According to Ingrid Honkala, death does not seem like the end of existence
NASA marine biologist Ingrid Honkala says her near-death experiences have convinced her that consciousness can continue to exist beyond the body.
He has a PhD in Marine Science, spent years working for NASA and the United States Navy, and says he has died three times. Ingrid Honkala has a lot to tell about what he saw, says .
The first time happened when Honkala was two years old. Honkala fell into an ice water tank at home, at a time when the maid was in another room. The mother, who had just left for a new job, returned inexplicablyarriving just in time to remove his daughter from the water and revive her.
Honkala guarantees that it was no coincidence. Wherever his consciousness had been during those brief minutes, believes he saw his mother to walk away and have managed, somehow, convey the urgency of the situation. When he later described what he had seen to his mother, the details matched.
“I remember recognizing her and thinking: that’s my mother”, says Honkala, quoted by . “At that moment, there seemed to be a form of communication between us, not through words, but through consciousness“.
What lived in that water tank set the tone for what would follow twice more, once after a motorcycle accident at age 25and another at 52, when the blood pressure dropped dangerously during surgery.
Each time, the same thing happened. The fear dissipatedthe body was left behind, and what remained was something he describes as pure conscience. “It was like entering a deepest layer of realitywhich exists beyond our physical senses. In this state, consciousness seemed vast, intelligent, and interconnected.”
Honkala, now 55 and based in Bogotá, Colombia, wrote about her experiences in the book . Be careful to frame it all as a rejection of science, but as an extension of it.
These were precisely what led her to pursue a scientific career, says Honkala. “I wanted to understand the nature of reality through observation and investigation,” he said.
His conclusion, after decades of both: “science and spirituality do not necessarily have to be in conflict, they can simply be exploring the same mystery from different perspectives“.
The most skeptical will say that near-death experiences are merely neurological phenomenapossibly the way the brain finds soften your own erasure. It’s a reasonable position.
The former NASA scientist’s argument, however, is difficult to reject outright: a mother’s confirmation about what a two-year-old claimed to have seen outside of his own body is, or a extraordinary coincidenceor something that deserves more than a simple “how strange”.
“Death does not feel like the end of existence. It feels more like a transition in the consciousness continuum,” says Honkala. I’ve said this three times already; draw whatever conclusions you want.
