The near death experience of Jonathan Ashford

Prior to my near-death experience, I was a C-suite executive and consultant. I would say I wasn't a great guy. I was manipulative. I didn't care much about people. I was anti-spiritual. I used to make the joke if God existed, I would just meet it when I died. I was materialistic. I only sought for myself and I just really didn't have any compassion or empathy for anybody. If you didn't fit in with that lifestyle, I didn't really hang out with you. My entire life was based around my career. It was about gaining as much as I could before I passed. It just so turns out I passed before I imagined I I was 46 years old at the time. I was very fit. I was on a ketogenic diet and I tracked all of my macros. I was very health conscious during the day. At night was a different story. But I ended up collapsing one day in a grocery store, so I drove myself to the emergency room immediately. While there they ran a battery of tests and they couldn't find anything wrong. They said I was having an After releasing me from the hospital, I felt off for the following week. I was not well and I was progressively getting sicker. The following week I felt that same feeling come on again and as I collapsed again, I drove myself to the emergency room a second time. This time they found a blood marker that said my blood was acidic, which could have been something that would have led to a proper diagnosis. But unfortunately, they attributed the acidity to the ketogenic diet. I was then given fluids and released a second time. After being released the second time, my health dropped off of a cliff. I proceeded over the next week to get seriously ill. By the end of the second week, I had lost seven to 10 pounds, my eyesight was fading. My hair was falling out. I was too weak to walk across my own house. Finally, at one point, my skin turned completely yellow. Top to bottom, every part of me had turned yellow. But I was so sick that night. I just said to myself, if I'm still yellow tomorrow, I'll call the emergency room or I'll call a hospital. So I went to bed that night. But at 4.30 in the morning, I woke up. And I couldn't understand why. I was sleeping 16 to 18 hours a day at that point. There was no reason for me to be awake at 4.30. And I felt different. I felt peaceful and calm, but knew something was wrong. When I tried to get out of bed, I fell, I collapsed into the wall. I struggled to make it to my doorway. And I figured, well, just I'm stiff or something. And I'll just go and use the restroom. I'm awake, I might as well. But when I made it to the bathroom, I noticed both of my hands were gray and had no fluid in them whatsoever. And I thought to myself, what a strange hallucination. I figured I had a massive fever or something. And when I looked into the mirror, I saw my face matching the presence of my hands, completely gray, void of all fluid, skin sagging, hanging. And I'd like to say there's just something that happens when you make it to that point. It's like you remember what death is. It's already programmed within you. You just know, there's just a part of you that knows when you're going to pass. And in my case, there wasn't a struggle to remain here. There was just an acceptance, a peaceful acceptance. I like to say it's three parts. It's the personality is last to know, your body knows first, your mind knows second. And lastly, by the time it hits your personality, you've realized all the human clinging to life has been removed. And in my case, it was just very graceful, a very graceful passing. I like to call it a long blink. You're here, you blink, and you're somewhere else. I experienced this velvety darkness, which I like to compare to being swaddled as a newborn and carried against a loved one's chest. It was all encompassing. It was all loving. There wasn't anything in that darkness, but it wasn't void of anything. I didn't experience any pain. I didn't experience any terror or fear. I just felt completely loved and cradled through it. A love that I can't quite explain. It was during that period, I don't know how long I was in that place. But after that point, after that long blink, I did wake up into a place of form. It was a place that I can only compare to the Scottish Islands or Ireland with short grass, waving grass as if it was underwater. It was seaweed and light everywhere. The grass was alive. The stones were alive. The hills were alive. Everything there felt just as alive or more alive than I felt. And I recognized in that space that I could see all around me 360 degrees. But seeing wasn't just seeing, it was feeling as well. Seeing and feeling felt as one. I could put my attention and intention into the grass, into the lights within the grass, and travel for eternity. It never ended. The light would communicate with you. It was just love. It just felt like love. And I didn't realize I had passed. I had no idea. There wasn't any part of me that thought, where am I? What is going on? It seemed normal. It was more real than life here. And that's hard to explain because we only know life here until we leave it. And there was a period of where I felt drawn to move. And as I moved, there was this misty boundary around me that moved with me. And on the other side of this misty boundary, as I moved, a hilt took form. And on that hill was a rock, a big rock. And there was a gentleman sitting on it. He looked like a hiker that you would see in that landscape, just somebody you would wave to passing on the trail. His arms were folded and his elbows were on his knees. He was just waiting. And it was in that moment where I made