In her magnificent book 45 secondes d’éternité – Mes souvenirs de l’au-delà, Nicole Dron gives a detailed account of her NDE. Her brain only stopped working for 45 seconds, but her experience filled his whole life. Here are a few nuggets, and I urge you to read the rest. He can give you many answers, about the afterlife and the meaning of our present life.
My NDE was a profound and unforgettable experience. It broadened my worldview and turned every value in my life upside down. It touched me deeply, in every aspect of my being. And she gave me the certainty that death does not exist, that there is only Life…
I know I’ll never forget it. It’s just not possible. It’s inside me, reminding me of the fullness, beauty and immense peace of a state that defies description. In comparison, the exclusive pursuit of material wealth, fame, power and glory seems derisory and futile.
I was there, with all my thoughts, my emotions, my impressions, with everything that constitutes my innermost being. I could see all sides at once, but above all, I experienced a new and incredible feeling: that of existing, of living beyond my body. If you only knew how overwhelming it is to feel alive beyond yourself! I became aware of being the inhabitant of my body, as a driver is the inhabitant of his car.
Light and Love
How can I tell you about the Light? You have to live it… This light was splendid, marvelous, alive, radiant, of incredible purity. It was also an ocean of Love, but pure Love, the kind that offers itself and asks for nothing, a Sun Love. And I was Love. I was immersed in an ocean of Love, totally understood, fulfilled, restored and loved as I was. From all eternity and so far from the worries and bustle of this Earth.
I understood that I was part of this light and that I was eternal. In this immense fullness and peace, I understood the meaning of the words “I am”. It’s as if, while being me, I become everything and rediscover my true nature. I had found my homeland. I had become Love and I was Life.
My guides were there
I also met beings I’d never seen on this Earth. And yet, I recognized them and was so happy to see them again! They exuded such nobility and respect! I stood before them like a little girl before a teacher to whom she would feel great deference. They read me like an open book, and I couldn’t hide anything from them. Yet I would have liked to show them only the beautiful aspects of myself. I know they’ve been with me and guiding me for a very long time.
I had a deep feeling that “everything was fine” and that everything had a reason to be. That, despite adversity, trials and suffering, there was an order, a potential, evolving good, that our earthly consciousness could not apprehend. Despite appearances, everything contributes to our well-being and evolution!
To die is to go home
Beyond the legitimate grief and suffering we feel when a loved one leaves us, we should rejoice in the knowledge that they have returned home or are on their way back to life! Yes, if we knew, we’d be delighted.
“What happens after death is so beautiful that our imagination cannot conceive it, even crudely. Death is the most painful thing that can be seen from the outside, but, once inside, you taste such peace and fulfillment that you never want to come back.” Carl Gustav Jung after his NDE.
The Being of Light
I felt a presence, an immense Presence, an infinite Presence. The whole universe was inhabited by this presence, everything was singing… And it was as if this Presence condensed into a being that put itself within my reach. She manifested herself in the form of a Being of Light, a Being our hearts know… And I was happy, so happy! It was as if I’d been waiting for this moment since the dawn of time! This Being radiated an incredible force of love,
How did you like it?
He asked me just one question: how did you love and what did you do for others? I immediately sensed the exigency of the question. At the same time, I saw a multitude of beings with their arms outstretched to the heavens, imploring. I knew that all these beings were suffering in their bodies or in their hearts. I felt all their torments, their fears, their pains, their passions. I felt immense compassion for them, for all of us. My God, all humanity is suffering! What pain on this earth! What misery! What had I done for them? I hadn’t been mean, but I hadn’t done anything in particular.
This question demanded from me more fraternity, openness and availability. She asked me to make life grow in myself and in those around me, to make it more ardent, more free. It required, as Emerson put it, “…doing all the good that exists in the individual,” helping him to grow in every aspect of his being. I also understood that it required a lot of love, that strong, enlightened love that liberates life. She demanded that I grow and get the best out of myself. So that my transformation and fulfillment can help others to fulfill themselves.
