I have always been a scientist at heart. Curious. Skeptical. Oriented toward evidence rather than faith. As a child, a traumatic experience fractured any belief I had in a higher power. The world felt arbitrary and cruel, and belief offered no shelter. Logic became my anchor, the only reliable tool I had for navigating a reality that did not seem just or kind.
Years later, another event nearly ended my life, and in doing so, dismantled the framework I had spent decades building.
I am not writing to convince anyone of anything. I am not offering answers or doctrine. This is simply my experience, as honestly as I can tell it.
During that second trauma, I lost more than two pints of blood and hovered on the edge of death. As my body failed, something unexpected happened. I felt myself rise out of it, lifting upward, free of pain, free of fear. What followed was not darkness, but an overwhelming presence of energy. The physical world dissolved into luminous strands of light, vibrant and interconnected, like a vast, living tapestry woven from motion itself.
For the first time in my life, I felt complete.
Not relieved. Not numb. Complete. Every fragment of doubt, shame, and self loathing that had followed me for years simply fell away, as if they had never belonged to me in the first place. I was safe. I was whole. I was home in a way I did not know was possible. For someone who had dismissed anything spiritual as fantasy, the experience was profoundly disorienting.
Then I became aware of a presence beside me.
She appeared as a woman formed entirely of energy. From a distance she seemed almost human, but up close her skin shimmered like living light, her hair glowing, indistinguishable from the energy around her. She did not speak with words, yet her message arrived with absolute clarity. It was not my time. I had a purpose, something meaningful still ahead of me, even though I could not see it and had spent years doubting my own worth.
She urged me to keep fighting. To stay. To understand that I mattered in ways I could not yet comprehend.
When I returned to my body, I knew something fundamental had shifted. I felt connected to the universe in a way I had not felt since before childhood trauma dulled my sense of wonder. Afraid the clarity would fade, I wrote everything down, trying to capture it before the weight of ordinary consciousness settled back in.
What I came away with was not certainty, but a framework.
Everything is energy. Life, death, and consciousness are not endpoints but movements within a larger system. We live, we die, and we cycle again, each existence adding to something like accumulated wisdom. Growth is the point. Evolution, not punishment.
Those who cause immense harm do not reconnect easily with that universal energy. That, to me, is what hell might be. Not fire or torment, but isolation. A soul drifting alone, repelled by the very fabric it once moved through, like opposing magnetic fields.
Ghosts or demons, if they exist at all, may be remnants of consciousness that lost coherence through cruelty or destruction. Souls that could not reintegrate. Good souls, by contrast, return to the flow, recharging, transforming, preparing for whatever comes next.
This interpretation unsettled me more than outright belief ever could.
I had rejected God after my childhood experience. Why believe in something that did not protect a child? Yet after this, I found myself reconsidering old ideas through a different lens. What if the biblical claim that God is within us was meant literally? What if the universe itself is the field we draw from, and morality determines whether we can reconnect to it?
I began thinking about belief as translation. If you were explaining complex physics to a child, you would use stories. Angels, demons, heaven, hell. You would call the universe God. Jesus, then, might be understood as someone profoundly evolved, deeply attuned to that energy. If everything is energy, even a virgin birth becomes less absurd, not miraculous in the supernatural sense, but improbable within a vast system that permits rare outcomes.
Science and spirituality, in this view, are not enemies. They are different languages describing the same reality.
Before this near death experience, I was closed off, angry, and merely surviving. I would not romanticize the pain that led me here, but I would not erase it either. Dancing with death cracked something open in me. I am happier now, not because of suffering, but because it forced me to confront the limits of my certainty.
People often ask how I can feel at peace after something so heavy. The answer is simple, even if the implications are not. I do not fear death anymore. Life is the harder task, and I am meeting it with a mind that is curious again and a heart that is no longer sealed shut.
I still do not know what to believe. This experience left me with more questions than answers, and I am comfortable with that. It feels as though a door opened briefly, letting me glimpse a larger structure of reality, one I have no formal training to explain. My thoughts have not stopped racing since, as if my mind is now tuned to a frequency I once could not perceive.
I do not know where this path leads. I only know that I am walking it awake, attentive, and willing to learn whatever the universe is trying to teach.