My
Out of Body Experience – A True Story
Salaam and Greetings of Peace:
This is a true story.
A few months after my 40th birthday,
on January 14th 1986, I was rushed to the Emergency Room due to the devastating
effects of a misdiagnosed illness. Had my sister not been visiting to see my
condition and insist I go to the hospital immediately, the doctors said I would
not have lived through the night.
In the emergency room my heart
stopped, and the doctors had to revive it with those electric paddles you see
in the movies. I remember it only vaguely, though I did have slight burn marks
for a few days. Eventually they discovered that I had Cushing’s Disease, a
benign tumor on the pituitary gland (which is in the middle of the forehead)
that caused the hormones levels in my body to run wild. The natural steroid
hormone ACTH, for instance, has a normal level of 200. Mine was 6000.
And since the pituitary gland
controls other glands and body functions, I had also gotten high blood pressure
and diabetes. It was the undiagnosed diabetes that was killing me. Eventually I
learned that the diabetes had been untreated for so long and gotten so bad so
quickly because of the tumor that I was fortunate to be alive. By that time my
eyesight was blurry, my muscles so atrophied by dehydration that I could barely
walk, and I found it difficult to think clearly. There were numerous other
symptoms, but those were the major ones.
Alas, we are captives to this
fragile shell of flesh. Fortunately, they had an experimental drug, aminoglutethymide,
that very slowly brought the hormone levels under control. Blood was drawn
every hour to check the hormone levels, so both arms soon became black and blue
from shoulder to wrist. Of course, being in a hospital has its own dangers, and
I soon got a staph infection, endocarditis, which attacks the heart valves, and
spent six weeks on Oxycilin therapy; another tube in my arm. I have a heart
murmur to this day because of it.
I had so many tubes in my black and
blue arms that it was almost comical. What wasn’t funny was the hormone-level
induced paranoia. Like anyone on steroids, they affect both the body and the
mind at those levels. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say I was
my poor nurses worst patient.
The hormones would spike at night,
and in the first days I would often go into a kind of catatonic state,
sometimes for days. I would come out of it and the nurses would be standing
around me saying, “Are you awake? Are you ok?” I once asked how long I was out,
and they said, “Three days.” I didn’t know where I had been or what I had been
dreaming, if anything.
About two weeks after I was
admitted, when the doctors were still not sure if I would live from one day to
the next, I remember lying in bed, on my back because both arms had tubes in
them, and feeling very weak and strange. I had learned to recognize the
physical symptoms of the onset of one of the catatonic states, but this was
different. I felt certain that I was going to die.
And I did.
Like a flash, my consciousness, or
soul, or spirit, or ka, left my body. I was flying upward around the
balloon-like curved right hand rim of the universe at an impossible speed,
faster than thought. I still had a body, but it was ethereal, light as a
feather. I could see the small oval shapes of thousands of galaxies on my left
as I sped past. A heartbeat later I was there.
In front of me was a long luminous
table, like a raised dais, and seated there were beings bathed in light, but
human in form. They had heads and bodies, and were robed in white, but I could
not make out their faces. Were they angels? Judges? I don’t know. I think there
were ten of them. At least that is the number that is in my head. Then I began
to spin like a top attached to a string, though my consciousness looked straight
at them. I am spinning and looking straight ahead. How is that possible? And I
began to weep. I must be dead, I thought, and began, without any prompting or
question being asked, to recount the sins of my life, and they were many.
Lying, cheating, stealing, gluttony,
sex, drugs; all the small and great sins of boy and man. How small or large
they were makes no difference. They were as big as my life then, and, besides
my children, all I thought I had to show for it. Through my tears, I begged for
forgiveness.
The being in the middle spoke easily
in a calm, male sounding voice that I heard in my mind. “You are forgiven. It
is not your time yet.”
Instantly I was flying back around
the rim of the universe. The galaxies were on my right as I flew past, with an
uncanny sense of going downward. In a heartbeat I was back in my hospital room
in my body sitting bolt upright in bed. I was never more awake in my life.
When I finally went to sleep that
night, I had a dream that I wrote a book that changed the world and brought
peace to mankind. Now that is a sinner really trying to make amends, lol!!!