I understood that all beings were chained by desires, fears, passions, weaknesses, illnesses of body and soul. That all this enslaved them. And that the greatest service, the greatest gift that could be offered to a human being, was “deliverance” from these chains.
We are all One
I felt that humanity was a single being whose members were interdependent for their progress and survival. I was awakening to a whole new responsibility. Our understanding of these two seemingly simple questions deepens with time.
During this assessment, I relived each situation as I had experienced it on “Earth”, with all the sensations and emotions that accompanied it. And I was also the other part of me, the serene, detached part of me. The one who was unaffected by emotions and saw me as I was, lucidly, fairly and impartially. It’s this part of me – which is all wisdom, knowledge, love and justice – that some call the Soul, others the Self – who cares! – who evaluated my life.
Beyond good and evil: Love
She did so not according to traditional criteria of right and wrong, but according to the Love and Wisdom of the world. Compared to the Love and Wisdom that radiated from the Being who was close to me! When I entered the Light, I was not judged. I was loved as I was, and totally fulfilled and restored by Love. I was in a bath of Love.
From now on, the deepest desire of my life is to consciously rediscover that state of freedom and fulfillment I tasted when I arrived “at the heart of myself”. In this inner space, there is no conflict, fear, passion or conditioning. I was no longer a prisoner of my emotions, prejudices and identifications. What wonderful freedom in this oasis of peace!
Peace is our true nature
That’s certainly the most important thing about this experience. Indeed, I now know that this center of peace is my true nature. And I’m aware of everything in and around me that stands in the way of this fullness of peace.
The other part of me was beyond all this turmoil, all these emotions and reactions. She was unaffected by all these feelings. She was in total peace and fulfillment. She was!
This fullness of being revealed to me my human miseries, my need to be loved exclusively, my inability to act precisely because I was too dependent on what people thought of me, and my imprisonment in a certain thought system that paralyzed me.
All our needs are met by Love
This “wholeness” filled me, expanded me. In her, I no longer needed approval. I no longer needed to appear. I no longer needed the exclusive love that made me feel safe and secure. I was no longer afraid of losing anything because I was “complete”. I no longer had any demands. Love is free of need, possession and fear.
I understood how much I had to change in myself and around me to be in tune with this truth. This truth goes far beyond conventional social and religious laws. And it was in relation to her that everything I did in my life was either right or wrong. She who is at once: love, knowledge, wisdom and fullness.
I understood that this fulfillment could only be achieved by being free of life’s claims, projections, illusions and fascinations. And that my outward freedom could only be the culmination of this inner fullness.
I had to acquire my inner freedom, not by giving in to all the fluctuations of my emotions, however legitimate, but on the contrary by no longer being subject to their hold. For that, I had to be in my oasis of peace, where I could detect the turmoil and be less and less affected by it. I understood this, but it took me many years to establish a little of this freedom in and around myself, to free myself from my dependencies and also from my tendency towards romantic attachment.
Love is the source of life
I didn’t want to suffer anymore, I didn’t want to feel the pain of the emptiness of absence! But then I understood that love is the source of life, and that if we cut ourselves off from love, we dry up, wither and die.
The Being next to me smiled and, next to him, I understood that it was I who had been wronged, and that everything that cannot be brought out into the open darkens our souls.
I was also told that Christ, Buddha and Mohammed were working together to regenerate the Earth. When I die, I won’t be asked what religion, philosophy or particular race I belonged to, but how I loved and what I did for others. Only the quality of an individual’s being is important.
The Earth is a school of love and wisdom
I was told that we return to Earth until we have acquired enough love and wisdom.
Christ, in this experience, was far beyond any religious context. He belonged to no religious institution, since he was at the heart of everything. I was not told whether He would return as an entity, or in consciousness, or perhaps both. But I was overwhelmed because I understood that the only thing that mattered here on earth and that could save us individually and collectively from all the wars, catastrophes and calamities that threaten us, was to blossom this “Christ” dimension in us and in every being, to blossom the rose of our heart, our soul.
