Divine Encounters Episode 050 | Near-Death Experience Story
Anita Moorjani was living in Hong Kong and in the fourth year of a cancer diagnosis when, she says, she slipped into a coma on February 2, 2006 and left her body. In this Divine Encounters episode she tells Alex Ferrari what she says she experienced, from reunions with her father and best friend to a new understanding of karma, destiny and who we really are.
Key Takeaways
- Anita says she was aware of everything happening around her hospital bed while doctors told her family these were her final hours.
- She describes leaving gender, race, culture and religion behind, and says “the only thing that crosses over is our pure essence.”
- She says her late father and best friend greeted her, and that communication happened without words, as a merging of energy.
- Anita says time is not linear on the other side, and that she could see other lifetimes and possible futures connected to the people in front of her.
- She says the experience overturned her belief that illness is karmic payback, and taught her she was meant to express herself, not suppress herself.
- She describes each person as a facet of God, and says destiny means following the intention your soul came in with.
- Her closing message: “You don’t have to work at being good.”
| Guest | Anita Moorjani |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 050 |
| Where it happened | A hospital, after she says she fell into a coma on February 2, 2006 |
| Living in | Hong Kong at the time |
| What Anita says happened | She left her body, watched the room, and entered a state of clarity |
| Who she met | Her best friend who had passed two years earlier, and her father, who had passed ten years earlier |
| What she says she learned | She is not her body, time is not linear, and every person is a facet of God |
| The message | Let your spirit shine. You are already spiritual. |
Life Before: Two Friends, One Diagnosis
Alex opens with a simple question. What was your life like before you died? Anita starts with a lump on her shoulder, right between her neck and shoulder. She had it checked, a biopsy was done, and it was diagnosed as lymphatic cancer. At that time, she says, it was staged as a stage two.
Then she widens the lens. At the same time, two people very close to her, both her age, were dying of cancer. One was her best friend, as close as a sister. They grew up together. The other was her husband’s brother in law. Both had terminal cancer, she says.
Anita and her husband Danny lived in Hong Kong. One of the two was being treated in the best cancer hospital in New York, the other in the best cancer hospital in Hong Kong. These were the most expensive treatments money could buy, she says. This is the backdrop for everything that came next.
Choosing Natural Therapies
From where Anita stood, it looked as though every treatment her two loved ones received left them worse. So when she was diagnosed and the only option she was offered was the same chemo and radiation, she said no. She decided to take her chances with natural treatments.
She describes a pattern that went on for four years. She would get better, then worse. Better, then worse. At one point she was being treated by an ayurvedic doctor in India, and she says she felt much better. Everyone said she looked better. She says the doctor told her she was improving.
Then people around her urged her to get scans from a Western doctor, a “real doctor.” She went, and she says he told her she was being foolish to see eastern doctors. In her telling, he said she had only three months to live at the rate she was going.
This is Anita’s account, and she is clear that it is her own view of her choices at the time. Next Level Soul shares it as she lived it and offers no medical guidance.
The Decline and the Morning She Did Not Wake Up
After hearing the three-month estimate, Anita says her health deteriorated dramatically. Her body stopped absorbing nutrition. She lost her appetite. Her muscles wasted. She says her lungs filled with fluid. It happened very rapidly.
She adds one more detail. At that stage, she says, the doctors told her that the chemo and everything else they had would no longer work. It was too late, they said. They could throw everything at it, but it would not save her life.
Then came the morning of February 2, 2006. She did not wake up. She was in a coma, and her husband, frantic, rushed her to the hospital. The doctors said, in her words, that she was not coming out of it. Her mother and her brother were there. They were all told these were her final hours.
Aware of Everything, Present in None of It
Here is where the story turns. Anita says that, unknown to everyone around her, she had left her body. Her spirit, her soul, whatever we choose to call it, she says, had gone. She felt incredible, light and free.
She says she was aware of everything. She knew her husband was rushing her to the hospital. She knew he was frantic. She was aware of her family in the room. And she was aware that, to them, nobody was home.
In the hospital she began to realize something. “I’m more than my body,” she says. She describes the sensation of expanding outside of herself, becoming aware of what the nurses and doctors were doing, and of conversations happening outside the room.
She says she watched her doctor tell her husband she would not make it through the night. Then she felt herself keep expanding, beyond the hospital itself.
A State of Clarity and the People Who Greeted Her
The next thing Anita remembers, she says, is a state she calls clarity. Her awareness of the people physically around her faded. Her awareness of non-physical beings grew. Some of them she recognized from this life.
Her best friend, who had died of cancer two years earlier, was there to greet her. So was her father, who had passed ten years before. Anita had always felt she let her dad down. They clashed, and she believed he was disappointed in her. In this place, she says, all she felt from him was pure, unconditional love.
She is careful to explain how it felt. There are no physical bodies, no vocal cords, no eyes. It is a different kind of perception, pure awareness. Her father did not need to speak. She simply knew what he wanted her to know, as if his energy and hers merged. She says she could see an image of him as she knew him, but he was not physical. It was his essence.
