Louisa Peck, an alcoholic and cocaine addict, had an NDE in her youth. But the experience didn’t fit in with her professed atheism. So she repressed it as a hallucination. And yet, in the rest of her life, she had many, many spiritual experiences. She finally let go and entrusted herself totally to the Higher Power she heard about in Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as to her guardian angel, whom she calls Egnacio. She candidly recounts her journey in her book Die-Hard Atheist: from NDE Denier to Full-on Woo-Woo – Against my Will. Here are some excerpts from her book.
The spiritual world is real
The main aim of this book is to convince you, dear reader, that the spirit world is real, that it exists alongside our material world and has a constant impact on our lives. I want to change your mind, not so that you will adopt my specific point of view, but so that you will be open and free to explore your own.
I know that the spirit world exists with the same certainty as I know that my consciousness exists.
The universe itself is a super-intelligence, the source of everything we know, and of many other things we don’t even know about.
I can’t pretend to describe this intelligence. I only know that it is infinitely powerful, complex and creative. It manifests itself simultaneously on countless levels, only one of which is our physical realm. And strange as it may seem, this same intelligence is Love. Intuitively, you know this. You see it every time you take a walk in the woods or watch a sunset.
A new chance at life
[Thirteen years after her NDE, Louisa is still an alcoholic. One evening, she is driving home – totally drunk – and only miraculously avoids a serious accident. When she got home, she heard a loud voice saying: 1) This is the last time I can help you! and 2) You know right from wrong!]
I received what felt like a new lease on life. My guardian angel broke through my defenses and his voice struck a chord. I “heard” him.
From that day on, I began a delicate dance of hypocrisy, knowing deep down that the spirit world was real, while insisting in my public persona that it was not.
What we think of as “reality” is in fact only a highly simplified version of an immensely complex set of constantly evolving relationships. Our senses can only provide us with a narrow range of stimuli – certain frequencies of light and sound, certain types of touch, taste and smell.
The purpose of life is to make love grow
I believe that the purpose of life has something to do with the expansion of Love, in the same way that God grows the universe and creates life. Incarnation seems to be a kind of mission that God wants us to hold on to until we’ve at least moved on to the next class.
When I tried to deny my NDE, the hardest thing to reject was the intensity of the love I felt in the light. It filled me to the brim. It was a feeling at least twenty times stronger than any I’d experienced before or since. I knew that love itself was infinite. There were no more questions, no more wondering, only love, love, love, love, love, love. The only limit to love was the amount I could absorb.
Love is everything, it permeates me like a warm light, it saturates me. I want nothing – only this, which surpasses all the love I’ve ever felt, in the same way that sunlight surpasses candlelight. I feel that presence again, powerful, like a parent. She has always known and adored me, never forgotten me, even if I have. She cradles me in invisible arms, she cherishes me, she floods me with a love that fills all. At last, at last! Everything I’ve been hungry for all my life is here. I’m in, I’m in, I’m home.
A filter to mask divine energy
I believe there is a filter, not in the brain, but around our physical body, like an energetic membrane, an aura.
Why do we have these auras? To separate ourselves from God and the spiritual soup in which we bathe. In other words, every living entity is surrounded by an envelope that is impervious to the divine, distinguishing it from the omnipresent divine energy of the universe.
We are divine energy captured in compartments by spiritual membranes that distinguish us, allowing free will so we can interact with each other autonomously. Our membranes are permeable from within. They allow us to send energy to God – in other words, prayers.
When a person who has had a near-death experience leaves their body and re-enters it, they somehow damage the membrane that prevents them from making contact with God. As a result, they become more sensitive to the spiritual world.
You have a guardian angel
Today, I know that everyone has at least one guardian angel, probably more. But we’re deaf to their presence.
The vast majority of people who have had a near-death experience encounter a spiritual being like the one I saw, pouring out love. Among them, many “recognize” the being(s) as having been with them all their lives, knowing them more deeply than they know themselves because they have accompanied, guided and helped them, not only in this lifetime, but in many others.
It’s our God-tight membrane that makes us “deaf” to the spirits. The more anger, fear, resentment and ego we carry, the thicker the barrier and the less we can hear. For many of us, leaving our bodies in an NDE has an effect on this barrier, like a tear in a membrane.