On Earth, the usual criteria for happiness are to be in good health, to love and be loved, to have a fulfilling job, a comfortable social situation, to be able to afford vacations, and so on. All this is legitimate if it’s not the sole purpose of life. But, unfortunately, for many people caught up in this highly materialistic society, happiness is all about : Having and enjoying life’s pleasures to the full.
To be, not to have
In the state I was in during the experiment, the only thing that mattered was: Being. I had only one desire: to be “what” I am, in all its dimension, in all its fullness. To be free of any desire to have and possess on all levels, whether material, intellectual or spiritual. To free myself from everything I’m attached to or dependent on in order to feel I exist in my own eyes or through those of those around me.
Yes, you can be the most fortunate person in the world and be so trapped by your attachments, whatever they may be, and, as a result, so poor in wisdom, peace, freedom and inner fulfillment, so unhappy even, that you are, on the soul level, “a beggar”. True wealth comes from self-realization.
It was the essence of the Eternal Feminine revealed in its ultimate dimension, the Wisdom of the World, the Eternal Virgin, the Mother of the World! She radiated light, a globe beneath her feet, and was pregnant…! I knew it was the original image of the Wisdom of the World shining on humanity! Sublime picture! An archetype of God in his feminine guise? If we could all see what the Eternal Feminine Essence is, how proud we’d be to be women!
Nothing but Light
And then, beyond everything, I remember an immensity of Light, a fullness of Light. There was no shape, no nothing. Nothing but Light… and Peace, infinite Peace; Nothing but EVERYTHING… What a paradox! I can’t put it into words. I was like melted sugar in water… me and everything in ONE… infinitely ONE. Being, only Being… Vastitude and fullness of Nothingness! How do you translate this? It’s impossible, you have to experience it…
When I returned to my body, I remember crossing denser planes and meeting souls still attached to Earth. I felt great compassion for them. I don’t remember leaving my body, but I do remember re-entering it through my head and slipping into it, like into a sock. And that, for me, is the tragedy of existence. No more fullness, no more freedom, no more feeling One and All at the same time! You enter your body as if you were entering a box, forgetting that, on another plane of existence, you and others are one and the same. We become strangers to each other and hurt each other…
Love is the secret of life
I’ve known ever since that Love is the secret of life, the secret of God. And I know there’s only life…!
Witnessing the Light is one thing, trying to make it a reality in every moment is the most demanding of adventures, but it’s also the one we all came here for.
For me, knowledge and love are one and the same, and reinforce each other.
You can’t keep an experience like that to yourself, it’s too important. The whole face of the world, the whole philosophy of life, could be changed if we could conceive of the possibility of survival. And if we could accept that Love is at the heart of life, then our scale of values and behaviors would be turned upside down.
Love heals and liberates us
The Love I came to know through this experience is the One who welcomes infinitely, who heals all wounds, who fills all gaps, who sympathizes with all sufferings – with which each being has identified and which has caused the brokenness of his life – who loves as a mother can love… even more, as only the Mother of the world can love…
He is also the One who saves and who, while understanding our weaknesses, is uncompromising towards them and asks us to triumph over them at the heart of our deepest despair. He is the Love that liberates and tells us: “Stand up, become What you Are, I in you have conquered the world!” Look at all the weaknesses, loopholes, guilt and childishness, fears and discouragement you’ve been a slave to until now. They are the source of your suffering and your action. Instead of running away from them, accept them, transform them and turn them into opportunities for intimate renewal. Free yourself, don’t identify with them. They’re not you. Be worthy of yourself, for: “You are ‘That’.”
I prayed a lot after my brother’s [suicide], but I couldn’t put it into words. I could only say, “My God, don’t abandon him!” But I had become prayerful. My whole heart was connected to him and to the “Presence” and I felt as if I had become a cradle, a nest.
I invited my parents to stop dwelling on the circumstances leading up to his departure, and to send him only thoughts of peace and love. He thanked us for this through sensitive people, telling us that our love and prayers had been, for him, a balm, a light, a beacon that had enabled him to rise faster above the dense zones of our Earth.