contact with him. I would like to say eye contact, but I know I didn't have a body. I did recognize him, but I could not place him. I did not recognize who he was. But at the same time I did, I could not place a name or an identity. And it wasn't until that being left the rock and walked down to meet me, standing amongst this waving grass, that he stood in front of me and showed me several different existences, different identities that I had been a part of. Over time, until he landed on the identity of me, the person who had just passed. And it wasn't until I landed on the version of me that it sunk in the full experience that I was no longer in a human body. I learned that I had passed. And then he said telepathically, I am you and you are me. And when he mentioned those words, it felt like the universe shook. And I understood exactly who he was in that moment. I can call him by a name. I can say his name was Jesus. However, it's not the Jesus that you know. It isn't the religious identity. It's something greater than identity itself. It was an unconditional love that's beyond measure. You can call that hiker by the man's name Jesus, but you can also replace the name with just the word love. It's far greater than the identity we tried to hold him within. And I tend to use the word love more than the identity of his name, and he would tell you the same. So after he mentioned who he was to me telepathically, my life review began. There was no warning. It just started. I saw many aspects of my life. I saw the good. I saw the bad. I saw and felt things from my point of view as if I was back in my body. I felt things as if I was in somebody else's body, receiving something I was saying to them. I also had a third party view where I was outside of myself and another person arguing. I was the pavement. I was the parking lot paint lines. I was the building. I was the car. I was the sky. I was the sun, and I could feel it all wince based on two people spitting poison at each other. My life experience taught me that free will is not what we believe it to be. Free will is understanding I am awake, and I know why I'm here and what to do and how to experience life from an awakened and conscious state, or I am asleep, and life rolls out to reflect those two states. You could say that free will is more about a state than a choice. The most basic choice that you have to repeat over and over and over again in your life is to recognize I love myself and I love others, or I do not. That choice can literally be repeated your entire existence. All choices boil down to that. During my life review, I was shown many things about our existence, why we experience the pain, the suffering, the happiness, why we experience all of what we experience here, and it's to understand that you're asleep and everything that you experience is here to wake you up. What we tend to do is judge those experiences. We don't want them, and they are the very thing here to provide us the opportunity to wake up to something more, to wake up to what we really are. If you can boil your life down to the singular choice of I'm awake or asleep, you will recognize that there is communication in every ounce of suffering that we receive. It's just trying to wake us up to something more, and the suffering tends to get turned down in a degree when we do wake up, when we do choose the state of love. So there is a reason that everything happens here. Nothing is random. I was shown that on the other side. Nothing here is random ever. So can you sit in the state and make that choice? You understand that you will experience things from a filterless state. You no longer have the ego to say, well, I did that certain thing because I was having a bad day. That part of you is now gone. So you get to experience the way you've lived your life without the human filter that can negotiate how you might view a particular situation. You understand that this is just a costume. This is just something that we wear, and identity is something we wear that is temporary. But on the other side, you will realize that every choice, every circumstance, every mood you've ever been in has been there to show you that you are something more, not the mood, not the identity. And at the end of my life review, I was given a choice. The choice was I can return, share, and help others, or to stay on the other side with that being. However, I like to say it's not really a choice. When you experience your connection to all others, when you feel it, and you know that we are essentially all love itself, how could I not return? How could I walk away from helping others? So I did choose to return. But it was at that point when I chose to return that I recognized that it wasn't for what I had just experienced. It was for something more. And it was in that place that everything changed. The entire landscape changed. The being I was with changed. Everything disintegrated back into something of a formless state. I realized that the landscape was simply there to be a loving welcome. It was the thing that welcomed me the most. If I had seen a church when I had arrived, I probably would have been a bit scared. But for me, nature was something I was always connected with. And it's just understanding that we will all be welcomed by something that we enjoy, or we find peace in when we pass. But it isn't permanent, just like our own lives here are not permanent. So once I became formless, and the landscape became formless, I received information for a even though there was no time there. I knew in that moment, that awareness that I was being given information to return with. It wasn't