How Almost Killing Somebody Accidentally Led To An Out-Of-Body Experience
Almost taking a life snapped me awake to the sheer fragility of human life.
Hirurg, Leung Cho Pan | Canva Within a split second, I swerved right. Jolted into alertness, my heart beat like a drum, and perspiration beaded on my forehead. Releasing my held breath, I adjusted the rearview mirror.
As a crowd gathered, some helped up the fallen motorbiker. Others restocked his gunny bags. The stray bull he’d rammed into was nowhere in sight. The sheer synchronicity that saved the motorist’s life awed me into silence.
My SUV’s steering mode. The road’s width. My steering hand’s reaction time. The stray bull’s zigzag path. The muddy U-turn’s location. The fallen motorbiker’s skidding distance. The reaction time of the car driver in front of me.
Had any of them differed even by a hair’s breadth, I’d have blood on my hands — or be in the ER with a wrecked car.
As my heart’s drumming slowed, Einstein’s legendary quote zoomed into my mental view: "God does not play dice with the universe."
In A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking explains how our universe wasn’t random — but designed and "fine-tuned" by intentional intelligence. Be it the speed of light or an electron’s charge. Fundamental constants are hyper-specific numbers.
As Dr. David Deutsch from Oxford University explains, "If we nudge one of these constants just a few percent in one direction, stars burn out within a million years, and there is no time for evolution. If we nudge it in the other direction, no elements heavier than helium form. No carbon, no life. Not even any chemistry. No complexity at all."
As The Nature of Space and Time explains, our universe’s expansion rate was fine-tuned to the 0.0000000000th decimal point! So, our universe isn’t chaotic or haphazard. A cosmic intelligence beyond human comprehension designed it. As the Astrophysicist Hoyle said — it’s as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics."
When an uncannily (un)favorable coincidence happens, we write it off as (bad or) good luck. But it’s cosmic orchestration — way too intricate for human logic.
"Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys." ― Emma Bull
Everything happens for a reason — and I soon found out why my near-kill incident did.
Musing over constants, synchronicity, and cosmic will, I tiptoed into the meditation hall. "Phew! Glad I didn’t miss the Kriya," I sighed as I sat in the half-lotus pose.
Fast-forward 30 minutes. Crescendoing in rapid breaths, the Sudarshan Kriya ended with slow deep breaths. Imbibing my Beej Matra (Seed chant), I went into Sahaj Samadhi ("Effortless" meditation). Ten minutes in, my feet throbbed — so I re-imbibed the mantra.
Then, it happened.
Hovering near the ceiling, "I" witnessed my own body and the entire meditation hall below.
It lasted a nano-second but seared the memory into my mind for life. This "I" was motionless, formless, thoughtless, timeless — simultaneously inside and outside my sculpture-still body.
Be it Hinduism’s Advaita Vedanta or Taoism’s Wu Wei, non-dualists describe it as — You dissolve. Reality dissolves. Only awareness prevails.
While my body didn’t dissolve, it felt "Hollow And Empty" — like a human-shaped ceramic vase that houses the flower of life.
Fun Fact: "Hollow-And-Empty" was a technique in AOL’s advanced meditation course. But my ignorant self had mocked and made it the butt of countless jokes. Don’t rule something out just because you don’t comprehend it (yet).
This might sound woo-woo or feel like an illusion — but that one nanosecond felt more solid than my 23 years of "life."
I can’t prove it or convince you to believe me. But I can encourage you to start meditating, be consistent, and find out for yourself. The best proof is your own experience. Even if you don’t have an out-of-body experience, you’ll experience a host of other benefits.
Almost taking a life snapped me awake to the sheer frailty of human life.
Walking past a sand truck, I visualized how the squeaky backdoor could snap and smash my face to a pulp. More so, I realized how close to death we get in our daily lives:
- Driving — aka hurtling inside (and dodging other) 2000-lb metal bullets.
- Visiting a salon — aka a stranger with a blade near your temples/throat.
- Crossing the road — aka the play zone of 2000+ lb metal bullets.
- Eating out — aka stranger-cooked food potentially laced with poison.
- Sleeping under a ceiling fan — aka sharp rotating blades overhead.
The Final Destination movies masterfully show how normal events can have fatal consequences.
Despite tightrope-walking with death, we’re blissfully unaware of it — all thanks to evolution. If we were constantly aware of our death, we’d be too paranoid to live. But this lack of awareness leads to the illusion that we have forever.
We put off our unrealized dreams, unsolved grudges, and unmet loved ones for tomorrow — unaware that tomorrow might never come.
"We have two lives; the second begins when we realize we only have one." — Confucious
Recognizing this, the wise Stoics came up with Memento Mori — Latin for "Remember that you have to die."
By recalling the inevitability of death, we live more intentionally.
To quote Seneca in his Letters, "Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time."
My Memento Mori is my forearm tattoo — the skull spear of death cutting through the infinite ouroboros.
Image | Courtesy Of Author
What’s your Memento Mori? Don’t have one yet? Get a ring, necklace, wall poster, or phone wallpaper to remind yourself of death — or tattoo if you’re extreme like I am.
Here's something intriguing to ponder over: In the book They Both Die at The End, Death-Cast informs people 24 hours before their death — and gives special privileges to make the most of their last day.
Let’s put Death Cast on steroids.
Say you could know when you’d die 48 hours, a week, a year prior — or even right at birth. How different would you live life? How early in life would you like to know your death date? Would such knowledge be depressing or liberating?
Neeramitra Reddy is a 12x Medium Top Writer, Chief Editor/Columnist for In Fitness And In Health (IFAIH), and a Columnist for Wholistique.