Observations placeholder

“Seven Minutes in Eternity ” With Their Aftermath By William Dudley Pelley

THEY did not need to answer my question. My question was superfluous. I knew what had happened. I had left my earthly body back on a bungalow bed in the California mountains. I had gone through all the sensations of dying and whether this was the Hereafter or an intermediate station, most emphatically I had reached a place and state which had never been duplicated in all my experience.

I say this because of the inexpressible ecstacy of my new state, both mental and physical.

For I had carried some sort of a physical body into that new environment with me. I knew that it was nude. It had been capable of feeling the cool, steadying pressure of my friends’ hands before my eyes opened. And now that I had reawakened without the slightest distress or harm, I was conscious of a beauty and loveliness of environment that surpasses chronicling on printed paper.

A sort of marble-tiled-and-furnished portico the place was, lighted by that soft, unseen, opal illumination, with a clear-as-crystal Roman pool diagonally across from my bench on which I remained for a time striving to credit that all this was real . Out beyond the portico everything appeared to exist in a sort of turquoise haze. . . .

I looked from this vista back to the two friends who had received me. There were no other persons anywhere in evidence in the first half of my experience.

Somehow I knew those two men — knew them as intimately as I knew the reflection of my own features in a mirror. And yet something about them, their virility, their physical “glow,” their strong and friendly personality sublimated as it were, kept me from instant identity.

And they knew a good joke about me. They continued to watch me with a smile in their eyes when I got down from my marble bench and moved about the portico till I came to the edge of the pool.

“Bathe in it,” came the instruction. “You’ll find you’ll enjoy it.”

I went down the steps into delightful water. And here is one of the strangest incidents of the whole “adventure” . . . when I came up from that bath I was no longer conscious that I was nude. On the other hand, neither was I conscious of having donned clothes. The bath did something to me in the way of clothing me. What, I don’t know.

But immediately I came up garbed somehow by the magic contact of the water, people began coming into the patio, crossing over it and going down the southern steps and off into the inexpressible turquoise. As they passed me, they cast curiously- amused glances at me. And everybody nodded and spoke to me. They had a kindness, a courtesy, a friendliness, in their faces and addresses that quite overwhelmed me. Think of all the saintly, attractive, magnetic folk you know, imagine them constituting the whole social world — no misfits, no tense countenances, no sour leers, no preoccupied brusqueness or physical handicap — and the whole environment of life permeated with an ecstatic harmony as universal as air, and you get an idea of my reflexions in those moments. I recall exclaiming to myself:

“How happy everybody seems! — how jolly! Every person here conveys something that makes me want to know him personally.” Then with a sense of shock it dawned upon me: “I have known everyone of these persons at some time or other , personally , intimately! But they’re sublimated now — physically glorified — not as I knew them in life at all.”