It was 1988 and 17-year-old Jan Bostik had never heard about God or Buddha or anything spiritual in nature. He was living in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) under communist rule.
Atheism is embedded in communism and spirituality wasn’t discussed in his home nor at school.
Bostik was an engineering student. He and a fellow student rode their motorcycles to a river near Tyniste nad Orlici to jump in for a swim. From a height of about 3 meters (10 feet), his friend jumped in and swam over to a beach.
It had rained recently and the bank where Bostik was standing was wet. His foot slipped and he fell into the river instead of jumping carefully. When he hit the surface of the water, he broke two vertebrae near his neck.
He was instantly paralyzed.
Unable to move his limbs to swim, he faced death. “I feared dying and not knowing what’s after that,” he said in a video posted on NDEvideos.com.
He assumed death would be like a light switch flipped to extinguish his consciousness. Instead, he found his mind separated from his body.
“I took a look back and I saw my body lie on the bottom of the river,” he said. “My identity was here, but my body lay there.”
“So that was the moment of death, when my soul detached itself from my body.”
He was pulled through a narrow, dark space and then he saw a violet-yellow light. “There I suddenly felt feelings of happiness, euphoria, and joy,” he said. “I suddenly felt that I’ve already been there once, that I was home.”
It felt more like home to him than his parents’ house.
He saw a figure radiating with light and love. He now believes this figure was Jesus. The being asked him to reflect on his life, then told him it wasn’t his time to die and sent him back to his body.
Raised in an atheist society, Bostik feels his experience could not have been imagined. Such ideas did not exist in his mind. Yet after this encounter, which he profoundly felt to be real and true, he believes in life after death.
Follow @TaraMacIsaac on Twitter, visit the Epoch Times Beyond Science page on Facebook, and subscribe to the Beyond Science newsletter to continue exploring ancient mysteries and the new frontiers of science!
