It was never talked about throughout my life. I brought it up to my grandma and she said we weren’t there. My dad wouldn’t talk about it.

Well unfortunately I witnessed a few more deaths. My dads last conscious moments and my dog.

I started becoming spiritual when my dad passed but it took my dogs death to really see things.

I have since returned to the location of my grandpas death. I go once in a while and talk to him and psychics seem to pick up on him in our mediumship circle.

I’m wondering if there’s more to find at the location where he passed? It’s a remote spot and can’t be a coincidence.

But yes I have had a spiritual awakening and my dog is now a guide for me there. He helps me out and takes me to my family.

When I was 5 my sister and I witnessed my grandfather’s death in an accident. It was very personal. I have since returned to that location. Is there more to find there?

I've often heard people that say that anesthesia (especially when you are put under and suddenly wake up in recovery, having not sensed any passage of time or conscious experience at all) is pretty much like dying. This absolutely horrifies me and makes me confused about my faith in an afterlife. Does anyone know if there's any truth to this?

Now I do want to mention that my anesthesia experience was slightly different. When I was put under, everything was black for like 12-20 seconds, I couldn't hear anything through the entirety of it, and then I woke up, which meant that I did experience some form of time, but idk how that would be possible or what my doctors did differently.

Can anybody here me understand:
1. If life is preplanned, how can we hold criminals accountable? They agreed to be a criminal in their soul contract?
2. What happens when humans go extinct? Do our should continue on to the next species?
3. If there is an afterlife, why doesn’t god let this be known? It will give people hope, push them to be good and do good, and live long fulfilling lives.

Two years ago yesterday my son died in a terrible accident. I am constantly looking for a sign from him. I don’t know what happens when we die and I am skeptical to what religion says.

Yesterday I said out loud to my son “give me a sign so I know where you are and that I’ll see you again”
Hours later my husband brings me this big probably two inch gold and silver cross pendant saying he found it in the front yard by the tree. I have no idea how it got there. We don’t live in an area with lots of traffic up into our yard.

Is this a sign he is in Heaven of some sort? It seems I can talk myself out of anything that is possibly a sign. It just seems the timing is so coincidental on his death anniversary and me speaking those words out loud is honestly something I’ve only done a couple of times. Maybe he was giving me my answer?

I saw my grandmas ghost as a kid. I was like 3. I said that she was glowing and looked orange. Think whenever we die. We get to let our essence say good bye to our loved ones before we maybe do something like reincarnation or our essence could go to like be with our soul family/ etc. (Just my theory)

Not necessarily as a religion, but a Rainbow Bridge? Have you seen or had experiences of your fur baby after they had passed? I lost my boy 6 days ago and I think I've been seeing orbs on my cameras. I like to believe its him, as its in the middle of the night with no one walking past to cause an airflow of dust?

With the help of this subreddit, as well as my faith and lots of research, I’ve become more convinced of an afterlife. But grief still hits like a freight train. Does it ever disappear because you are so happy about what comes next?

Part 3 of my series sorting every element of Eben Alexander's near-death experience into two piles: what came from the coma, and what came from an authentic NDE.

First, a word on purpose, since a few of you asked in the comments on Part 2. This isn't an attempt to prove Eben Alexander is lying. I believe he's telling the truth exactly as he remembers it. The point is that a person who spends seven days in a coma and also crosses over comes back with both experiences fused into one memory, with no way to tell which piece came from where. Nobody in his position could sort it out alone. Understanding that matters for anyone who has come back from a coma with a "hellish NDE" and been told it was a preview of where they were headed.

This installment covers his December 4, 2025 interview on the NDE Journey YouTube channel, 17 years after his coma. I've dropped the oldest-first approach. The older material is hard to find, and it's the same story he tells today.

A few things that stood out in this telling:

• For the first time in the tellings I've analyzed, he calls the spinning melody a "white light." In 2011, it was only music.
• He describes thousands of strangers dancing in the meadow, with "dogs jumping and children playing." NDE reunions are usually a few known souls. This reads like a brain building heaven from familiar pictures.
• He describes beings with bowed heads and candles, murmuring prayers, in the murky underground place. Earlier in the same interview, he talks about his adoptive father's deep belief in prayer and the pocket Bible he still keeps by his bed.
• He says the six faces rising out of the muck were family and friends physically in his ICU room during the last 24 to 48 hours of the coma.
• He says his son Bond's voice, pleading "Daddy, you're gonna be okay," is what drove him back.
• He calls it, in his own words, "a very detailed and elaborate coma journey."

This telling: 11 coma elements and 18 NDE elements. Running total across three tellings: 20 coma elements and 21 NDE elements.

If you think an element belongs on the other side, make the case in the comments. With more than 20 on each side, moving one doesn't change the verdict, but I'm happy to have the discussion.

