Void : A Near- Death Experience
That day I was going to the city for a competition by a local bus. I was pursuing my senior secondary then, in a school that was a little far from my home, that I had to walk for two kilometres to board a bus from the nearest bus stand to the school.
Till my high school, I rarely went out without my family, especially on bus, as the school was just a walk’s distance from my home. But time never remains the same and I had to get out of my cocoon for further studies. No doubt that the exposure to the outside world gave me a new perspective about the world and even many valuable experiences to cherish lifelong.
So, that day I was going to the main city to represent my school. I was alone in the local bus with a crowd of unknown men and women. We all were lost in our thoughts, nobody talked to anybody and the bus was captured in soundlessness.
I felt a little weird about myself that day. I had no thoughts and an extreme void was created in my brain. I tried to think about something but my mind was reflecting back everything as if it was fully satisfied of this material world and wanted no more of it.
I felt as if my soul wanted to move out, as if I was going to die. Still no thoughts emerged in my mind. No attachments, no worries, no emotions, nothing at all. I was like a robot with my soul captured inside but eager to come out.
As the bus reached the destination, the conductor shouted aloud to everyone to descend out of the bus. Like a lifeless body, I moved out of the bus and advanced towards the place where the competition was to be held. As I reached there, I went to my schoolmates who were standing in a group in a far corner of a ground. They were discussing many things but everything flew past over my head and I still stood numb.
The whole day I felt the same. That was extremely awkward and a unique experience at the same time; though everything became normal the following day. At that stage of life, I didn’t know about the logic and the reason of that kind of feeling and never had I discussed that with anyone else.
Neurologists and researchers have defined this state of feeling as ‘Near Death Experience (NDE)’, although the person don’t die or experiences any negative effects after such kind of incidences. NDE is actually a broader term that includes out of body experiences, a feeling of being dead, tunnelling experience like moving through a passage, having a life review like a film, falling back into one’s body, feeling of peace, painlessness and void, etc. What I experienced that day was just a small part of this vast episode.
I know everything that I have stated looks like a fictional story but this is a fact and even regarded as transcendence by psychologists and neurologists. A British psychologist, Chris French gave some models to explain the phenomenon that included spiritual, psychological and physiological theories of NDE.
According to the spiritual model, many psychologists like Bruce Greyson (2014) believed that many things including ‘out of body experiences’, are out of human extent of knowledge and couldn’t be explained. In the psychological model, Russell Noyes (Prof. of Psychiatry) and Roy Kletti (Clinical Psychologist) speculated that NDE occurred during extreme emotional conditions. And according to mainstream neurologists, NDEs are result of brain damage or low blood oxygen levels as stated in the physiological model.
However, I didn’t get any satisfactory explanation about my experience but I was escalated to learn about the positive after-effects which I definitely noticed in myself. The changes included positive change in personalities, shift in consciousness, more value of life of people and worldly beings and a bigger perspective towards life and space.
We humans think that we have conquered the world and have logical explanations for anything; but this would be our limited outlook, if we don’t accept that many things are beyond human reasoning, which we have to get a justification for.
