I was an atheist until a near-death experience made me a believer… here’s what I saw

A former ‘true atheist’ has come forward to tell his story of the dramatic near-death experience that turned him into a believer and left him with a ‘deep sense of love’.

Jose Hernandez, from Canada, said his journey to the other side began with a brutal accident as an electrical engineer working on roadside power lines.

When his coworker crashed their company car on January 6, 2000, the then 46-year-old Hernandez was left with multiple broken ribs that left him unable to breathe as emergency medical technicians rushed him to the intensive care unit.

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 remembered those moments in the hospital, “and said, ‘If you help me through this, I will change.’

“That fear that I felt in that moment was incredibly competitive,” Hernandez said, “and I started asking myself, ‘Well, what if God really exists?’

As doctors and nurses rushed to his aid, Hernandez said his consciousness was soon transported through a dark, alien portal that led to a mysterious transitional realm of living light and color that left him “instantly amazed.”

He was clinically dead for three minutes, came back, only to relapse into the same condition for another two minutes, which he said seemed like hours as he looked at his lifeless body in the hospital.

“Everything I believe was destroyed when I died,” said Hernandez, now nearly 70 years old. “Everything I believed in science and stuff. That wasn’t the answer. No. Something else has been created.”

The Okanagan, British Columbia native laid bare his emotional near-death journey during a interview with YouTube channel Shaman Oaks

“I was on a truck with electrical lines,” Hernandez said of the near-fatal car crash.

“The guy who was with me, my partner, was more concerned about electrocuting me on top, so he was more concerned when he looked up and he just crashed into a tree.”

“My expectation when I died was that I would encounter nothing and become nothing,” the former atheist admitted, “now I’m beginning to see things that were mind-boggling.”

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 church, my father said, look out the window. God is everywhere, right?’ as he told another podcast: Next level soulin 2022.

“So I chose a kind of science path.”

As doctors began to resuscitate his damaged rib cage, Hernandez recalled watching the entire scene unfold from another corner of the room, next to this “shadow, by the door.”

“It just stood there,” he said to Chapman the ghost. “Then I started thinking, ‘You know what, I’ve had such a hard and difficult life, maybe it’s okay to let it go.’

“And the moment I said or thought that, the shadow just moved,” he continued. “In my mind I saw his hand reaching out to me, and he just touched my toe.

‘And as soon as it touched my toe, I felt an enormous sense of relief, relaxation, peace, love and calm. I was in bliss.’

Hernandez then described this shadowy, ghost-like figure and offered him words of comfort as he passed over to “the other side.”

“I heard the voice next to me say, ‘Think of your body like a car, and that car has about five million miles on it, and there’s nothing we can do about it anymore.’ So you have to say goodbye to your body now,” he recalled.

“Then the voice said to me, ‘Okay, it’s time for us to move on.’

Then, Hernandez recalled the feeling of “falling” into a black hole and landing in a space bathed in bright, warm, colorful light.

The light seemed alive to him and left him with “an amazing sense of peace, tranquility and tranquility.” And soon he even regained contact with his deceased father.

He found himself flying over a beautiful, green, earth-like landscape, where he learned that he could watch over his children from this heavenly spirit realm.

This alien flight ended when he landed on the surface to better see a man below, near a seaside bay. That fateful decision regarding this realm allowed him to reconcile with his deceased father.

“It was even more amazing because me and my dad had a very difficult relationship,” Hernandez noted. “We had a lot of clashes and I don’t remember ever saying ‘I love you’ to my father, or him to me.” But that all changed when they met again in this realm.

“When I met my dad on the other side,” he told the podcast, “I realized maybe we can’t say anything here, [but] we can say it somewhere else.”

Scientists in recent years, including a team of the University of Liège in Belgium, have begun a deeper look at near-death experiences (NEDs), interviewing experts in search of clues and commonalities between their life-changing episodes.

Charlotte Martial, lead author of the Liège study – published in the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and cognition – hoped to learn how similar these people’s experiences really were to each other.

After researching more than 150 people who had experienced a ‘classic’ NDE, the team from the University of Liège found that about a third of subjects experienced an out-of-body experience as the first feature of their near-death experience.

The most common final feature was return to the body (36 percent).

Among the participants in the study was a feeling of peacefulness (80 percent), seeing a bright light (69 percent) and encounters with ghosts or the souls of dead people (64 percent) were some of the most common recurring features.

The two outliers in this group of NDE experiences were “accelerated thoughts” (only five percent of survey participants) and “precognitive visions” about the future (four percent).

“Although near-death experiences may be universal in character, such that they share enough common features to belong to the same phenomenon,” Martial concluded, “our findings suggest that near-death experiences may not contain all the elements.”

“And,” Martial added, “elements don’t seem to appear in a set order.”