A former “true atheist” has come forward to tell the story of the dramatic near-death experience that turned him into a believer and left him with a “deep sense of love.”
José Hernández, from Canada, said his journey to the other side began with a brutal accident when he was an electrical engineer tending to power lines on the side of the road.
When his colleague crashed his utility truck on Jan. 6, 2000, Hernandez, then 46, was left with multiple broken ribs that prevented him from breathing as EMTs took him to intensive care.
Despite his disbelief in the afterlife, Hernandez said he spent those moments of deep physical pain seeking help from a higher power.
“I started thinking about God,” as he recalled those moments in the hospital, “saying, ‘If you help me get through this event, I will change.'”
“That fear I felt at that moment was incredibly competitive,” Hernandez said, “and I started wondering, ‘Well, what if God is real?’
As doctors and nurses came to his aid, Hernandez said his consciousness was soon transported through a dark, otherworldly portal that led to a mysterious transitional realm of living light and color that left him “instantly amazed.”
He spent three minutes clinically dead, returned but fell back into the same state for another two minutes, which he said seemed like hours as he looked at his lifeless body in the hospital.
“Everything I believe in was destroyed when I died,” according to Hernandez, who is now in his late 70s. ‘Everything I believed in science and all that. That wasn’t the answer. No. Something else was created.’
An engineer and former “true atheist”, José Hernández (above), has come forward to tell his story of the dramatic near-death experience that left him with a “deep sense of love” and turned him into a believer. Hernandez is now an artist and public speaker based in Canada.
The Okanagan, British Columbia, resident laid bare his emotional near-death journey during a interview with youtube channel Shaman Oaks
“I was in a bucket truck passing some power lines,” Hernandez said of the near-fatal car accident.
“The guy that was with me, my partner, was more worried about electrocuting me from above, so he was more worried looking up and he just hit a tree.”
“My expectation when I died was to find nothing and become nothing,” confessed the former atheist, “now I’m starting to see things that amazed me.”
Hernandez described the origins of his atheism as his own compromise between his parents’ opposing religious beliefs.
‘I had a conflict. My mother was Catholic and my father was indigenous. My mother said, go find God in the church, my father said, look out the window. God is everywhere, right? As he said in another podcast, Next level soulin 2022.
“So I chose the path of science.”
As doctors began performing CPR on his damaged ribcage, Hernandez recalled how he watched the whole scene unfold from another corner of the room, next to this “shadow, next to the door.”
“It just stayed there,” he told Chapman of the spirit. “Then I started thinking, ‘You know what? I’ve had such a hard, difficult life that maybe it’s okay to let it go.'”
Hernandez then recalled the sensation of “falling” through a black hole and landing in a space enveloped in bright, warm, colorful light. The light seemed alive to him and left him with “an amazing feeling of peace, calm and tranquility” (illustrated above on the Shaman Oaks podcast).
“And the moment I said that, or thought that, the shadow just moved,” he continued. ‘In my mind I could see his hand reaching out towards me and he just touched my toe.
‘And the moment he touched my toe I felt a tremendous sense of relief, relaxation, peace, love and calm. I was happy.’
Hernandez next described this shadowy, spirit-like figure, offering him words of comfort as he transitioned to the “other side.”
“I heard the voice next to me say, ‘Think of your body as a car, and that car has like five million miles on it and there’s nothing we can do to fix it.’ So now you have to say goodbye to your body.” ” he recalled.
“Then the voice told me, ‘Okay, it’s time for us to move on.'”
Hernandez then recalled the sensation of “falling” through a black hole and landing in a space enveloped in bright, warm, colorful light.
The light seemed alive to him and left him with “an incredible feeling of peace, calm and tranquility.” And soon he even reconnected with his late father.
She found herself flying over a beautiful, green Earth-like landscape, where she knew she could watch over her children from this celestial spiritual realm.
This supernatural flight concluded when he landed on the surface to get a better look at a man below, near a seaside cove. That fateful decision in this kingdom allowed him to reconcile with his late father.
“It was even more surprising because my father and I had a very difficult relationship,” Hernandez said. “We had many confrontations and I don’t remember ever saying ‘I love you’ to my father, nor he to me.” But all that changed when they met again in this kingdom.
“When I met my father on the other side,” he said on the podcast, “I realized that sometimes we might not be able to say something here, (but) we’ll be able to say it somewhere else.”
Scientists in recent years, including a team of at the University of Liège in Belgium, have begun to look more deeply into near-death experiences (NEDs), probing experiencers for clues and commonalities among the episodes that changed their lives.
“When I met my dad on the other side,” Hernandez said in a video (above), “I realized that sometimes we might not be able to say something here, (but) we’ll be able to say it somewhere else.”
Charlotte Martial, lead author of the Liège study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and cognition – I was hoping to find out how similar these people’s experiences really were to each other.
After surveying more than 150 people who had experienced a “classic” NDE, the team at the University of Liège found that about a third of the subjects experienced an out-of-body experience as the first feature of their near-death experience.
The last most frequent characteristic was return to the body (36 percent).
Among the study participants, a feeling of peace (80 percent), seeing a bright light (69 percent) and encounters with spirits or souls of dead people (64 percent) constituted some of the most common recurring characteristics.
The two outliers in this group of NDE experiencers were “racing thoughts” (only five percent of survey participants) and “precognitive visions” that saw the future (four percent).
“While near-death experiences may have a universal character, so they may exhibit enough common characteristics to belong to the same phenomenon,” Martial concluded, “our findings suggest that near-death experiences may not include all the items”.
“And,” Martial added, “the elements don’t seem to appear in a fixed order.”