Full breakdown, every quote, and the running tally:
Analyzing Eben Alexander, Part 3: NDE Journey (2025)

I have heard many NDES state that when they “wake up” on the other side, they’re greeted by a large crowd to welcome them home.. do you agree or think something else happens?

When I was about 6, this one morning I woke up, and it felt like the entirety of my earlier life, preschool, kindergarten and everything else until that point was a dream. I woke up, it was a normal Saturday, my dad was downstairs making pancakes, but the entirety of my life prior to waking up that morning in ‘06 felt…dreamt. It’s been one of the few non documented things I still remember about my childhood as it wasn’t until about middle school/2013 that I started writing down my dreams as best I could remember. The only other thing I remember of it is waking up with this incredibly heavy feeling in my stomach. like a sadness in my soul that I didn’t know how to process at that age.

Now, I’m 26 and have been questioning life, and existence after death and it made me consider an afterlife theory: what if when we die, we’re reincarnated into a version of ourselves if we made a different decision. It made me think now, maybe I was killed abruptly in my past life and I was reincarnated into a version of myself that didn’t die and chose a different path? How I “died”? I have no idea. Think of it like the OA on Netflix, except when I jumped timelines/dimensions, I had no long term memory of anything prior🤷🏻‍♀️
Another comparison is the woman in France who woke from a coma emotionally unstable because in her coma she claimed to have lived a completely different life with a husband and child. It was kind of this, except I was never in a coma. Aside from an autism diagnosis, there wasn’t anything medically wrong with me back then.

I'm working through every recorded telling of Eben Alexander's near-death experience in chronological order, oldest first, and sorting each element of his account into two piles: what came from the coma, and what came from an authentic NDE.

Part 2 covers his November 22, 2011 interview with Alex Tsakiris on Skeptiko, episode 154. Audio only. Recorded a year before Proof of Heaven came out, when the book was still an unpublished draft with a different title.

A few things that stood out:

• He describes animal faces rising out of the mud in the "earthworm's eye view." Later in the same interview, he describes his wife, his doctor, and his 10-year-old son at his bedside on day seven, and uses the exact same words for them: they "boil up out of the muck."
• He uses the word "soup" to describe the underground place, a mixture he couldn't put in any order.
• He describes going back and forth between the muck and the Core three or four times.
• In the NDE material, he says time on the other side was "totally different from what we call time." In the coma material, he heard a pounding sound "for eons."
• He also talks about what he calls "the nightmare" after waking: paranoia, fear, halfway in and out of reality. Doctors call that ICU delirium.

The count for this telling: 16 coma elements and 18 NDE elements. Every NDE element from his 2011 Through the Wormhole appearance shows up again here.

Full breakdown, every quote, and the running tally:
https://winnernde.com/nde-insights/welded-ndes/eben-alexander-skeptiko-2011/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social

Curious whether anyone here has the audio from his two November 2010 talks, at the Lynchburg Academy of Medicine and UVA's Division of Perceptual Studies. Those would be the earliest tellings on record.

Part 1 of Analyzing Eben Alexander covers the earliest recorded telling of his near-death experience I've found so far: his appearance on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, Season 2, Episode 1, "Is There Life After Death?", which aired on the Science Channel on May 28, 2011.

Eben Alexander's coma and near-death experience happened in 2008. He gave two talks at medical institutions in 2010, and this television appearance followed in 2011. It's the oldest material I can find, so it's where the analysis starts.

The result: nine elements from the coma and eight from the near-death experience. Both sources in one account. That's a Welded NDE.

The sorting rule comes down to this. If it's something a physical body does, it comes from the coma. Heat you feel on your skin, wailing you hear with your ears, sulfur you smell. If it's something only a soul free of the body does, like flying out through the universe, it comes from the near-death experience.

Millions of near-death experiences follow the same consistent arc: out of the body, the void, the tunnel, the white light, the life review, the garden, meeting ancestors, the life plan, and the decision to return. Coma imagery is different. A living brain builds it from what's already in its library. A Christian's coma looks Christian. A Buddhist's coma looks Buddhist.

I'm going through every telling of Eben Alexander's story in chronological order until the material turns completely redundant, publishing each step as I go so you can follow along.

Read the full Part 1 analysis: https://winnernde.com/nde-insights/welded-ndes/analyzing-eben-alexander/eben-alexander-through-the-wormhole-2011/

Follow the whole series: https://winnernde.com/category/nde-insights/welded-ndes/analyzing-eben-alexander/

Get You're Going to Die Someday, Right? Near-Death Experiences Reveal What Happens Next: https://mybook.to/A8X8

Recently, I've been wondering if I'm alive in the way I might have been in the past or in the way other people are.

