Betty Eadie went into the hospital for surgery, frightened that she was going to die on the operating table and go straight to hell. She'd grew up hearing that God didn’t want people like her, and started to believe it.
She started bleeding during the operation, but the surgeons were able to stop it, and everything seemed fine.
But in her bed in the recovery room, Eadie started to feel a sense of foreboding. After calling her husband, she was comforted and decided to try to sleep.
Then she woke up at around 9:30 p.m. and felt her body shutting down.
“I felt myself dying,” she said. “It’s very distinct, it’s very different. It’s your body shutting down.”
“It began to shut down from my feet up, and I could feel my legs dying, and by the time death reached up to my shoulders, I could feel this feeling inside, a movement, a shuddering of my heart. And then that was it, I was gone,” she said.
Looking for God
Eadie grew up in the 40s, where Native American children were placed in boarding schools for education and cultural integration, and as a result had a Catholic boarding school education.“I was only 4,” she said. “And all I knew, coming from that, was I was taken from my parents.”
Eadie described herself as extremely timid, and unable to stand up for herself. But she had a younger sister she was protective of, and if someone picked on her, Eadie would be the first one there.
“And these were fistfights,” she said. “I had four older brothers and they taught me how to fight like a man.”
“When I was 15, I married the boy next door just to get away from my environment,” she said. They had four children, but one daughter passed when she was only 3 months old. Afterward, the marriage fell apart and they divorced, and Eadie later remarried.
In all this time, Eadie did not have any particular religious beliefs, and even had a hard time believing in God.
“I just didn’t trust that there could be a God that would condemn the Indian people, or any people, to hell because of their race,” she said. “Yet that was what I was taught in boarding schools. I was part Native American and part Irish, and they said I was the worst of the lot. At 4.”
“I wanted to believe in God. I tried to find him—in myself, out there, wherever God is,” she said.
Out of Body
After Eadie “popped” out of her body, she felt herself rise up to the recovery room ceiling, and when she looked down, she could see her own body.“Now, I had worked in hospitals before, when I was studying to become a nurse. I know what a dead person looks like,” Eadie said.
She went closer to get a better look, and thoughts ran through her mind about the fact that she was dead and her children and husband didn’t know, and “I just became very frightened at that moment.”
“But as each moment passed, and they passed very quickly, it’s like waking up from amnesia.”
It was like Betty Eadie’s life had been a dream, and she had suddenly woken from a long sleep to a bright and beautiful morning, feeling more alive and awake than ever.
“Awareness in the body, in the brain and the mind, is nothing like the vividness, the total awareness that just exists outside of the body. It is just amazing,” she said. “And as each moment passed I became more aware of my spiritual self, my spirit body, and my spirit knowledge.”
Three ancient men in brown robes with golden belts appeared by Eadie’s bedside.
“And they told me that they had always known me, through the eternities,” Eadie said. “I remember thinking, ‘I know what an eternity is, but what is eternities?’ And they said they had known me through eternities, and they had loved me and I had loved them, and that they were my ministering angels.”
“And they said, ‘you have died, but you have died prematurely,’” she said.
Eadie now knew she had passed, but she wanted to see her children and husband one more time, so that’s what she decided to do. She saw a window and decided to fly through it, though the moment she decided to leave the hospital room she had already arrived where her family was.
She remembered her husband promising to put the children to bed, so when she saw they were still running all over the place at a quarter to 10 while he sat in his chair reading the newspaper, she couldn’t help getting angry. But she knew they were fine. Her husband would later be shocked at her accurate description of the scene.
Once Eadie had the certainty that her family was alright, she felt “drawn back to my body.”
“Soon after I got back, there was a sound, at first it was the most beautiful sound: tinkling bells, chimes,” she said. “It was like an energy that was preparing me to go with it.”
And then Eadie felt herself traveling through a black space, so devoid of color and light that one could put their hand in front of their face and see nothing. When she was a child, she was punished by being shut in a dark, small space, so Eadie had been somewhat claustrophobic. But she felt no fear here.
“In this space, if I had gone no further, I would have wanted to stay there for the rest of my life. There was no condemnation,” Eadie said. “I was awakening to something that was more fantastic and marvelous than our minds can even imagine. And I felt it. And the love, it was like bathed in liquid love in this dark space, going through a healing of some sort, and I surely did need a lot of that.”
Eadie basked in the sense of love and healing until she saw a pinpoint of light appear.
“I felt that the light was looking for me, and I was looking up at it, and it just wandered until it spotted me,” she said. “And then it broadened, to fill me in that light, and drew me up into the light.”
