“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” —John 1:5

Fully awake, I, the insomniac, layed in bed. I didn’t really believe in sleep. I believed it was good for you, healthy for the body and mind, even. But I also believed I had more important things to do with that time. I mostly spent my nights studying, watching, and reading anything I could learn or grow from. Funnily enough, sleep is what fuels growth in youth. And yet somehow, I, the insomniac, ended up six foot two. It's easy to think that I could have had a more stable life with more sleep, but even in high school I knew that I was not going to stabilize, and all I did then was sleep. I slept more then I even went to school. One day I realized that I was just not capable of stability. Not capable of living a normal life without idolizing suicide or praying for God to kill me. I wasn't just ill, I was seeing through the cracks of reality, and I was no longer falling for the the circus show that is modern society. The sun hadn’t even started to set, but I watched its light shift, bleeding through the dusty window and glinting off the gold painted rims of cracked glasses. I stared at the shifting colors, trying to focus on anything but the pain radiating through me. My body ached from fibromyalgia, psoriatic arthritis, gout, and nerve pain. The weight of depression and anxiety held me down like some sort of mental paralysis. My twenty-eight-year-old, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound body felt like it carried the weight of a six-hundred-pound, eighty-two-year-old man. I couldn’t feel my toes. I was unsure if it was just the usual chill of the basement, or if my body was struggling to circulate blood after years of bed rotting and sedentary living. Even though my feet were frozen, they burned, a constant, searing sensation I had grown used to. Like walking on a coal fire at all times. With the pain I felt every day, in both body and mind, I wondered if I was already living in hell, but I know not everyone would understand that feeling, or think that way at all. Some people might call me crazy. I have been admitted many times to hospitals in bad states I didn't yet understand. Being diagnosed with things has helped me become more self aware of my health, but I know I will always be on a journey of healing and learning. There is no denying the downsides of my disorders. But there’s also a side not many talk about. A strange kind of gift. I feel everything more intensely: emotions, sensations, beauty, connection. My mind does not process the world the way others do. I see things that others do not. I connect dots others might miss. I feel deeply creative, with ideas constantly surging through me like an endless storm. Sometimes I wonder, what if there’s truth hidden in what we call madness? What if up is down? What if pain is for a purpose? What if the moments that feel like death are actually the birth of something divine within us, or a remembrance of it? I used to think I was falling apart but maybe I was just beginning to come to my senses. Maybe I was just waking up from a long, bad dream. Maybe things society treats as flawed like mental illness, insomnia, emotional intensity, and trauma is not a weakness but an invitation. A sacred cracking of the shell so that the true soul can finally emerge. The deeper I searched inside my self, the more I saw that truth does not always live in the light. Sometimes it is buried in the dark waiting to be discovered. 

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

What if the mind’s deeper states aren’t dysfunctions at all, but doorways? Instead of exploring the depths of the mind and its various states, society simply slaps a label on these experiences, a best guess diagnosis. They strip you of your dignity, treat you like a dangerous convict, isolate you and chemically castrate you, force feeding you pills that might as well be rat poisoning. The loss of time and memory from the synthetic drugs makes days feel like weeks. Weeks with no belongings, no contact with the outside world, and no windows to watch the sun go down. You begin to forget your own native language. They watch you from cameras while you sleep, shower, and drool, locking you in with sterile LED lights for a sun. They label you mentally ill, hand you a lifelong mandatory prescription that comes with permanent side effects that shorten your life expectancy by years, and then send you back out into the world as if that experience was the ultimate therapeutic treatment. At least they aren't doing lobotomies and shock treatment much more these days. Maybe I am crazy, or maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m just tuned into a different channel or frequency. All I can do is speak the truth of what I’ve experienced, learned, and lived. But in that moment lying in bed, as the sun faded out, I knew deep in my soul that I had to die.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” —Psalm 34:18

I’ve battled suicidal thoughts for years. I’ve survived more than one attempt. But nothing prepared me for what I went through that day. After the last attempt at my life, the details I’ll spare, I felt myself slipping. Losing motor function, my body was fading and my breath slowing. That fragile border between life and death was right in front of me, and it was not a hallucination. It was real. My legs shook. My feet trembled. My body seized, though one hand still worked, barely. I tried to move my fingers, only to watch them fade into particles of dust, as if I had been snapped away. Suddenly, I was terrified. A wave of real, raw fear of the unknown hit me hard. I fought to pull myself out from under the blankets wrapped around me, but my body would not respond. It just kept shaking. Then my eyelids shut. I wasn’t asleep or dreaming; I had simply lost control of everything. I tried desperately to hold on to the only reality I knew, but death started to feel inevitable. So I let go. The moment I did, my soul was yanked out of my body and into a vortex. I left the world behind.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Soon I was in a dark place, somewhere bad, isolated and floating in a void. I drifted there for what felt like years, caught in looping negative thoughts. It felt like my body was a radio station I was usually tuned into, but I flipped through the frequencies too fast, lost the signal, and couldn’t find my way back. I was stuck, drifting through static, lost forever in another dimension. That’s when I realized I might truly be dead or I had become the very definition of insanity. So far gone that I had completely dissociated from my body and was trapped in some kind of mental loop while the real me lay in a hospital bed, damaged but kept alive by machines. Only when I finally came to terms with death did I escape the darkness.

