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Ingrid Honkala, a former NASA scientist, claims she is intimately familiar with death after allegedly flatlining a staggering three times.
Each time, she had the same revelation.
“It felt like entering a deeper layer of reality that exists beyond our physical senses,” Honkala, 55, told Jam Press of her trifecta of near-death experiences. “In that state, consciousness felt vast, intelligent, and interconnected.”
The Bogotá, Colombia-based creator, who notably earned a PhD in Marine Science and has worked for both NASA and the US Navy, claims that her first brush with death came when she was just two years old.
Honkala fell into an icy tank of water at home, unbeknownst to the maid who was listening to the radio in another room. Thankfully, the tot’s mother arrived home just in time and was able to resuscitate her before it was too late.
During that brief stint on the other side, however, Honkala said “Something extraordinary happened.”
After the initial shock of the cold water and “panic of struggling to breathe,” the ex-scientist said that her fear gave way to a “deep calm.”
“The panic disappeared and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace and stillness,” recalled Honkala, who detailed her journeys into the beyond in her book “Dying To See The Light.” “It felt as if my awareness separated from my body.”
That’s when her connection with the “physical world” was replaced by an “expanded state of awareness” so powerful she was able to see her “small body floating lifeless in the water.”
“At that moment, I no longer felt like a child in a body but like pure consciousness, a field of awareness and light,” Honkala recounted. “There was no sense of time, no fear, and no thoughts.
She added, “I felt completely unified with life itself, as if the boundaries that normally define who we are had dissolved.”
Most importantly, this out-of-body perception allowed Honkala to alert her mother, whom she claimed she was able to see walking to her new job.
“I remember recognizing her and thinking ‘that’s my mom,’” insisted the author. “At that moment, there seemed to be a form of communication between us, not through spoken words, but through awareness.”
According to the ex-scientist, this metaphysical distress signal prompted the mother to turn and rush home, where she found her daughter unconscious in the water tank. While this story might seem far-fetched, Ingrid said that when she recounted her vision to her mother, it matched mom’s recollection of the events to a tee.
From that point on, Honkala said she no longer feared death.
“The experience showed me that what we call the afterlife did not feel like a distant place at all,” she said. “To me, the experience suggested that consciousness may not be produced solely by the brain – it may be something more fundamental.”
Honkala would undergo two more near-death experiences: one following a motorcycle accident at 25 and the other at 52, when her blood pressure dropped during surgery.
Thankfully, she was able to attain the same serene state each time. Ironically, she claimed it was this spiritual awakening that inspired her to pursue science.
“I wanted to understand the nature of reality through observation and research,” said Honkala. “For many years I focused almost entirely on my scientific career and rarely spoke publicly about my spiritual experiences.”
She added, “Over time, however, I came to see that science and spirituality may not necessarily be in conflict — they may simply be exploring the same mystery from different perspectives.”
Naturally, skeptics might chalk up Honkala’s near-death enlightenment to hallucinations or dreams; other near-death experiencers have reported seeing everything from bright lights to relatives and even Jesus standing atop a flight of stairs.
Researchers claim that these visions may serve as a form of relief for the soon-to-be departed, and that comforting dreams of lost loved ones in particular could be seen as psychospiritual coping mechanisms
However, Honkala maintains that what she saw was no figment of a moribund imagination.
“These experiences transformed my understanding of life itself,” she said. “Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals struggling to survive, I began to understand that we may be expressions of consciousness experiencing life through a physical form.”
The author added, “From that perspective, death does not feel like the end of existence; it feels more like a transition in the continuum of consciousness.”
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