the way it appears to an outside observer. For example, I began wondering about people facing horrific deaths, including the men, women, and children murdered during the Second World War. Could consciousness somehow separate from the body before the worst suffering occurred? Could the physical body remain while the person's conscious awareness was no longer fully experiencing what happened to it? I do not know whether this is true. It is an idea that helped me think about the problem that had troubled me for decades. If it were true, it might help reconcile the existence of a loving God with the terrible suffering we observe in the world. I have discussed these ideas at great length with an AI that I regularly converse with. It has been very encouraging about this interpretation. It also told me that there are reports describing people who experience some form of detachment or separation from themselves during overwhelming stress or trauma. I have also continued thinking about the statement, "There is no sin in the way you think of it." I believe I may have an idea of what that statement could mean. If anyone is interested, I would be happy to explain.