This is a reminder of how many accounts describe a reunion with loved ones. If you are curious about the wider theme, our glossary entry on the afterlife is a gentle place to start.
What Crosses Over: Pure Essence
In that space, Anita says she realized something about identity. When we cross over, we leave behind our physical bodies and also our gender, our race, our culture, our religion and our beliefs. She says “the only thing that crosses over is our pure essence.”
She calls that essence pure love, pure God, pure source energy or pure consciousness. The name does not matter to her. What matters is that, with her dad’s essence and her own, they could simply merge. She could understand him, and he could understand her.
That merging changed the story she had told herself. She says she understood that, just as she had always believed, she was a victim of her culture, and that her father was a victim of the same culture, doing the best he could within it. The old tension softened. There was nothing left to defend.
If you are drawn to this idea, you may like our entry on consciousness.
Brother, Husband and the Lives She Could See
Anita says that when she focused on her husband Danny, she saw other lives she had shared with him and a potential future. The space filled with other times and places she had met this person. It was, she says, very abstract and esoteric.
When her awareness turned to her brother, who had flown in from India to be with her before she passed, she felt she could not die just yet. She says she saw a lifetime in which she was much older than him and very protective of him. In this life he is the older sibling, she notes, yet she still feels protective of him.
When she turned to Danny, she saw a scene from her future in this life, one that had not yet happened. She understood the two of them still had work to do together here. If she did not come back, she says, he would not be able to fulfill his side of it.
This is why she says “time is not linear on the other side.” She could access the future, the past and any life connected to her experiences here. She compares it to a holodeck of all of her lifetimes, each one informing the present one. Readers curious about this theme may enjoy our overview of reincarnation.
Rethinking Karma and the People Pleaser
Anita says the experience changed her view of everything, including spirituality, religion and karma. Before, she thought of karma as simple. You do something wrong, you pay it back.
When her own illness was not healing, she says, people, even spiritual gurus, told her it was her karma. She needed to do more good work. For someone who was already a people pleaser, that landed hard. She had been taught to serve, to be subservient, to be groomed to become a good wife. Told to clean up her karma, she became even more of a martyr, practically prostrating herself so no one would be bothered, so she would not add to the bad karma she believed was feeding the illness.
After crossing over, she says she saw it was not her karma. In fact it was the opposite. “I was meant to express myself fully, not suppress myself,” she says. She says the belief that we must constantly work at being good rests on a hidden belief that we are not good. That belief, she says, is the real flaw.
For more on how teachers describe this idea, see our guide to understanding karma.
A Facet of God, and the Decision to Return
What Anita says she learned is that each person is “a facet of God,” love or pure consciousness expressing itself through a body. When she saw how much more powerful she was than she had believed, she says, that is when she made the decision to come back into her body.
She describes a message that came from her father. Now that she knew the truth of who she was and who she was meant to be, he told her, her body would heal very dramatically. She shares this as the message she received. The conversation here does not go further into what followed, and neither will we.
To explain how we are all connected, she offers an image. Picture a mirror ball with billions of little mirror tiles. Each tile is one of us. Together they make one bright, shiny ball. That, she says, is God.
Destiny, Free Will and the Soul’s Intention
Anita says we choose to come here. For her, it felt as though her soul chose this life and arrived with an intention. That is how she makes sense of free will and destiny. “Destiny is not written in stone,” she says. Following your destiny means following the intention of your soul.
Along the way, she says, we get knocked off the rails. We learn things, we teach things, we lose our way. We all forget. In her case, she repressed who she was so completely that her soul, she says, fought back with symptoms and wake up calls in her body, a way of saying this is not who you are.
Free will is the choice to follow that intention or not. She also says you can get your lessons from between lives, or even from having done something harmful to someone, without having it done back to you. For related reading, see our page on soul purpose.
Placing Anita’s Story Beside Common Near-Death Themes
Several elements here echo what many experiencers describe: awareness outside the body, loved ones who have passed, a feeling of unconditional love, and a sense of being given a choice about returning. Anita adds her own emphasis. Her focus is less on a place and more on identity, on what remains when culture and belief fall away.
Researchers have studied these reports for decades. Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson published the 16-item NDE Scale in 1983 to help measure them, and a 2001 study in The Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues found that about 18 percent of 344 cardiac arrest survivors reported such an experience. How to interpret them is still debated. Here, we share them as experiences in the person’s own words, with no medical claims.
To go wider, read our complete guide to near-death experiences and the glossary entry on near-death experience.
Bringing It Down to Earth
You do not need a coma to ask Anita’s questions. Where in your life have you been working at being good, as though goodness had to be earned? Where have you softened yourself to keep other people comfortable?
Her closing words are simple: “You don’t have to work at being good.” She adds that you are already spiritual, and that you were born that way. “Just let that spirit shine.”
Questions to Sit With
- Anita says she spent years trying to be good enough. Where are you still trying to earn something you may already have?
- If, as she describes it, only our essence crosses over, what parts of your identity do you hold most tightly right now?