We are connected to our deceased
He also told us that he came to draw from our hearts, through the love that unites us, all the light our hearts are filled with, because, he said, “My oxygen is in the light”. It’s magnificent, and confirms just how interconnected we are on all levels, and how our own evolution helps others to realize theirs!
We’ll meet again one day. I know we’re already in touch. Only a tiny fraction of our being is embodied in matter, the other unfolds on subtler levels of existence where it is in intimate communion with other souls. We’re not aware of it, except on rare occasions. But one day, at the end of our lives, we’ll meet again… In joy, in peace, in Love!
Based on my own experience, I believe that each of us is the culmination of all our past thoughts, tendencies, aspirations, desires, impulses and frustrations, which constitute the particular vibratory “note” that presides over our new birth.
This “note”, this particular vibratory frequency that is its “signature”, its quality of being, attracts the circumstances and events that are in harmony with it and that will materialize over the course of its life.
A subtle chain
There is a subtle chain of relationships between the invisible world of thought and emotion (causes) and its material concretization (effects). It’s the channel of Destiny that every man creates for himself. He receives from life what he has previously given to it.
I understood that Destiny is an intelligent force that governs the universe and restores balance to man’s life in an impersonal and universal way, like a set of scales. Not to make him feel guilty or punish him, but to awaken him to his higher consciousness, through which he can fulfill the particular purpose of his incarnation.
As long as this Consciousness is obscured by the claims, passions and attractions of the ego, the experiences of our lives will constitute painful educational trials. In this way, we remain under the yoke of destiny, and therefore of the law of cause and effect (karma), which most of us wrongly consider to be a punitive law.
Predestination or free will? Or both?
But as soon as we free ourselves from this hold, our purified consciousness vibrates at a different frequency. It then attracts living conditions in harmony with our new state of being. She enters into grace. That’s freedom. That’s why I think there’s both predestination and free will.
Predestination at birth, because we inherit a particular pattern of life. This corresponds to the lessons our soul has agreed to experience, both to pay our “debts” and to evolve in consciousness and love. Predestination as long as we are subject to the forces of the ego. And freedom when we are free of our ego and have reintegrated our soul.
In the meantime, there’s the path that leads to freedom. This is the Way, the inner quest for unity by which the bonds of the ego are broken and the person freed for unconditional love. This Way is spiritual exploration based on personal experience, not intellectual research. It is the foundation of all religion, its root and source. She is One.
The same family
Men and women of all traditions who embark on this Way belong to the same family and share the same experience. Every person who has experienced transcendent consciousness communes with a single source, beyond all religious expressions.
Those who express themselves on this experience, once they’ve left it, don’t say the same thing, because when they leave the realm of this experience, they inevitably fall back into the usual cultural patterns, into the mind, into religion. But their expressions all refer to a single, universal reality.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than approaching divinity and spreading its rays over the human race. At that moment, no one will be able to disturb the feeling of bliss in which you will be.” Beethoven
Throughout the writing of this book, I felt driven by a magnificent, indomitable force that carried me forward: that of proclaiming loud and clear that these experiences cannot be fully understood without their mystical dimension.
An unforgettable experience
I thank Providence for giving me this experience. And I’m grateful to the Universal Spiritual Tradition for enabling me to understand and integrate it into my life. They both gave me great confidence and strength, the ability to feel in my place and in total harmony with the deepest part of myself.
This experience is etched in my soul, and I think it will remain so for the rest of my life. It is part of me, rests within me, fills me and nourishes me. It’s like a force, an anchor around which everything revolves. She is a point of reference for all my thoughts and activities. I feel it like a subtle weight in the hollow of my chest. It anchors me to the earth and, at the same time, connects me to heaven. It just wants to grow, sometimes so strongly that it’s almost painful.
Perhaps that’s the most beautiful extension of this experience: the sensation of a “Presence”! It also, of course, broadened my conception of the world. I now know that there’s more to life than what we know on Earth. There’s another reality, a world of light and pure love. This world is our true home, and we’re so happy to be back in it – if you only knew how happy we are!
