Author’s Story

NOTE: The reason for sharing my story here with you, is I claim to have some answers to some pretty big questions such as, “What is the meaning of life?”.  If I came across someone who said they had that kind of understanding, I’d want to know why they claim they do, how did they end up at this and so on. So, I felt it was only fair to share this with any readers who might think the same way.

My quest for the knowledge you see here began very early. I had a very painful childhood beginning at 2 days old and by 5 I had my first near death experience as a result of drowning. When I died, I went to the most beautiful place: I was driven by what I saw as my parents to a white farmhouse set in a gorgeous garden of emerald and peridot greens and bathed in golden shafts of sunlight. I was apparently going to stay here, but they were going to wait for a bit to see me settled in. I ran around and played with the resident children of the house for a time, experiencing for the first time a genuine happiness as I did so. The moment I became aware of this fact, I realized everything in this place was perfect – too perfect and this was not the place I wanted to stay. After that, I don’t remember anything. A year later, my 2 year old brother got a nasty gash on his forearm from a lilac bush. Without thinking, but with the sure knowledge I could do something to make it better, I grabbed his arm and concentrated on that knowledge. The gash disappeared from his arm in about a minute…

I was to have many more near death experiences (or NDEs) over the years and was not to realize what they were until much later. Notwithstanding my ignorance, over that time I continued to change and developed 2 other abilities in addition to healing: 1) I seemed to be able to solve problems. Not a mathematical sort of ability, rather, one that allowed me to see the possibilities of choices from the seed of a situation: Given a set of circumstances and a person’s decision, I would know the play of events from that moment forward. 2) The ability to sense or know the truth. On top of that, the contrast between my NDE experiences and my experiences of this world was so dramatic, I would look at a situation as it was, ugly bits and all and I would know how it “should” be. For survival reasons, I also learned to read people very accurately, which until I learned to frame my observations with better words that others could bear, got me in more trouble than it was often worth – to me at least.

With all this already under my belt at 13, I decided I needed a quest worthy of these abilities. I arrogantly decided I wanted to know the meaning of life. My reasoning went like this: If the question is asked, then one presupposes there is an answer and if there is answer, then there needs to be design. If there is design, then a designer and if there is a designer, then one has been designed to ask the question, or one wouldn’t ask. If one has been designed to ask the question, then there would be an aswer. So, the quest would not be futile, assuming the hypothesis to be correct. I truly felt that although many before me had asked and I was simply one more, the answer also had to be found sooner or later – why not me? Had I known the cost to gain such a treasure, I would have given it more than a second thought; probably tenth and eleventh thoughts, actually.

Now I’m what you might call a realistic optimist, meaning I try not to blind myself to the truth even though I don’t like it and look for the most best possibility given those circumstances. However, sometimes crap happens and sometimes crap happens as a result of choices we made, sometimes from quite a ways back down the road we’ve travelled. It’s amazing just how far poo can fly (and how much momentum it gains over time)… In the middle of my 31st year, a dung heap crashed into me and with no place for me to safely get out the way, I crashed through a wall in reality and found myself looking into the brightest, whitest space possible. All the flows of the universe began and ended in this space: It is/was the nexus point of things and all the answers I ever wanted to know were there, the problem was one does not simply crash into enlightenment, grab whatever one wants and then run off with it. There is a door or threshold, possessed by each of us, through which we cross to enter – not smash through a random internal wall with a wrecking ball.

The reason for this is that the former allows us to deal with the profoudity of the experience and the following changes that will occur as a result of this shift in consciousness and the latter can cause irreparable damage to ourselves due to shock. Which is exactly what happened to me: On the last night of my 31st year, the shock and unpreparedness of that experience, coupled with the exhaustion from the pain of all the experiences to this point that was needed to answer my question caught up to me and I took my own life.

This is the only NDE that I don’t remember anything about (probably because I used drugs to take my life), but when I came back the first thing I noticed was I felt joy and on top of the joy was happiness. There was no “relief” at returning, nor any fear of going back – just a level of knowing that I was loved and accepted no matter what that was so profound, I was beyond tears… It was also the first time I noticed that I had carried a dark shroud of death around me for most of my life because now it was gone.

It was during this, my 32nd year, that I had the basic answer. But, it took a further 2 years to get a clear view of how and in what way the answer was part of a very complex whole: The question was a grand one and was in fact a question about how the universe itself worked. Therefore there was an equally grand answer for my question. I’m a very practical person, so to understand what I’d learned and translate it into something others could work from, I created a map which I kept refining until I was sure that I had the the most pertinent and practical parts mapped out. This mapping is still an ongoing process, but the parts I share here are the truths tested in my own experience that I hope will help others.

Blessings,

M.D. Berry