Processing an Extraordinary Experience
Some experiences lie so far outside anything familiar that you do not even know what to call them. I experienced myself separated from my body, a moment in which ordinary reality dissolves. The hard part often comes only afterward. How do you carry something like that back into daily life?
When the words are missing
The first thing many people lack is language. An experience like this can hardly be put into concepts, and whoever tries soon notices how far the words fall short. What follows is a silence that does not come from shame, but from lack. There is simply no sentence that reaches the experience.
I know this silence. My own experience happened in 1991. For the first years I could not speak about it at all. I did not know how. There was no internet, no videos, no forums. Perhaps two or three books, and none of them matched what I had lived through. I did not even know whether what had happened to me was a near-death experience, an astral projection, or a spontaneous tunnel experience. They were only terms, labels without ground.
What occupied me most
Two questions would not let me go. What was that, really. And how can I repeat it. The second question led me onto a path with dangers of its own, described on another page. The first question stayed open for a long time, because no one could answer it.
Today it is different
Anyone who has such an experience today is not as alone as I was. A few words into a search, and a thousand voices appear, accounts, videos. The subject is no longer a taboo or a secret. Times have changed. The very fact that you are reading this page is proof of it.
This takes nothing away from the depth of the experience. But it takes away some of the loneliness. Processing it still takes its time, often years. I even believe that an experience like this carries a task for one's own development. There is not this one experience and then nothing more.
The search became a journey
Out of the question of what it was, a search grew over time, and out of the search, a long journey, inward and outward. It took years until the circle closed and I arrived at myself.
This path, from the first experience to arriving, I have described in my book
Beyond the Body – The Radiance of the Soul.
Read on
What a tunnel experience is, and how it differs from a near-death experience, is on its own page.
How perception changes after such an experience is described in Inner Experience and Perception.
Further short reflections appear on Substack,
each beginning with a question about perception, inner experience, and art.