Samadhi: Coming Back to Life

What I am about to share is not a dream, not a vision, and not a metaphor. It is the most real thing that has ever happened to me.

In the linear understanding of time, the assumption most of us make each day, there is only what is ahead and what is behind. We call the moment that slipped away yesterday, and the breath that is about to come tomorrow. This is an account of my own encounter with time and with timelessness. I do not have the vocabulary for all that I experienced. But I will try, because it changed me permanently, and because I believe you need to hear it.

In the months before that night, something was already shifting in me. I found myself falling into deep meditation not as a practice I sat down for, but as a state I could not leave. Every quiet moment carried me inward. A peace I had never known in ordinary life began to settle in my body. I was experiencing a cosmic love opening in my heart, and a slow, gentle loosening of the self I had always taken myself to be. The ego, the identity, the accumulated story of me, I was detaching from it, by a kind of natural release. I understand now that my soul was already preparing to leave. It had been leaving, little by little, for months.

Buddha had been with me through this. He began appearing to me before that night, as mentor, as light, as a presence I cannot fully explain but have never doubted. Across this lifetime and, I believe, across many others, he has held my hand. I was already in his care when the night came.

I lost a beloved animal companion sometime before. His name was Thomas Edison, a marbled Bengal cat, and he always lived in my heart, and yet not once had he come to my dreams. Until the night my spirit left my body.

I found myself in a kitchen with an island. There he was, on the floor by the cabinet, my Edison. My heart leaped with joy. Then a telephone rang. I picked it up. It was my grandfather, who had passed away nearly a decade before. I heard him call out my name and I was overwhelmed. I knew with every part of my being that this night was different.

Not only did I encounter the ones I had loved and lost. I was reunited with them.

My grandmother stood on the other side: a world apart from ours, and yet I could see her clearly. Around her were all the people I had ever loved, every face, every soul. And from that gathering came a message received in the fullness of my being:

It’s time to come home.

There is something I need to try to describe, even though language may fail me here.

I heard the most beautiful music I have ever encountered, and yet there was no sound as we know it. In that higher plane, sound is not heard with ears. It is felt through your entire being, more vivid and more alive than anything physical, and yet without volume, without boundary, without source. And the music had color as the soul knows it, living, luminous, inseparable from the sound itself, as if tone and light were always one thing and we had simply forgotten. My soul recognized that cosmic force. I did not just witness it. I belonged to it. It penetrated every part of me, and I knew with complete certainty that I had never experienced anything as magnificent as this, not once, in any moment of my earthly life.

The universe was singing. And it was singing me home.

Alongside that music, I saw my entire life in a single flash, every face, every hand that had ever shown me kindness. And in that instant of total review, I knew: my journey was complete. The life I had planned before incarnation had been fulfilled. I had done my part in this play called earthly life. Earth, the great Maya, no longer had hold on me.

I was free to go.

What I felt was not the absence of fear. It was something far beyond fear’s reach. A peace I had never known in this body. A joy without cause. A pleasure that had nothing to do with the physical world. I was a spirit, part of a vast and luminous consciousness, and I was home in a way I had never been home on earth.

Among all the souls gathered there, one stood out.

My mother.

Not as she is in this life, not the complexity and the struggle that often existed between us, but her soul, ancient and luminous, the one I had traveled with across many lifetimes. In that space beyond the veil, I could see clearly how her soul and mine had found each other again and again, learning from one another, each holding light for the other in different ways and different lives.

I understood, in that deep knowing that has no words, that if I left this plane, she would be devastated. She had never fully gotten to know me, not the real me. She had never imagined our time would run out. She had never thought her daughter would go first.

With complete peace, I took her hands. And somehow we traveled together through those lifetimes, me showing her that it was okay, that she would be okay, that I was grateful for her. She gave me motherly counsel, telling me there were still lessons I could learn, still reasons to stay. She was not ready for our parting.

But my soul was in full knowing. I had completed those lessons. I smiled at her with full love and told her I was ready, and she would be alright. I let go of her hands. And while she wept, I turned toward the light.

There is a tunnel made of light, and inside the light there was writing, symbols, records, knowing, and I understood all of it instinctively, without effort, as if reading my own name. I was floating, then flying, moving faster and faster, the faces of those I would rejoin becoming clearer, the end of the tunnel opening before me.

I was almost there.

And then, behind me, a sound.

A voice. A man’s voice.

“I don’t want to live this life without you.”

I kept moving. I did not want to stop. The light was right there.

“I don’t want to live this life without you.”

Something in me turned. Not my body, I had no body. But something in my soul remembered a promise made before I came into this life. A covenant to meet this person on the earth plane, to be with him here. And I became aware of something that stopped me completely:

His soul was still incarnated on earth. We had not met yet.

I had to make a choice.

Or perhaps I was chosen. Because before I could fully decide, I was pulled backwards with tremendous force, so fast that my soul landed back in my body and my eyes opened instantly.

Tears were already running down my face, though I had not been crying.

What followed was not peace. It was the opposite of everything I had just felt. The smallness of a body, the darkness of a room, the terror of a child waking from a nightmare who does not know where they are. I was frightened that I had died in my sleep. I wanted nothing more than to go back. I felt grief for the music I could no longer hear. I felt grief for the faces I had reached for and then lost. I felt, if I am honest, anger. Anger at being pulled back into this limited world, this veil, this Maya, because of one man whose soul I could not abandon.

That was five years ago. And looking back, I am still as tender about that night as I was in those first moments. I carry the memory of that music in a body that cannot reproduce it. I navigate a world that mostly does not know what I know. I wait.

I came back different.

Buddha has continued to appear to me, steady, luminous, holding me as he always has. I trust him fully to take me where I need to go. And I have slowly come to understand what that night was showing me.

We are not bodies. We are souls wearing bodies for a time, playing out a story more intricate and more beautiful than our waking minds can comprehend. The life we call real, with its pain and its forgetting and its sense of separation, is the dream. The light is what is real.

I also understand now that I was not pulled back as punishment. I was pulled back by love. A love so specific it knew me from the other side of a tunnel. Whatever that man’s soul is destined to find in me, whether it is recognition of something ancient, or the echo of a vow made before either of us had a face, I am still here. Still living my part of the agreement.

This is my prayer: that we find each other.

This is my offering to you, reading this now: that you remember, even for a moment, that you are not merely a body moving through time. You are ancient. You are loved by name. And somewhere, in the music you cannot quite hear in waking life, the universe is still singing you home.

It just isn’t time yet.

With love and light,

Vanessa Love