“The ego is a veil between humans and God.” —Jalal al-Din Rumi

Leaving my ego and physical body behind, I followed a bright light into another plane, a realm that was non-material, astral, and ethereal. I traveled through the stars, flying, though I wasn’t in control. It was like my soul had boarded an invisible train, pulled along by divine magnetism. As I moved through the stars, languages I didn’t even know existed flashed past at hyperspeed, yet I absorbed them. English felt primitive in comparison, like cave scribbles next to the living code of creation, the language of God. I saw, heard, and felt that time was everywhere, all at once, yet no longer existed. Somehow, past, present, and future collided into a single, eternal moment of existence. I wandered through an archive of my life, drifting through scattered moments and memories my mind had locked away for reasons it no longer remembered. Eventually, I arrived at the final stop on my tour of the cosmos. God was there with me, around me, even in me, and He taught me everything I had ever longed to understand. It was like being handed the keys to the universe, keys that unlocked the very answers to life and death itself. I had many revelations, realizations I had never grasped before. I felt an overwhelming sense of unity, a compassion so real it dissolved all sense of separation. I understood that life is profoundly meaningful. I saw how every person is uniquely beautiful, yet deeply connected as one family. Like individual cells that make up a larger body, we are each a part of God. We all carry the divine spark within us, a breath of consciousness that connects us with the supreme being. Every living soul, whether aware of it or not, shares in this collective spirit. To harm another is to harm oneself. God is not far away, but present in all of creation, experiencing joy, pain, sorrow, and love with us.

“There is one body and one Spirit... one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” —Ephesians 4:4–6

God is the presence of love, the source of light, and the living spirit flowing through all things. God is good. I know this now. 

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” —Acts 17:28

Every emotion poured from my soul all at once, like a flood of tears. In that moment, I understood our true potential as human beings. The miracles we are capable of co-creating. The immense power of the mind and soul in full divine alignment. We were made in God’s image, divine sons and daughters, light given flesh from star dust. 

“Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” —Psalm 82:6

My traumas remained, but now I understood them. They no longer felt like wounds, but lessons and experiences that had shaped my soul. Every last trace of pain had vanished, like a storm finally breaking and leaving only the calm. It was the deepest, most profound healing I had ever known.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” —1 Corinthians 2:9

Imagine the warmth of a perfect day, not too cold, not too hot, just right. Now multiply that comfort a thousand times. That’s how this place felt, like heaven. I’d never been anywhere like it before, and yet it was deeply nostalgic, as if I were finally returning home. I felt overwhelming love and a fierce desire to guide everyone I knew to this place, if I somehow could.

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." —C.S. Lewis

The colors and shapes I saw were beyond written description, unlike anything on Earth. My soul laughed and cried with joy and understanding. It was beautiful, vivid, and bright. Even to the greatest artist of the world, I knew it would be impossible to recreate. What I saw was beyond human, pure perfection, divine truth. I don’t know if returning was truly a choice, but it felt like one, offered to me. I wanted so badly to stay there forever and almost did. But certain, that I would one day return, I chose to come back.

“He redeemed my soul from going down to the pit, and I will live to enjoy the light.” —Job 33:28

When I returned, it was sudden. My soul slammed back into my body. I felt strange, like I was relearning the controls of a video game I hadn’t played in years, only this time the game was me. I was back in my room, but my eyes were glitching, and I questioned the reality around me. It felt as if the world wasn’t real in the way I had always believed, but more like a dream we only wake from in death.

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes: when they go from light into darkness and when they go from darkness into light.” —Plato, The Republic, Book VII

I’d lost most of what I’d learned, but remembered enough to know this: what I’d experienced was more real than everything else in my life up until that moment. When I came back, an overwhelming urge to hug everyone I had ever loved welled up inside me. I just wanted to hold them, because I understood how truly precious they were, and I felt like I had been gone for hundreds of years. But Earth time said otherwise, it was still early night, just late enough for the rest of the house to be sound asleep. I was alone. I paced in restless circles, struggling to adjust to having a body and feeling pain again. Eventually, exhaustion claimed me, and I slipped into sleep feeling older and wearier than ever before. That night I dreamed, and for the first time I can remember, I knew it was a dream and woke myself up. It just didn’t compare. Even the most vivid dream couldn’t fool me anymore. My subconscious must have measured it against the realness of my out-of-body experience and rejected it. I woke early with a splitting migraine centered in my forehead, as if a metaphysical third eye had opened between my brows. That morning, as I sat in the garage trying to process everything that had happened, a black cat slipped in through the small gap beneath the garage door, which I had left cracked open. It settled in front of me and stared directly at my forehead. I had never seen this black cat before, or any cats at all in the area. My neighborhood was a dog walking street. The wide-eyed creature looked at me like I was its best friend, trusting me completely, as if it had finally found its way home. I tried to usher it out, but it came right back in, locking eyes with me as if staring into my soul. After some research, I discovered that black cat encounters are viewed differently across various cultures. What stood out most to me was that while black cats are traditionally seen as bad luck in Western cultures, in many other cultures they symbolize positive concepts linked to facing the shadow self, ego death, and rebirth. And in that moment, I knew God had sent me a sign, a quiet affirmation that I was on the right path. I still feel somewhat lost at times, searching for purpose. I wondered why I had truly come back from that peaceful place at all. I was almost disappointed to be here again. But one thing had changed for sure: I was no longer afraid of death, and just as importantly, I no longer wanted to die. This world, broken and sinful as it is, still holds something sacred. Because while the afterlife may be infinitely more beautiful than this world, Earth is still a gift, a one-of-a-kind place for the soul to evolve, to wrestle with truth, to become. There are no trees, no wind, no water there. Nothing else compares to this physical experience. We get only one life here, and an eternity in the beyond. I fully trust that God kept me alive for a reason. That the spirit is guiding me through this life, even when I don’t understand it. And when the time is right, I will return home to the source, the creator of everything.

“There is a light within each of us that can never be diminished or extinguished. It can only be obscured.” —Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” —Psalm 118:17