transcript
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
[01:21] Hi, my name is Laura Ketchledge. I'm 63 years old, and my near death experience happened in April of 1979. Let me take you back. It's 1979, and I'm living in Northern Virginia, and I'm thinking myself very cool, very progressive. I was working at a nightclub. I had my first apartment. I was driving a crappy Chevy Vega car, and it was my own and it was paid for. It was a great time in my life. I just started living, being an adult. So one day I just decided to go horseback riding. It was an accident, a blessing, an experience that would change my entire life, shift all my values. But it started out pretty innocent. I went out to Centerville, Virginia, where I used to take riding lessons and hired a horse for a couple of hours. I got on, it was just a beautiful April day. It was just really great. I'm a good rider, I'm not a great rider. And I was a little out of shape. I hadn't been on a horse in a few months. So I was riding around this field, enjoying the day. And it was getting a little bit later. And I hooked up with these other two guys that were riding behind me. And we decided to race our horses. My horse took off and went from a canner into a really, really fast hand gallop. And then the terrain got rough. And I knew that I was losing control, but I thought I could handle it. And I was riding and holding on the best I could. And I remember feeling this, like, dread. Oh, God, this horrible rolling fear came through me as my horse stumbled. And I knew I was going to go flying. Luckily, I had on my helmet. And as I was being flung off the horse at a high rate of speed, I never hit the ground. I went into this velvet limitless tunnel. The walls were soft, and it was completely pitch black. So I literally left my body before the impact of the accident. What had happened is I'd been thrown off this horse face first into rocks, into a ditch. And I'd been killed. I didn't know that because I'd left my body. But as I left my body and went into another dimension, it was so unexpected. One minute I'm clicking down the meadow and it's gorgeous. Next minute I'm dead. And that was the biggest shock of my life till then. All of the emotions you can imagine just rollercoastered inside me. Fear, isolation, dread, shock, grief, grief that I just lost everything that was the most precious to me, my identity. So I went through this tunnel and I know other people speak about it and see the light and feel this joy. It wasn't like that for me. I think it's because it was an accident and it was so abrupt. And then it all happened. There isn't time. Time is irrelevant on the other side or in non-physical reality. You are just there at the present. So I know I'm dead. I know that this is not a heaven or hell situation. But when you leave the physical world, there are so many things that you learn, so many experiences that there isn't a human language articulate enough to describe it. To say the walls of the tunnel were velvet, but dense at the same time, to say that I was not in any pain, I felt no physical pain, though I did have the sensation of a body, did not have the courage to check out my limbs to see if they were still there. I just felt like it was magnificent to say the least, that I felt so wonderful, I wasn't hurting. So the most wonderful thing happened, my grandfather. My grandfather died when I was 12 years old, it was very traumatic, he had a terrible death of cancer. I loved him dearly, he was the most precious person in the world to me, and he was my guide. Well, he didn't look like a young man, he looked like an older man, the man I knew from my childhood. The person was there to comfort me, and it was really emotional to say the least, seeing the person you love and lost and hadn't seen in years, to know they still existed, to know that the love that they felt the day they died was just as strong years later when he was finding me. There's things that I learned in my life review that came next that were very disturbing, at least for me. You know, you go through your life's review, basically, and it's like this. It's not a judgment. You're your own critic. You re-experience things that you've done to other people. Let's say there's a situation and you were curt or rude to somebody. You're going to feel their hurt feelings, or you're going to feel their joy when you've done something nice. So everything you do in your life, from you're a small child to the day you draw your last breath, it matters. How do you treat people? You get the bill at the end basically. What I got is that everything in your life, how you treat others matters, your mindset. Are you a kind person? Are you a person that is just taking your bad mood out on everyone? All of these things I learned and your life review, it's like happens all at once, but each scene has death. So I can't really explain it. You have to have it to understand it. So my life review was sad, stressful, upsetting, and I felt like, gosh, I haven't even finished my life. I never got a chance to do it right. So there was real anguish in my life review. But I did see some things that I really had done right, like a girl that I had befriended that was