I began to recover then. Perhaps the
medication was finally taking effect. Some years later I had occasion to see my
medical records. On top of one page was written: Recovery is astounding.
And so it was.
I left the hospital on March 7th,
1986, walking with a cane because of my atrophied leg muscles. For nearly a
year I had to climb the stairs of my house by literally crawling up them on my
hands and knees because my legs would not hold me. Slowly the muscles got
stronger with use. By the time I had the operation to remove my pituitary gland
on December 23rd 1986, I was fully recovered. After it was removed, the
diabetes went away. The blood pressure returned to normal.
In those nine months between my
release from the hospital and the surgery I began to write poetry. The words
just streamed out of me in gulps, like great gusts of breath. I was so happy to
be alive that love poured out of me in poems and in tears.
My state in that in-between time was
one of infinite gratitude for the gift of my life, and for God’s infinite love
and mercy and forgiveness. Like the stories I have read about people who have
had near death experiences, everything afterwards seemed illuminated with love
and the peace of mind of a new understanding of life. I wept a great deal at
the most mundane show of tenderness and emotion, and still do. My kids make fun
of me for it, but I don’t care. I know how precious a gift is this short life
we are given, and the chance in it to give love and experience love, and
through love, God’s love for us.
This ‘change of heart’ gradually
diminished, and the ego-centered nafs roared back as strong as ever, but
something was activated that did not go away and sought an outlet to nourish
it. It led me eventually to the Sufi path and to the door of the Beloved.
Five years after being hospitalized
and my out of body experience, I stepped on the path of the heart and was
initiated as a darvish in the Nimatullahi Sufi Order. Six months after
initiation, an idea for a book came to me during zekr, and twelve years
after that I finally published the Sufi novel, Master
of the Jinn. I doubt if it will change the
world, but if it gladdens one heart for one day, that is enough for me.
Every word of this post is true.
What details I have left out are not important to the reason for telling it.
You may think it was a dream, a vision, or a hormone induced hallucination, and
for a long time afterward, so did I.
I had been a cynic and agnostic for
as long as I can remember. I have never believed in hell, but always desired to
know what, if anything, lies beyond this life, to know what is meant by God.
Perhaps this is always at the edge of consciousness in everyone. Now, after
fifteen years on the Sufi path, I am sharing this story so you will know that
beyond everything you experience and believe, there is a truth that is
unimaginable, and that one day you too will experience it. It is written about
in Holy Books, and phrased in lovely language and parables and aphorisms,
poetry and stories, and lived through the lives of Prophets and Saints.
It is love and mercy and compassion
and forgiveness and love again, so complete and encompassing that we are born
out of it, and return to it in the end. It is the bond of this Love that each
of us shares, felt most strongly in the bond between mother and child, but felt
nonetheless by each of us to the degree that we let it in. The Sufi path is
nothing more than this, life is all of this, and that is all I know.
Ya Haqq!
http://darvish.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/my-out-of-body-experience-a-true-story/
Dear Mufti Shamsuddoha,
ReplyDeleteI read about your near death experience in 1986. We are constructing a website here in Atlanta USA which will be for an English speaking audience and will be using video to tell each persons true account. We are short of Muslim NDE accounts and would like to ask if it is possible for you to record your story on video and send it to me for publication. If you do not speak English then please if you agree to do it then make it in your own language if you wish and give us the English transcription and we will add the subtitles. please let me know if you can help. I think it is important to show NDE accounts from all cultures and religions.
regards
Maurice Visser (Atlanta Ga USA)
email: info@peachtreeink.com
A reinactment of this testimony has been done and can be seen here:
ReplyDeletehttp://ndevideos.com/category/muslim/
That is a beautiful story friend. I have recently looked into Sufism myself. I think this and other gnostic paths are a more clear and less base form of worship... not that I am any authority on the matter of course. Peace to you.
ReplyDeleteLoved it!
ReplyDeleteWas even questioning my own way of faith and your account absolutely strengthened me. Thank you. :)
This is not the account of the Mufti but of the author of Master of Jinn.
ReplyDeleteHe simply cut-and-paste it from what I presume was the author's website.
ReplyDeleteThose interested in reading more about Muslim NDEs should to the "Islam and the Near Death Experience" Facebook page.
ReplyDelete