When I was around eight years old, living in a small district called Iteboral in St. Mary, Jamaica, I became dangerously ill with measles. I remember the fever most, a heat so intense that it felt as though my whole body was cooking from the inside. My chest rose once, dropped heavily, and then everything changed.
I began drifting upward, slowly, gently, lifting away from the bed. I wasn't frightened. There was no panic, no confusion. What I felt was curiosity, as if what was happening was completely natural. As I floated toward the ceiling, I looked down, and there below me was my body lying still on the bed.
But what I saw wasn't flesh as we know it. The scene felt liquid, almost as though I was viewing the room through water. My own form didn't feel solid either, more like I was made of crystal, like energy, drifting through a dense, fluid field. Everything shimmered, slowed, and softened.
I have since learned that countless people around the world have described experiences like this, many calling it death. I cannot say with absolute certainty that my body had clinically died, there was no witness or doctor in the room to confirm it. But everything I felt pointed to the edge between life and death. My temperature was extreme. My breath had collapsed. And the separation was unmistakable.
What still strikes me is that the experience did not feel strange. It felt familiar, almost obvious, as though this movement out of the body was not an exception, but a function built into us. And sometimes I wonder, if I had not looked back at my body in that moment, would I have continued onward? Because it was that single, curious glance downward that brought me back.
The following day, my mother filled a wash basin with hot water and tamarind branches, a traditional healing bath used in the Jamaican countryside to pull sickness out of the blood. I survived. But I did not return the same.
That moment, floating above myself, conscious and aware, became the quiet seed of a truth that would take decades to understand.
Consciousness exists beyond the body.
Life continues beyond breath.
And what we call existence is far larger than the physical frame we appear in.
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