Prayer is vital
I further thinned my membrane of separation from God when I said my first crummy prayer at the top of the little hill. I asked for help. When we do and mean it sincerely, miracles follow. It’s the cornerstone of the A.A. program. Apparently, I was able to muster a little sincerity, to open my heart a little to the spirit world. I remember that moment well too.
In the words of St. Francis of Assisi: “Lord, may I seek to console rather than to be consoled, to understand rather than to be understood, to love rather than to be loved”. These words may seem banal when we read them, but when we live them, it’s quite the opposite. By being useful to others, by helping to heal what’s broken, we feel a sense of fulfillment, doing exactly what we’re here on Earth to do.
Light at the end of life
[A few years later, Louisa’s older sister Adelyn is dying of cancer. Louisa is in her hospital room]. Something is brewing, something big, gathering momentum like huge turbines slowly accelerating, huge jet engines firing up before takeoff. Something incredibly wonderful – but what?
I know: the light is approaching. The same light that engulfed me fifteen years ago, with all its happiness and love, it’s… where? It seeps into the room through the base of the window, like a slow mist. Impossible. Ridiculous. There’s nothing there. An ordinary hospital room at 4 in the morning. I close my eyes, determined to sleep. But the fog, the strange fog – it’s coming in, and it’s happy. The time has come. The time has come. This is absurd. The doctors have given him two weeks to live! But what are these fussy reflections of human doctors compared to the power, the reality of what is happening?
As if the window were open from below, when it’s not even designed for that, light seeps through that sill, onto the windowsill, then down, skimming the ground like fog rolling in from the ocean. It gathers, accumulates, swirls over my sister’s body. It contains countless sparks of light.
Tiny lights. Millions of them. For the part of me that recognizes it, the light brings joyful anticipation. She’s coming for my sister! Countless tiny points of light swirl above her, a galaxy whose center lies just above her belly. My mind senses that each light is someone – a spirit, a being. Angels, ancestors, countless divine beings of light who know my sister far better than I or anyone else, who love her better than anyone on Earth. They’re getting ready to take her home. I know they are. I know it deep inside, with a clarity deeper than thought.
We are infinitely loved
Something is stuck, something has to change, and I’m the only one who can help. Pain weighs on Adelyn’s heart. “The height of devaluation,” she’d said, but by whom? By God? All the wounds of her childhood, the bullying she endured, our mother’s incessant nagging about her weight, the rejections, the inadequacies, the self-loathing – they taunt her now, pointing to death as proof that she’s not loved.
But those voices are wrong. Adelyn needs to know this, to shed her burden of victimhood and embrace love. These thoughts don’t come from me.
Help her cross – Now!
Help her cross over, the voice says to me now – and I recognize that it’s the same, always the same voice, that same feeling, that same energetic cadence. It emphasizes Adelyn’s fear, her painful doubts about God’s love, and makes it clear that they are preventing her from crossing over to the other side. Help her! You’ve crossed over! You can tell her. I know exactly what the voice wants. I can tell Adelyn that she has nothing to fear or cry about, that death is just as wonderful an experience as birth. But I can’t! This is bullshit! What, am I supposed to tell her some cliché like “heaven is real”? I resist. I’m in public. I can’t obey my invisible voice.
Do it NOW!” the voice asks again and again. I try to silence it, but it comes back into my mind, stronger than ever: Do it NOW! DO IT NOW, NOW! But… what am I going to say? How can I describe the light? I can only begin. Now. Right now. Okay, I sigh, resigned. Okay, I’ll do it. I get up, cross the bed and kneel beside his head. I take his hand and start whispering close to his ear. “You’ve had a wonderful life,” I tell her, and from then on, like scarves out of a magician’s sleeve, the words keep flowing.
Everything she did, I say, she did magnificently. She brought beauty to the world through her love of music. She used her incredible intelligence so well. She created three beautiful children and gave them a wonderful, loving home.
Jesus loves you and welcomes you home
And here, remembering his faith, I know what to say: “Jesus sees all you’ve done and he’s proud of you. But now your body doesn’t work. It’s broken, and nothing in the world can fix it, so Jesus is going to take you home. His love will be all around you, warm as sunlight, but through you, so much love!”
I can almost feel it now with a joy that fills my voice. “You’ll be in a light so warm and bright, surrounded by love. Oh, and you’ll feel so safe and loved, Adelyn! Everything will turn to love! Jesus loves you so much! You’re his child, and he loves you more than words can say. I love you. We all love you.”