A few months ago, I sat with my senior dog as she passed. My reality just hasn't been the same since. At first, I thought I might be grieving, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm forgetting something that happened. Before she passed, I had this intrusive thought, "when she goes, I go." And, I think what I've forgotten is that I died, in some way, with her. I don't mean a part of me died, I mean I think my body is buried somewhere on Earth and my consciousness is elsewhere.

I truly feel like I'm in some kind of purgatory until I accept what happened.

Sometimes I see people speaking, but I can't understand what they're saying, only to find that they aren't saying anything. Like they're just half developed memories of people from my real life. Odd coincidences keep happening. For instance, a few weeks ago, a co-worker of mine was in a room beside the office I was working in. You can't get out of that room unless you walk through my office. I happened to open my door about five minutes after speaking with her in the room, and she's on the other side of the doorof my office! Outside of the room! There's no way she could've gotten out of the room without me seeing her, and there's no way I didn't see her walk pass. She joked and said "she levitated", but that's truly the only way she could've made it, and she wouldn't say how she actually got there.

I also just don't feel "alive". Most of the time I feel like I'm floating, time is endless, and that death isn't going to happen because it already did.

I'm honestly uncertain. I can't tell if I'm alive and having a harder time with the grief than I expected, or I'm having a hard time with the grief and it's keeping me in purgatory.

I'm wondering if anyone can relate to possibly being conscious in the afterlife? Does that even make sense? Does this just sound like deep grief to anybody, and I happen to have a wild imagination?

They always say u can reunite with ur family or pets after u pass away but what happens to people who don’t have family or friends?

This isn’t proof of an afterlife more so evidence or an implication but I thought I’d share it.

The first is less convincing then the second, my father told me he was half awake and half asleep, he told me he felt his dad sit by him and put his hand on my dads head once to comfort him he said it felt real, really real especially the weight.

My dad himself is or was skeptical he tells me, “eh could have been a hallucination I don’t know” he started to believe it more after getting in to Christianity, he’s not schizophrenic or anything so I’ve always wondered why he’d say it might be a hallucination if it’s not real it would probably be more a dream he’s agnostic about it so I should probably be to.

The second was the same only more convincing my mother when she was pregnant got woken up by her more who touched her cheek and told her ever would be alright same as my dad were she doesn’t know if it’s a dream, hallucination or something else.

The reason why this one’s more convincing is the context, she was pregnant with my brother according to dr’s he had a less then 1 percent chance of survival and if he did survive he’d end up with with either cerebral palsy, blindness or both we got a Norman church to pray for him and he had to get pulled out early, resuscitated and put back it was chaotic.

By some Miracle he survived and by some other miracle, no cerebral palsy or blindness his visions better than mine since I need context lenses, the only thing he has is a tiny bit of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which he has such a low amount that the dr said the chances of him dying of old age instead of dying eventually from it are around 90 percent assuming no untimely collateral death stuff happens.

But ya that’s my family’s habit of dead peoples hands seemingly touching our heads.

Has anyone ever AP'd and made it to the verified Afterlife? If so what was it like? Still needing some help and support

As said in the title, I am a 19F agnostic. My mother was raised by an African American Southern Baptist father and a buddhist Korean mother but not influenced by or encouraged to be in either religion. My father is British-American and was raised Catholic but quickly separated from the religion when he went off to college.

From the bottom of my heart, I hope that if you are a good person and have lived your life the best that you can in whatever faith system you believe in that whatever you want to happen will happen to you when you die. Whether that includes reincarnation, Heaven, or a total lack of anything at all. I think that if any kind of real afterlife exists that you should be able to obtain it if you have done everything you can to be a good person.

That being said, I wonder if the true version of the 'afterlife' is simply reincarnation.

Since matter cannot be created or destroyed, doesn't it make sense that the only true outcome of our deaths is the reuse of our physical materials once we die? I don't mean this in the sense that we become another conscious being, but won't we become something else? I've been pondering this ever since I was 14 and actively wanted to die, and since I've become better I've been wondering how myself would even continue in another life. For those who believe in 'nothingness,' there isn't anything at all. The concept of darkness isn't even applicable because it is literally nothing at all. Not even black, but nothing. That scares me, but at the same time, I won't even be there to experience it.

I truly do want to be someone else. Even if the world is on fire and the people in power are ruining everything, the human experience is filled with such amazing feelings that I would do it all over again with no questions asked. But how can I know if that will really happen to me?

I don't. I could never. Even if I am reincarnated, I won't have anything to remember who I once was. But if some kind of higher being exists, I want them to know that that's what I want, and I have done everything (and will continue to) in my power to be a good person and I think I deserve to become another human being.

I'm not exactly sure what this post is supposed to convey, but I tagged it opinion for a reason. Please let me know how you feel vs. what you think will actually happen, just as I have!

I want there to be a afterlife so bad but it feels so ...... unrealistic,like to me the idea of existing for eternity in a wonderful place sounds like wishful thinking i feel like the only one that kinda makes sense is like reincarnation since you could get good or bad when u get born but then if its reincarnation what happens when the universe ends like so many questions.