getting bullied to school and sort of protected her from the bullies. I saw how important finding this lost cat was to the little girl that I returned it to. Small things like that aren't small, they're huge, they're enormous, they're ginormous. My whole shift happened during my life review. The worst thing you can do is screw up somebody's destiny, hurt some innocent person, affect their life in a negative way. That's the worst you can do. The best you can do is don't do damage to others. I don't know. I just wanted to talk about how profound a life review is and how it impacts you and changes you. And the shift in your morals is totally, totally different. It's so important to be nice. So I had this life review and it was a lot of anguish. And very upsetting and my grandfather was there to comfort me. And non-physical reality is so thought-responsive that you can't believe it. There's, you can change your, just by thinking, change your whole what's around you. I thought about the Tree of Life. It just flashed through my mind and I saw this beautiful tree. And I knew it wasn't the Tree of Life, you know, like some biblical thing, but it was pretty cool. So you have to really control what you're thinking about while you're out of body. Another thing I learned is, you've got physical reality, but in the same space, in a different dimension, there is non-physical reality. That is very cool. But when I had my life review, I still wasn't ready that my life was over. I still had so much hope in physical reality. I was so grounded in physical reality, I wasn't accepting it well. And my grandfather was trying to soothe me, trying to make me feel better. He was standing there as to help me. Now there was other people behind him, but I couldn't perceive. They were on a different frequency or a different focus or I don't know what, but I knew that there was other people around. I just wasn't able to perceive the group that was around me. I could perceive my grandfather, but nobody else. So my grandfather still loved me. He wasn't there to explain a lot. He was there to comfort. I know that I had a decision about going back to physical reality, going back to my life. I know that there was a blonde woman that said this was going to be hard. I was going to have an especially hard life, a difficult life. What is the furthest I went that I've ever gone out of body was source. I think people mistake it for heaven. I don't think it's heaven. I think there's something way beyond it. But I burst into this area that was filled with souls, that I was floating in a sea of love, that there was a sky and there was sun, but no actual sun. There was brightness and music floated through like in random waves of music. Beautiful, classical, soothing music to make me feel better. The sea of souls that I was floating in were parts of me. I really have never been a big person until then about reincarnation, but I was with different personalities that were part of me. That was a tough one for me to wrap my head around. I couldn't even remember it clearly because it had such an impact. But I didn't get to stay long just enough, like a glimpse through a door or a window, and a feeling of intense joy and love. I think people mistake that as heaven, but it wasn't heaven. It was going home. It was to your source. After that, I was catapulted back to another dimension, and then my grandfather was there. It was a dimension close to physical reality. It was mauve in appearance, very light in area. I mean, there was a ground, but there was no floor. He had formed. He was standing there. He looked like him, and no one said, oh, Laura, you have to go back and live your life. It was time for me to go back, so I didn't have a choice. I wanted to stay with him. A sweeping fear ran through me of the idea of going back, like not after I learned all these things, and then I felt like as I was standing there, things were being taken away, lessons, explanations, experiences. I said to my grandfather, I said, this has been so long. I knew that there was a lot that I can't tell you, a lot that happened that was being removed from my memories. I think there was a lot more explanation, a lot more interaction that I had, but I wasn't allowed to take back the memories when I went back to physical reality. I felt them being stripped away from me, and that made me feel sad and grief-stricken, like I wanted to claw them back in and push them back in, and they were being taken away from me, perhaps because it was too much for me to comprehend. I don't know, that's just a guess. But all of these epiphanies, and there was a lot of epiphanies and a lot of interactions, and this experience was way longer than I can tell you. I can only tell you what I was able to keep and remember. And my grandfather, I know he felt empathetic for me, but he didn't want me there. He wanted me to come back and finish my life. And I also believe that he wanted me to come back and tell his wife that he loved. My grandmother would have transpired. I felt like a messenger for him. It was heartbreaking. There just wouldn't be enough tears in an ocean that I can tell you how bad I felt about coming back. So like a swoosh, my body went backwards, went backwards