With that, my words cease as suddenly as they began. I linger a little in case there’s more, but I feel that I’ve done the right thing, that I’ve awakened a spark in Adelyn that will ignite on its own. The rest is up to her and the galaxy of millions of sparks. They work together.
All is well
We all stare at Adelyn’s dying form on the bed. No one does anything. Rage rumbles in my chest because no one is trying to save her! I understand there’s no hope and yet I want to grab that doctor’s skinny little neck and strangle him for his “it’ll stop” way of saying.
But the next moment, something – suddenly and completely – erases my rage and simply replaces it with peace and well-being. It’s as if someone had transformed a roaring locomotive, with a simple wave of a wand, into a spring duckling. “Everything’s fine,” my mind says. But it’s not the same voice, it’s coming from somewhere else.
I’m now aware of Adelyn. Her essence hovers over my head, her energy, her presence, looking down on the room’s activities. What I mean is that throughout the whole fiasco of my brother and I screaming for help, running around and trying to dial the phone, I had stereo perception, a bit like looking through a spyglass without closing the other eye. My peripheral consciousness perceived Adelyn’s spirit trying to soothe us. She was telling us not to be afraid, that she was fine, that she was wonderful! – but I didn’t hear her until now.
A love so personal
Adelyn’s love has a specific quality, a tone or flavor that I would recognize anywhere. Now I feel it, powerful, distinctive and communicative, coming from… from…. above us, somewhere near the ceiling. It’s Adelyn’s love, loving not only my brother and me, but also the little doctor and the bawling nurse. She loves us all, she loves everything. She is love. Her happiness and light continue to fill me.
All the dark emotions evaporate in the clarity and I’m filled with a joy so bright that it’s all I can do to hide it – which I have to, because nothing could be worse. In our culture, death is a tragic, horrible, cruel fate. What can I do with all this love? It hums in my every cell, so wonderful, so incredibly bright! I can’t remember ever being so sure that everything is wonderful, that everything is peace and goodness, sitting less than three meters from the empty shell my sister has just left.
She’s in the light now
I remember my despair when I had to leave again following my IME. But Adelyn can stay! In fact, she can go further into the light, and I know she will. She already knows a joy, an intelligence and a harmony greater than our brains can conceive. And she gives me a little gift. She’s telling me something, giving me knowledge, something exceptionally important to her. Explains Darius. Her two-year-old, Darius, no one’s going to explain to him why she left. It’s so important! She’ll tell me what to say. Inwardly, I agree to do whatever she asks.
I believe that when we ask, when we pray specifically and authentically, we create an energy that spirits can work with. Not necessarily perform, but work with. All authentic prayers emit energy. We unlock possibilities.
Light fills me
Light fills me. I am loved. For the first time in my life, without conditions, without doubt, without an ounce of recalcitrant cynicism, the doors to my heart and mind open wide. I thank God for my life, for his love, for his guidance. My upturned face is now flooded with tears. In a hoarse voice, I sob aloud, “I know… that you are.” The voice answers. I feel joy, but love. There’s love in her amusement at my intense drama, my deep human fervor to see what has always been there, pure and simple.
We still love you, little one. And you’re right! We can do real things! Real things. Yes, they can do real things. I see that, despite all the miracles and paranormal gifts God has given me, fear has always won out – fear of looking stupid, of boasting, of being abnormal. It was fear that fueled my cynicism, fear that made me retreat into the safe shell of “normalcy.” It was fear that kept me from curiosity and wonder.
I’ve always known
What my fellow human beings might think of me carried more weight than my own experience. But deep down, haven’t I always known this simple truth – that every plant, every organism and even every inert substance that exists is part of the whole, the unity I can now call God? Of course I’ve known it! Everyone knows it! A sort of vow or promise is now required – not for God’s sake, but for my own.
So I say it out loud, my emotionality broken, my voice calm: “I will never, ever doubt you again”. I see myself making obnoxious declarations to my skeptical self; I anticipate my browbeaten, societal cynicism demanding that I conform, that I reject this madness, this voice, this knowledge – all of it! But I’ve unmasked these voices as fear. I now pledge never to let fear take over again, no matter how hard it is for me to maintain this position. So be it – for the rest of my life.
