Luminous Awareness

My friend Rob and I were having a beer one night when he told me that he’d died. He mentioned it casually, like he was recalling a time when he’d made a wrong turn and found himself in unfamiliar territory.

I set my beer down on the bar and looked at him. “Are you serious?”

I knew Rob had been in a bad motorcycle accident several years before I knew him. But I never knew the details, because he never really talked about it with me.

“Totally serious,” he said. “After the accident, I was lying on the pavement and they said I was clinically dead.”

Then I asked the question we’d all like the answer to: “What was it like, being dead?”

“It was like my mind suddenly expanded to include everything,” he said. “All of a sudden, I knew everything there was to know. The meaning of Pi, anything, any subject you can think of, I understood all of it.”

Different religions offer different concepts of the afterlife. In Buddhism, they would say that Rob temporarily experienced the state of luminous awareness, which is our original fundamental nature – the state of clear, radiant awareness, a bright unbounded knowing that is the ground of our being, something which was never born and which never dies.

Whatever the interpretation, one thing was clear: Before the medical team revived him, Rob had what he believed was a direct experience of a higher power, being plugged into the source of all knowledge and love. His life was changed by it.

I went home that night thinking deeply about Rob’s story. Decades later, I’m still fascinated.

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