to return to talk about my near-death experience so much, although I'm happy to. But it was to share information. So while I was in that formless place, I call it the void. It's alive, but it's also formless in a way where you understand all things that take form come from this place. And I was given information and revelations and teachings and things that went on for what seemed like forever. I was given things about time and reality and perception, about why things happen here, what we experience, what you really are versus what you think you are. Truth, what it means, how we are truth itself without realizing it. And at that point, there was something that happened after all of this time, even though you don't feel time in a way like you do here. It doesn't really exist. But there was a sun that appeared amidst this void, a small sun that started about the size of a basketball in the distance. And it just kept growing and growing. That golden white light that isn't golden white, it's something else, a color I can't describe. It just consumed everything. It kept growing, consumed the void, consumed the being next to me, consumed me. And when I was fully in it and integrated within it, I recognized that I am the light as well. We're all aspects of that light. You can use the word God, and I call it the embrace of God. But even the word God is too small. It does it a disservice. And it's just understanding that it knows all things everywhere. It knows how many raindrops are in the largest oceans. It can tell you anything. And when you realize how powerful it is, and it looks at you, it points all of that at you and loves just you in that moment. You feel like you are the only reason for all of the things that it knows. It's a love I can't explain. And it's why we will continue to take an incarnation here, just to get the chance to feel that again. And it was in that space, it felt like infinity. You could feel all things everywhere. And finally, it felt like it was pulling away from me. I felt as if I was horizontal. And it was what some near-death experiencers see in the beginning of their journey, a tunnel of light. And I experienced it on my return, as it was pulling away from me. And I felt like I was being cradled and placed into the body. I felt like a raindrop falling off the end of a tree branch in slow motion, just gently gliding down. And then the next thing I realized, I was in my body. But I wasn't conscious in my body, I was consciousness somewhere in my torso. And then over time, I felt myself expand into the body slowly. I was told Dr. Rudolf Steiner describes it as a box or rectangle. And I felt that very feeling just expanding into the torso. I felt my body try and take its first heartbeat. I felt fluid move for the first time. I felt my lungs, which I recognized had pancaked on my back after the collapse, inflate without taking a breath. I felt what it felt like to take the first breath. And all the motor skills returned as I was filling out the body. The consciousness was filling out the body. And then I opened my eyes, and I was reborn again, in a way. I recognized that I had collapsed. I was on the floor. My cell phone had fallen out of my pocket. I looked at it. It said 730. I was gone three hours. I'd been taking my temperature all week, not knowing why I couldn't control my body temperature, but it never fluctuated. It was 97.1 all week. When I put the thermometer in my mouth, it was 94.0, emergency hypothermia. And I didn't understand until about a year later that that's one degree of temperature loss in a corpse for every hour that it's gone. But the part of me that was worried all week about, or the past two weeks, I was worried about what was happening to it, didn't return. There was no desire to seek assistance. I eventually got off the floor, looked in the mirror, recognized myself. My skin had filled back in in my face and my hands. And I walked into my bedroom and my dog looked through me. I had him 12 years at the time, and he gave me the only look I could not recognize other than the same look I gave that being on the other side. I know you, but I don't know you. How do I know you? And then I proceeded to go about my day. But something had changed. I felt a love that I couldn't explain. A love that three hours earlier I could not carry. A love that I was against. And now I carried it freely. And everything had changed from that point on. I didn't tell any doctors that I had passed. I went to several doctor's visits over the next few months. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth month after my return that a number of doctors were able to put together what had happened, which was the gallstone getting stuck in a duct that led to sepsis stage one, stage two, stage three, which then led to organ failure, multiple organ failure. I had one doctor say to me, you're lucky to be alive. And I never shared that I had passed. So on my return, I was completely changed. I never went back to work. I knew that I couldn't. I could never put myself in a position to take from others for my own gain. I came back without desire. No desire for money, companionship, for entertainment, for anything. I sold everything I owned, including my house, the friend groups, all of the relationships I had died with that person that day. I am so different that most people can't reconcile what had happened to me. I now simply exist to be in that state of love and share it with others. I just understood that money and material items were no longer going to be a part of my life. And I remember when it had finally hit me that I've sold everything and I don't