Coming out
I kept my word. And it was extremely difficult, especially at first. Like all “coming out” processes, the first step is simply to reveal yourself. In the same way that if you’re a homosexual, an alcoholic or simply no longer believe in the family precepts you’ve been indoctrinated into, you first have to admit it to yourself. Only once we’ve accepted this truth can we begin to live it – first in our self-image, and later, perhaps, in our social personality. At this point, I was far from ready to tell anyone else what I believed. But I was ready to acknowledge for myself what I knew about the spiritual world and that its existence was a reality.
What I’ve learned from experiencers who’ve had more information than me from the other side, is that free will is a very important thing. It’s inseparable from our reason for being on Earth. As humans, we can’t know why we took on physical form or what we came here to accomplish – and I certainly don’t pretend to know. Nevertheless, I can imagine that separation from God is like an opportunity for us to choose individually to embody and extend the power of love.
Helping people who experience an NDE is vital for them
When I interviewed Dr. Kason in 2022, she described the years following her NDE following a plane crash in northern Ontario – which was neither her first nor her last NDE, by the way. “For many years, I lived a double life, publicly as a member of the University of Toronto medical faculty, and privately as a mystic – studying, meditating, even going to India to be guided by Gopi Krishna. It all came together in 1990, when I was invited to speak about Kundalini awakening at a conference organized by the Spiritual Emergence Network in California.
Taken for fools
While leading a sharing circle, I heard nightmare stories of people who had experienced spiritual transformation who had been mislabeled, pathologized, dismissed as crazy, condemned by their church, locked up in psychiatric wards, subjected to electroshock therapy and rejected by their loved ones. They cried and hugged me. That “MD” [medical doctor] after my name meant a lot to them, just to finally meet a doctor who believed them. I was then walking on the beach when I had another transforming experience, the mystical experience of my “calling”. I was “called” to come out of the closet and start advocating for people who had undergone such experiences. I had to speak out because the medical profession and the public were doing harm by calling experiencers crazy.
So I went back to the head of my university department and said, “I’ll resign if you like, but this is the area I intend to specialize in”. My guardian angels must have touched him, because not only did he agree, he even gave me some advice on how to set up what has become the Spiritual Emergence Research and Guidance Clinic.”
Turning to the essential
The vast majority of our thoughts and concerns are simply meaningless. We become entangled in the games our species has created – economics, politics, history, science. Death reminds us that all these concerns are meaningless. The closer we get to God, the more real things become. This can happen in life too. You can have a little rivalry with a friend who occupies your thoughts, but if you learn that he is dying, you can jump to the next level where everything is forgotten.
Loving the beauty and goodness on Earth is more real than worrying about the financial markets. Being kind and helpful to others is more real than self-centeredness.
When we constantly seek security, pleasure or relief, we miss the point of life, which is to extend the reach and power of love – that is, of God.
Death is work, like birth
Like birth, death is a process, a work, an intense transition to what follows. It can be easy or difficult. If we are held back by negative beliefs, anger, resentment or self-pity, these energies can thicken our defensive envelope, blocking or complicating our reintegration with God. Love does the opposite. This means that anyone can help another being through, mainly by surrounding them with love and assuring them that the other side is great.
At a higher level, the whole of humanity is guided towards progress. It may happen on the basis of two steps forward, one step back, but it’s happening.
Selfishness is part of life. Don’t feel guilty about it! We’re wired as physical beings to be selfish in thought, but that’s not what matters. It’s the choices we make in our behavior, the way we act towards others – that’s all that matters.
Let yourself be loved
Let those who love you love you That’s what life’s all about! There’s nothing better to do! You couldn’t ask for a more explicit message! Self-loathing only traps us in selfishness, preventing us from accessing what friends want to give: love. What counts is exchange. That’s what A.A. tells us: our job is sometimes to be of service, sometimes to enable others to be of service to us.
Love is everything
Humans need to know that God exists. They need to know that love is paramount. They need to know that every act of kindness is sacred and meaningful, whether it’s providing disaster relief or offering a smile to a stranger. And they need to challenge and fight the greed and selfishness of the rich and powerful, a minority inflated by the malignant symptoms of fear and aggression. This book, this account of my own metamorphosis from skeptic to believer, is my offering, my crumb on the scales of change.
To find out more, visit Louisa Peck’s website
And Yvonne Kason’s website