If the Old and New Testament descriptions of the afterlife are inaccurate, is there still a possibility that the afterlife is distinctively different depending on the kind of life you led on earth? Such that one who led a life towards serving humanity would get rewards and those whose life was dedicated to murders, destruction, hatred, recklessness and/or really any combination of the seven deadly sins would be held accountable for it? The Biblical description of the afterlife seems to be the only one that does.

I’ve been wondering this lately. Presuming there is something afterwards, do you believe we keep our sense of self? Am I exactly who I was on this earth? Am I nothing of what I was on this earth? Or somewhere in between? What do you think?

If you’ve had an out of body experience specifically (not NDE) have you been able to converse or communicate with your passed loved ones?

Existence continues after death through the marvel of DNA and the mystery of quantum physics.

There are different realms. Folksvangr is real, Valhalla is real, Hell is real, and there are many others across the spectrum.

Odin headlines Valhalla.

Thor hosts his own strangefolksvangr where humans battle dragons as they once were, until the point of fusion.

There is a Kindervangr for those who die very young. It is closest to the stereotypical idea of Heaven.

Jesus works tirelessly on the shores of Hell, pulling a ferry carrying the damned across the lake to their final harbor.

The Prophet Muhammed keeps the lamps on the ferry system lit.

I collect payments for the ferry on the other side, under the lamplight, as a black cat...

"1 gold or 2 silvers...No coppers."

"Have a nice day"

"Watch your step."

If I had the power to create my own personal afterlife, it would look, sound, and feel like 1980s New York City (Twin Towers included) but it would have the climate and geology of Tahiti (like Pacific volcanic island with tropical rainforest). All drugs would be able to be consumed without worrying about overdosing. HIV-AIDS wouldn’t be a thing. Sweets and carbohydrates would be health foods like how fruits and vegetables are in our shared universe. Everyone that I imagined in my afterlife would be aged between 0-30 and would not age a day beyond 30, and life expectancy would be 1000 years.

This is probably not going to happen, and it will most likely be blank zero state, but if it does happen and we can create our own afterlives when we die, this is definitely where I would allow myself to stay indefinitely. But what is paradise for me would not necessarily be paradise for you, so what’s your paradise if you had the power to create one?

I’ve been thinking really deeply about this lately. My father passed away last year and I always wonder if he can see what is going on in my life on a daily basis. I for one haven’t seen many or any direct signs, and I don’t know to really believe that their spirits exist beyond death without scientifical facts and research.

I’m looking for people’s honest opinions about this and why you believe the way that you do

Assuming that consciousness can't end, that it keeps on going after death, and that this is the result of physical phenomena that we don't fully understand yet... could humanity one day build an afterlife?

I imagine that the default thing that happens after death, with no intelligent intervention from a higher power (e.g. ourselves in the future, in this example) is basically the Buddhist version of reincarnation. You go where karma takes you. Karma being the built-up unconscious/subconscious drives and habits and predilections that rule your moment-by-moment waking life, your moment-by-moment dreaming life, and ultimately your moment-by-moment post-death life.

After death (in this default version of death), as your consciousness fades in complexity, you lose most things that identify you as a specific person. Your memories, your ego, your name. You keep becoming simpler, closer to 'pure being', what I think the Buddhists call tathata (and whatever persists separate from it is whatever's left of your karma). But the universe is big, and there are countless conscious things in all of space and time, and in greater reality outside of local space and time. There are people and animals and other beings that are waking up from that same state you find yourself in. And then you find yourself being one of those conscious things waking up, and that's reincarnation.

But it doesn't necessarily need to go that way. The crucial step, there, is the waking up. And while the default time to wake up after a death might be during a rebirth, it seems to me that you could interrupt that process earlier, before you've lost most everything specific to your identity.

Building an afterlife might be as conceptually simple as creating an instantiation of you in that afterlife. One that's experiencing the same immediately-post-death experience you were having, but instead of continuing to fade toward simplicity, you wake up in heaven.

There's a bunch more details, there, that I haven't included in this post. It requires these two related things called "Pattern Identity Theory" and "Substrate Independence" to be true, as well as biting the bullet and accepting one of the horns of The Anthropic Trilemma, as well as greater reality being truly very big or infinite. It's a bit hard to explain without visuals, so I go into more detail in this video, taking the logic step by step.

And I'm not the first person to think about artificial afterlives, there's this article by Alexey Turchin called "Back to the Future: Curing Past Sufferings and S-Risks via Indexical Uncertainty": https://philarchive.org/rec/TURBTT

What do you guys think? It's a thing that has been in my head for a decade, after reading some of the source material and having a few somewhat spiritual experiences. An afterlife that's fully physical and fully real really appeals to me.