She continued to travel, now through light, which became more brilliant as she neared what seemed to be her destination.
Eadie saw ahead of her a shadowy forum, with golden light beneath it, and a vast whiteness beyond it.
“A white we can’t even imagine here on this earth,” she said.
And in that white light, which she felt was many times brighter than the sun, she saw the image of a man.
“And as I got closer, I knew exactly who he was,” she said. “Not that I knew him in my youth so much. I wanted to know God, I wanted to know the Creator, I wanted that, but it just didn’t exist in my mind.”
‘Why Did I Have to Go There?’
Eadie wanted to know why she would be asked to live a life where she was Indian-Irish, taken away from her parents to a horrible boarding school, and had a poor miserable life.“I thought, ‘Why did I have to go there?’ and he said, ‘because you selected that. You as a spirit being in heaven had grown to such wisdom that you wanted that challenge, that you were strong enough to endure that,’” she said. “And he said that everything you learn there, everything you draw to yourself is a learning curve that will grow your spirit, so that when you return here, you will be greater than you were before you went there.”
Even angels did not select to come to earth, Eadie learned. “Each one of us took on the challenges that we knew we needed to have in order to grow and to acquire the greater attributes like God. We’re here to acquire his attributes, like love is number one, forgiveness, all these things.”
“In order to get to that point of learning what it’s like to love, or what it’s like to forgive, you go through all these challenges,” she said. “It’s how we learn to deal with that that we grow our spirit more like He is.”
Eadie was then taken to what she understood to be different parts of heaven so that she could better understand why.
“I saw spirits preparing to be born on the earth, and it was interesting how they were selecting their parents. Maybe just the mother or maybe just the father sometimes. Sometimes they were already a pair,” she said. “They selected them! Because, as it was explained to me, they would have not only the physical DNA, meaning the appearance of their parents, but they would have the ancestral memories, because cells have memories, every experience that we have on earth is encoded in our cells.”
She saw reincarnation, but “not as we think it to be.”
“There have been some people that have been sent back here as teachers, maybe some as students, but not everyone is reincarnated,” she said. Sometimes what one thinks is reincarnation is one waking up to ancestral memories that have been passed down, she said.
“It’s amazing, when you look at God’s perfect blueprint and his plan,” she said. She saw technologies that did not yet exist in the world, that were prepared in that other realm and would later be given to humankind as inspiration. “My mind was bubbling over.”
“The closer we can become to God, and accepting our challenges and also our blessings, we can be inspired if we’re ready,” she said. “I was joyous. I was taken to the many worlds God created. I wish I could have held onto the memories of each one.”
“It is just unbelievable the volume of information that you can have when you’re up there, and it could be given to you in just seconds,” she said. “And it’s not just information.”
Above All Else
Eadie was told that she would return.“People coming back from near-death experiences are challenged to share precisely what we heard or saw there,” she said. Most people who have a near-death experience say how hard it is to describe the indescribable, she added, but with each one adding their own perspective, others come to understand. Eadie has since written as much of what she can find the words to describe in her book “Embraced by the Light.”
“We all have a mission to serve,” she said. “Every soul is deserving.”
“We cannot judge the height and breadth of any individual as far as being the greater spirit among us. And Jesus proved that by being one of the lowliest men on earth, and yet he is the highest in heaven,” she said.
“And that is what Jesus said to me when he returned me back to earth. He said, above all else, love one another,” she said. “And if you can do that, all else will be fine.”
Next year, it'll be 50 years since Eadie had her near-death experience. “And it is still as vivd to me today as it was back then,” she said.
“I know upon my return, that I was given an extra dose of human-ness,” she said. While before she was very shy and timid, even if she was angry inside, afterward, she was drawn to connecting with others.
“I noticed was a change in my thoughts and my demeanor, my attitudes about different things,” said Eadie. “I became stronger and firmer in my belief. I was more solid in my thoughts, my feeling, my speech, everything.”
Eadie learned there would come a time when the world would be in danger of destruction, but also that there were worlds such as the heaven she had seen with beings who were there to protect the world.
“I saw the world and I saw how prayers are important, essential as a matter of fact,” she said. She feels the time of turmoil has come, as she can see the suffering in children who are committing suicide before age 10, and she hopes the messages from those who have touched heaven can still find their way to men’s ears.
“I know hardships,” she said. “I know when a child dies, I know when your parents die.”
“I understand,” she said. “Jesus told me that my hard times, everything I had to go through, see we earn our intelligence, our structure, we earn it by getting through our challenges, no matter what it is.”