have a career anymore. I walked away from a 25 year career as a marketing and technology executive. And I just shut my eyes and said, I know you have a plan because I don't. And at that moment, I received a message that says, do not worry about money. And I never have since the return. I've always been taken care of. So I don't seek anything. One of the pieces of information I received on the other side was, receive only what you are given, take nothing for yourself. And I knew that if I took for myself, I would be rebuilding something that had died, a self. So I do not reach for anything for a self. I am simply here to give. And that being who is with me on the other side has never left me. There is something that gets integrated with that being. He, it, the all is with me all the time. I haven't been out of connection or communication with that being since my return. It has guided me to help others in ways that are beyond explanation. People witness him through me in different ways. And I'm just simply here to be a vehicle for that. So I came back with many gifts, clear audience, clear sentience, clairvoyance, psychic visions. I do help others with those who have passed to receive messages, but mostly I am guided. I sit in a place of stillness that allows me to be guided to what I need to do. Many of the psychic visions I have have come true. I could say all of them. I predicted the LA wildfires three days before they happened, avalanches in Switzerland, earthquakes off the coast of the United States. I received this information not to run around and seek something, but simply to help others when I I come back understanding that the veil of spirituality that most people refer to is not outside of themselves. We are the veil. And when you understand the state that you walk around in is the very thing blocking you from experiencing more, your life becomes a reflection. Can I reflect on my life and experience more? Or do I think it's outside of myself? It's actually within. So I come back understanding that the ego and the intellect are not what you are, yet we identify ourselves with them. We always have, since birth, since we can recognize our own name. You could say it's a tool in a sense because it shows you where you stand in your understanding of this reality, but it's truly something that is to be transcended in a way because you can't intellectually get to love. You can only feel it from the space which doesn't have identity. That's the removal of the veil. So it's understanding most religions will talk about faith, divine trust, but I know from my return that everybody here in existence has been given enough breadcrumbs throughout their life to be able to see that there's more. We're just too busy. We're just wrapped up and distracted, but if you were to sit down and reflect, reflect on your existence, I can tell you that the proof is already there. So I understand from returning that everything here is communication, but in our human state we look for specific types of communication. We want to hear it. We want to see the sign. We want to experience the clouds parting and have it come down and hand us something, but that's not its primary language. Its primary language is the circumstances that we run into all day every day. It's constantly trying to tell us something. Everything here is a folded up piece of paper with a note on it. We're just too busy to open the note. When you sit back into that reflective state, you can look at your life and witness your life and hear that very communication that you're trying to find. It's understanding that our life is a set of dominoes, all white dominoes, black dots, all lined up, stacked up that runs for eternity, and at the end of it, it creates the portrait of your existence, and every domino is meant to fall. It's putting your hand out for a cookie and asking for a cookie, and when you get the carrot being upset, because it's only you can see one domino. You can only see that particular circumstance. You can't see where the carrot leads. The reflective state is taking this step back and looking at your life as a whole. We get wrapped up in the circumstance, which is why we can't see the communication. So taking this step back and understanding you get what you need, not always what you want, but what you need will lead you to what you want. Your free will choice is to recognize that or to fight for something else, but heaven will not abandon you. The other side will never abandon you. You are loved beyond measure, beyond anything you can imagine. You could take every day of your existence, every second, and say it was loving, and it still won't scratch the surface of what you feel on the other side. It's knowing that your heart is the GPS, and your heart will always fight the mind. The two very rarely agree. It's like drawing a heart. If you draw a heart from the point at the bottom instead of the top, it's knowing no matter how far out to the left or right you go, you will always return to center, but you will only return to center when you remember to return to center. When you turn that pen over and return to center in the shape of the heart. So it's about your own awareness. Your own awareness is what gives you the answers you seek. They aren't outside of yourself. So on my return I understand that you are never alone, ever. I was shown plenty of circumstances in my life review where I imagined myself to be alone and I was not. It's understanding that even those who have passed are here. Past pets, past friends, past family. They're around us all the time. We are never alone. You can say you don't have any privacy