Observations placeholder

from The Stargate Chronicles

One Friday evening in July, I met my wife and another man from the detachment at a small gasthouse (a bed and breakfast, usually with a restaurant) across the Inn River in a town called Braunau am Inn. We were meeting for dinner. We ordered before-dinner drinks.

After taking a couple of sips from my drink, I began to feel quite nauseated. Not wanting to be sick in the restaurant, I excused myself and tried to move outside. When I got to the front door and attempted to push it open, there was a sound like a pop and I found myself standing on the cobblestone road out front, watching with curiosity as the rain passed through my hands.

Events  then unfolded as though I were just outside the boundaries of reality. My initial fears departed and were quickly replaced with curiosity. I drifted over to see what the commotion by the door was all about and found myself staring down at my own body, lying half in and half out of the gutter. I watched as my friend pulled me up into his lap and attempted to put his finger down my throat. I had gone into convulsions and he was attempting to keep me from swallowing my tongue. I found out later that he was unsuccessful and I had bitten halfway through his finger. I watched them load my body into a car, and followed alongside the car as they drove back across the border to Germany, and a hospital located in Passau. Once at the hospital, I quickly grew bored with what the doctor and nurses were doing to try to revive me. I felt as though I began drifting upward toward the ceiling, then gently rolling over backward, where I suddenly found myself falling into a wide tunnel opening.

The emergency room receded, growing smaller and dimmer in the distance as I accelerated downward into the tunnel. As it faded from sight, I attempted to turn my attention to where I was falling.

But I seemed to lose focus at that point. I was suddenly feeling very warm all over, especially across the back of my neck.  A tingling sensation washed over my entire being, almost like an electrical charge, but it wasn't at all unpleasant. The feelings kept growing inside me, until suddenly I entered a new space, which was filled with the whitest and brightest light I have ever experienced. I was overwhelmed with the sudden sense of joy comfort, and love. I felt as though I had finally reached the ultimate destination, the one place where I could feel whole and complete, where I could simply be without any conditions, needs, or wants.

I then found myself reviewing my entire lifetime, good and bad.  I saw all the ways in which I had failed myself or others. I experienced all the non-constructive and noncreative aspects of my life up until that moment in time. It was just like reliving every single moment of my life up to that point, except that it went by incredibly fast.

I became totally aware of all the feelings and intentions of all the people I had ever interacted with throughout my lifetime. When it was over, I was filled with the most incredible sorrow. Not so much sorrow for what I had missed or not done, but sorrow for all the times that I had misunderstood, thought wrongly or too quickly about someone, had not paid attention when they were needing something from me that I could have given. It was intensely painful, yet very cleansing. And then I had an intense feeling of forgiveness flood over me. It was a feeling of love that flooded inward, washing over my soul, flushing away the corruption, the guilt, and stupidity.

At that point a voice in my mind said that I could not stay, that I had to go back. It was not time for me to die. I tried to argue with it, but to no avail. There was a second sudden popping noise and I sat up on the hospital bed and looked around.

…... I found out that after I had gone into convulsions and swallowed my tongue,

I couldn't breathe, so it was not long after I stopped breathing that my heart stopped.  I had arrived at the hospital in Passau clinically dead.