Death does not exist
I also know that we are eternal, that we have always lived and will always live. We are sparks of this Light. I know that death doesn’t exist, that it’s the great illusion. Our life is sacred and a gift from heaven to evolve. It’s not a belief, I know…
My NDE enabled me to see “higher and further”. Discovering that this life is only a transitory stage in the progression of the soul has helped me to better accept the injustices and sufferings of this world while at the same time helping it.
It has also enabled me, in conjunction with the enlightenment of spiritual science and the vigilance exercised over my behavior, to spot and perhaps avoid some of life’s traps and mirages. It has helped me to become less dependent on the need to appear and the desire to please, and to detach myself from the superfluous.
My experience has given me the freedom to attach only relative importance to professional status, social success and all that has to do with external values. A minimum of comfort and material security is certainly necessary for a decent life. But if it becomes our sole reason for existing, if it becomes a goal in itself, then it feeds the greed of the ego and alienates our inner freedom.
I know we’ll leave everything behind when we make the big trip: our homes, our cars, our jewelry, our bank account, everything.
Real wealth
In the Light, our wealth will be our spiritual finery, a fabric woven from day to day by our thoughts and actions. They’ll form our dress of light! Yes, our “having” will disappear and our “being” will take on its true dimension: infinity.
This has been the great lesson of my experience: to become aware of the need to die to everything that is not oneself in order to “BE”. It has also enabled me to become less involved in the personality conflicts and power struggles that exist around me. It has helped me to stop needing to control events, to feel whether it’s right to help people with their personality or whether it’s better to leave them to the wisdom of their soul.
I don’t need to stir myself up, to move the wind, to feel that I exist. I no longer need to compete, to perform, to be “more or better than”, to do at all costs. It gives me great pleasure and peace to “settle down”.
I came back from there with a tenfold wonder at the beauty and sacredness of life, and a greater sensitivity to music and color. How beautiful and lively they are when the light plays with them! How beautiful is the smile of a child awakening to life, the delicacy of a flower, the song of a bird! How beautiful nature is, and how precious is the life that circulates within it! I could spend hours contemplating it…
Love is all that matters
“A man may never have studied a single system of philosophy. He may believe in no God and never have. He may never have prayed in his life. But if the simple power of good deeds has brought him to that state where he is ready to give his life and all he has for others, he has arrived at the highest point that can be reached by the religious man through his prayers and the philosopher through his knowledge: self-denial” said Vivekânanda, a great Indian sage of the late 19th century.
Millions of us have experienced God’s love, millions of us have been intoxicated by it, millions of us have immersed ourselves, to varying degrees, in Light and Peace! Damn it! Why don’t they believe us?
Must there be a collective NDE of humanity for this fact to be accepted? I wish it with all my heart, not for revenge, rest assured, but so that our world can be transformed, saved.
If I were God …
Yes, if I were God (He must be smiling), I’d offer the whole world “a moment of eternity”, a moment of peace, fullness, beauty and Love. A moment when everyone would feel eternal, fulfilled. A moment of grace in which he is both “All and One”! A moment when he would remember what he is!
Then the world would be saved! There’s no need to die for it – at least not physically! Many people have experienced this dimension of themselves consciously, in prayer, meditation or spontaneously.
Do NDEs invite humanity to a transmutation of consciousness? I believe it deeply.
There’s only love
I’ll never forget the Light, the Peace and the Fullness of my Homeland! I’ll never forget the One who asked me the most demanding question that can be put to a soul: “How have you loved and what have you done for others?”
I’ll never forget what a magnificent being I am, what magnificent beings we all are, in the most sublime dimension of our being! We are not poor sinners. We are strong and splendid.
May the reign of Love invade the world! In the meantime, I sincerely hope, dear friends, that this book will dry up any tears and open wide the doors to hope and life! May he grant you the grace of a moment of eternity!
When I return to the Light of God, I’d like all the little seeds of light that have been sown to the four winds in people’s hearts to have become precious stones!
There is only Love…
To find out more :
The link to her book on Amazon or Fnac
One of his YouTube videos
See also the article on Nicole Dron’s second book “Comment as-tu aimé?”