whatsoever. They know everything that is going on, but at the same time they're sitting in a state of love. So there's no judgment. We would go to, well they see everything, uh-oh. That's a form of judgment, but there's no judgment from the other side. So I like to tell people that if you want to use the word God, it's in the room with you and you simply need to shut your eyes and ask it. Ask for what you want. Ask for communication. Ask for a sign. You may not get those answers because you will only get what you need. However, it's not somewhere else. It's here. It's in the room with you. It's developing a relationship with something that you trust that you know is there after you've reflected on your own life and seen the proof. I would say that the best way to pray to it or the best way to communicate with it is just to close your eyes and find stillness within yourself for a few minutes a day. It was never about lighting candles. It was never about a particular building. It was about acknowledging that there's something in the room with you. God to me is a divine intelligence. It's the source of all things. It creates all things. It has its own personality. It is not a nebulous energy somewhere. It's everything around you. It moves things on the board to make things happen. It creates the experiences that you are here to experience to try and wake you up out of love. You could say it's love itself, but to even try and give it a definition is doing it a disservice. It's too big. But it's just understanding that it is the very thing that loves you as if you are the only thing that exists, and it's here with you. I often refer to God as the parent that's walking you through a busy market, and you are a child, a very small child, and you're holding its hand. And because there are so many distracting things, you forget that you're holding the hand of that parent. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's walking with you. But you get distracted by all the things in this reality, and it's only when you finally wake up that you find that state of stillness within and realize that it's always been there. Do you look over and say, oh, you've always been here. You never left. I like to think of us as the three-year-old child who walks into the parent's bedroom and says, I'm going to make breakfast today. And the parents look at each other and laugh and go, uh-oh. And the child tries to make pancakes, and Dad just watches this child struggle to make pancakes, and it can't do it. It makes a mess in the kitchen, and Dad just lets you try to struggle to make pancakes. But finally, when you give up, when you're the three-year-old that finally gives up and says, Dad, I can't do it, Dad finally steps in and helps you make the pancakes. It's only when you acknowledge that it's there will it come to your aid. Surrender is the way to experience the divine. Because in order to recognize that God exists, you need to surrender the ego. It's understanding that the ego was never driving the car. And that's the difficult part for the ego, because then it's out of a job. But everything in modern reality is built to feed the ego. The desire for outcome is something that's very difficult for most of us to transcend. It's viewing life through our lens, which says, I know what is best for me. And we're constantly working through that lens, which only sees a very small sliver of reality. But all possibilities exist outside of that lens. And it does involve trust. It does involve communication. And it's understanding that you're better off being guided than choosing. So the practice is recognizing, am I seeking an outcome or am I being guided to it? I understood being a man of many desires prior to death and returning without them after, I do understand that desire serves a purpose. We like to point at desire and say, well, it's bad. We judge it without realizing we're not supposed to judge anything here. We're supposed to recognize our desire as the very sign that shows us where we are in our spiritual progression. It's not about denying yourself something. It's about recognizing why you want something. That is the very nature of this existence, the contrast that we experience here. This was never meant to be simple. It was meant to be the contrast that wakes you up. You in a bad mood serves as the very gift to somebody else. They have that choice to love or judge you. You in a good mood is the very gift to somebody else. So there's no place to stand where we aren't being a gift to somebody in some way. The problem is the part of us, the ego that seeks perfection. And this was never about perfection. This was about awareness. It was about understanding where you are in reality, what you are in reality. But you can't perfect this reality. You cannot perfect your life. You will create your own suffering trying to. The perfection is found on the other side of death, not here. You're two halves of a ball. One half of you is infinitely loving and perfect. The other half of you is the three-year-old trying to make the pancakes in the morning. You recognize that the human is perfect because of its imperfection. The imperfection of you is what provides the contrast for everybody else to experience something through you. Yet we try to find perfection and create our own suffering through doing so here. But this was never meant to be perfect. Perfect is on the other side. This is just meant to be experienced. So if I could sum up what we are here to do, it's to remember what we are. It's not to learn so much, but it's to look in the mirror and recognize you are love itself. It's hard to find. We're