through the tunnel, and boom, I was back in physical reality. So when I got back in physical reality, I can say the least, I didn't take it well. The two gentlemen that saved my life, they resuscitated me and there was a whole group of people there and there was a car to take me to the hospital and all that. And I looked at these guys and I looked around the field and I was hurt and I was really hurt bad. And I just said to myself, this is not reality. I knew where I had been and that is the true home. That this is, we're just visitors and taking the tour of physical reality. On the way to the hospital, I passed out. I didn't go out of my body, but I fainted. I had a massive concussion, a broken nose which is still broken, a broken finger which is still crooked. And I don't think there was a part of me that wasn't bruised. I was banged up badly. And I got into the hospital and they did x-rays and all kinds of exams and stuff. And I started to try to tell the doctor what had happened, about my near-death experience and stuff. And all of a sudden, he went from compassion to disgust. He folded his arms and he said, what drugs have you taken? And I said, I didn't take any drugs. I had an accident. This is what happened during the accident. I don't understand, you know, why I'm here. And I was very, very distraught. He went, said some things to my mother and my mother said, listen, if she was taking drugs, she'd be the first to tell you. She's not. She's had a severe head injury. You need to admit her. And the doctor was just awful. And I just wanted to go home. And there's some things that I felt that were urgent. This urgency after your near-death experience is just profound. Everything was urgent for about 12 hours. I had to tell my grandmother that I loved her. I had to tell my boyfriend that I loved him. I had to tell everybody that you have to get it right. I wanted to tell everybody, oh my god, this is what happens. You need to get it right. Oh my god, what had happened. But what had changed in me after that doctor shamed me in front of the nurses and embarrassed me, and he just said awful things to me, awful things about kids these days and blah, blah, blah. So I went over to my mom's house, and I went upstairs, and I was really hurt, and I grappled with how can I tell anybody. They're gonna think I'm nuts, they're gonna think I'm on drugs, and I thought, I can't tell anybody. This has gotta be my secret. No one will understand. If you weren't, I wouldn't believe anybody if they had told me. You know, it was really very, very upsetting. And then I worried about the woman with the blond hair that told me I was gonna have a very hard life, and it was going to be quite difficult. Well, she really, really told the truth because shortly after that, I was diagnosed with autoimmune disease and had a lot of life and death struggles. But the things that I learned about non-physical reality was beautiful, was that, you know, the love still exists. Everything good matters. There is a beautiful place that you do go to that you can experience after death. So my fear of death is diminished. I told my grandmother about seeing my grandfather and whatnot, and she believed me. And my grandmother said to me, and her name was Laura also, she said, my mother had the gift. I think it's passed through you. I think it passed through my son. I don't have it. So I was to find out my great grandmother had psychic abilities, healing abilities. People came to her that were ailing and she put her hand on them. She did that when her own child had a bee sting that was fatal and saved him. So the thing that happened after my near death experience, the after effects were the ability to see recently departed people, relatives, things like that. They call it psychic ability. But I did come back with some after effects, which were pretty dramatic. It's so beautiful to know that love still extends into the next life. It's so beautiful to know that I will be seeing loved ones again. I will be reunited. It shifted my values. It changed me. It was the greatest gift I've ever been given. I am so glad I had that fall. I am so glad that someone resuscitated me. Because I was able to give my dying parents comfort and knowledge of the afterlife before they died and I was able to be with them as they died and take care of them. A near-death experience opens you up psychically. It changes you completely. I think, well, not just your core values and knowledge of the afterlife, but I think it awakens something in you. I think I've talked to other people that have R&D years and they've had the psychic phenomena afterwards. The greatest gift of my life was this accident. So if you haven't led such an ideal life, try to be nicer, try not to damage anybody. That's what I say. That's what I believe. Your purpose here in this physical reality, in this incarnation is to live the best life you can, to help people as best you can, to be a good person, to love. We're brought here on this earth to experience and to learn and to love, and to try to be a nicer person. I don't always get there, but that's what I got from my near-death experience.
Speaker 4:
[19:27] If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.