busy. It's hard to find in a modern setting. But that hasn't changed anything. It's who you are. It's your natural state. You will return to it someday. The choice is returning to it now. It's becoming formless within form. Some of the practices that I practice are going in nature. It's the purest form of divinity that you can find. I recommend to everybody is start a gratitude practice. Wake up in the morning. Be thankful for your life. Be thankful for the gifts that you're given. You're surrounded by gifts everywhere. We judge them as not being gifts. Take time and reflection. Five minutes. Five minutes a day. Take time and reflect on your day. Did you recognize the communication that was coming through? Did you recognize why you experienced contrast? Did you recognize why your desire was pointing to something? Without these practices, you're wrapped up in existence and you can't see and experience more being wrapped up in it. I like to tell everybody they carry their own happy pills without realizing it. It's the feeling, for example for me, it's the recognition of a beautiful sunset. It's when I'm in that place and I recognize that beauty that I realize I am not my name. I'm not my age. I'm not my sex. I'm not my problems. I am simply the recognition of that beauty and I am connected with it. Nobody ever taught you how to recognize beauty. No one taught you in school how to look at a sunset and say, wow that's beautiful. The reason you know how to recognize that beauty is because it's innate. It's a part of you. It's a reflection of the love that you embody and I tell everybody to bottle that feeling. When you find it, whatever it may be, a walk in the park, knitting, painting, whatever it is, when you find it, bottle up the feeling where you recognize that deeper connection and the next time you're struggling, shut your eyes, take one conscious breath and feel that feeling. Be authentic. I call that one happy pill. How many happy pills do you need an hour? A hundred? Two hundred? You can't overdose on the happy pills, but it's recognizing that your connection is far deeper than what reality will tell you. It's far more than what your intellect will allow you to believe, but the truth is divinity is around us all the time and you can feel it. You can feel it now. If I could, I would redefine death. Death is birth. Birth is death. Death is a remembrance of what you are. It's going home. This was never your home. It's understanding that if you've lost somebody recently, they sit in the state of love. They're loved beyond anything you can describe. You may feel loss for their material existence here, but if you can get to loving them where they are, they're experiencing a gift that all of us will someday get to experience again. So there's no part of me that has fear of death or harm in any way. I do recognize on my return that I am not this body. I am the essence that drives the rental car that leaves it at the airport and takes a flight out of here. So I do not identify myself as this body. I understand this world, this reality. You come down, you forget to remember. The whole goal of the amnesia, of having the amnesia here, is to remember to love. It's like walking away from the sun and forgetting the sun is behind you, only to remember it someday, turn around and say, oh my god, there's a sun there and I love it. So we're constantly leaving to remember love. Your whole existence is based on that fact. All the contrasts and all the things you experience here are simply trying to wake you up to that fact. You walk away from it until you remember to turn around and walk towards it. Is this reality a trap? I would say of your own making. I would say if you do not reflect on your life, you are trapped. I would say if you do not remember that you are more than this physical body and this existence, you are trapped. And you will probably keep coming here until you realize that I was never any of this. So I've had visions about two choices that we have moving into the future. You could say this is a time of great change. I think most people are starting to feel that. And really that choice comes down to free will, the single free will choice, which is repeated again and again, which is I understand that I am a compassionate loving being or I'm not. I judge and I seek outcome. And based on those two choices, I think you will start to see a separation. You'll see groups who sit in love and you will see groups who seek outcome. You're probably seeing it now. But you could say that will decide where we end up on this planet. So there will be more things coming. You are witnessing some of this play out now. And in the future, there will be more. It's a time of turmoil. And it's more important than ever to sit in that space of love. What's happening is happening for a reason. It was meant to happen. Can you find love within it? Yeah, it's a tough time. I don't know that I recognize a true awakening happen. But I do recognize that those who are awakening are getting closer to awakening. And I recognize those who aren't are getting further from it. I don't see a worldwide awakening. I was not shown that to be true. But I do believe that people will become more loving based on the contrast we experience in the world. So you can look at this as the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. And if you're here experiencing this, you have that choice to make. I remember why I'm here, what this is about, or I choose to deny it. But the choice will always be love in the end, regardless of worldly circumstance. That is our free will choice, to remember that we are love itself.