- Is there a relationship, like hers with her father, where you could begin from understanding instead of old patterns?
This week, notice one moment when you start to people-please. Pause, take one slow breath, and say what you actually need.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Anita says we are more than our bodies, and that the only thing that crosses over is pure essence.
- She describes loved ones greeting us with unconditional love, without words.
- She says time is not linear on the other side, and every lifetime informs the present one.
- She says illness is not a sign that you are bad, and that suppressing yourself is the real flaw.
- She says each of us is a facet of God, and destiny means following the intention of your soul.
Please enjoy my conversation with Anita Moorjani.
Guest Links: Connect With Anita Moorjani
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Anita Moorjani?
Anita Moorjani is the guest of this Divine Encounters episode. She was living in Hong Kong with her husband Danny when, she says, she fell into a coma on February 2, 2006 and had a near-death experience.
What happened to Anita before her near-death experience?
Anita says she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, chose natural therapies over chemo and radiation, and went through four years of getting better and then worse. She says her health then declined rapidly before she fell into a coma.
Why did Anita avoid chemotherapy?
She says two people very close to her, her best friend and her husband’s brother in law, were dying of cancer despite receiving the best treatments available, and she saw them getting worse after treatment. This is her own account of her reasoning, not medical advice.
What does Anita say she experienced in the hospital?
She says she left her body, felt light and free, and was aware of everything around her, including her husband’s panic and her doctor telling him she would not make it through the night.
Who did Anita meet?
Anita says her best friend, who had died two years earlier, and her father, who had died ten years earlier, were there to greet her. She says she felt only unconditional love from her dad.
How did Anita communicate with her father?
She says there were no vocal cords or eyes. It was pure awareness, and she simply knew what he wanted her to know, as if their energy merged.
What does Anita say crosses over when we die?
She says we leave behind gender, race, culture, religion and beliefs, and that “the only thing that crosses over is our pure essence.”
What did Anita learn about karma?
She says she had thought of karma as paying back wrongs, and that people told her illness was her karma. After her experience she says she realized it was not, and that she was meant to express herself fully.
What does Anita mean by a facet of God?
She says each person is a facet of God, love or pure consciousness, expressing itself through a body. She uses the image of a mirror ball made of billions of tiles that are all connected.
How does Anita define destiny and free will?
She says your soul comes in with an intention, and destiny means following it. Free will is the choice to follow that intention or not.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the person’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
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- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What karma means
- What is a near-death experience?
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- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Anita Moorjani 0:03
It started with a with a lump on my literally on my shoulder, like between my neck and my shoulder. So I went to have it checked out, and they did a biopsy, and it was diagnosed as lymphatic cancer at that time, it was staged as a stage two and then over the years. So the thing is, what was going on for me at that time was that my two people, very close to me in my life, and the same age as me, both had cancer. Both of them were dying of cancer. They had both had terminal cancer. They were dying of cancer. One of them was my best friend, who's as close to me as a sister. We grew up together, so it was a shock when she was diagnosed, and then my husband's brother in law, also the same age as me, was diagnosed, and so both of them were having the best or most expensive treatments that money can buy in the best cancer hospitals. One of the we were living in Hong Kong, one of them was being treated in the best Cancer Hospital in New York, and the other one in the best Cancer Hospital in Hong Kong. But both of them continued to deteriorate, and when I from my perspective, it looked like every time they had a treatment, they were getting worse. So when I was diagnosed, and the only option I was given was the same treatment they were given, you know, the chemo, the radiation, I was like, No, I don't want that. I'm going to take my chances with natural treatments, because I am seeing these two people very close to me are deteriorating and dying, and they're having the best treatment that money can buy in the world. So I did opt for natural therapies, but interestingly, I would get better and then I would get worse. I would get better and I would get worse. And I went through this over a period of four years, and I reached a point where I started to really deteriorate, because it started when a doctor told me that I needed to get some scans to get real about where it's at. I was being treated by an ayurvedic doctor in India, and I was actually feeling a lot better. And the doctor was telling me I was getting a lot better, and so I was feeling so much better. I looked better. Everybody said I was better, and then I fell into again, with people telling me, oh, you need to get scans from a Western from a real doctor. You need to go to a real doctor. I went to a Western Doctor Who did the scans and said that, said that I was being foolish, going to the eastern doctors and everything. He told me, you only have three months to live at this rate. And after I heard that, my health deteriorated dramatically, like dramatically. My body stopped absorbing nutrition. I lost my appetite, my muscles started to deteriorate. Lungs were filled with fluid. I just deteriorated. I got worse and worse and worse, very rapidly. And then on the morning of February the second 2006 I didn't wake up. I was in a coma, and my husband was freaking out. He rushed me to the hospital, and the doctors said, This is it. She's not coming out, she's dying, but unbeknownst to everybody around me, I had left my body, my spirit, my soul, whatever we want to call it. Had actually left my body, and I was feeling incredible and light and free. Oh, and I also want to add one more thing is that at this point where I was at, where I went to the doctor and everything at this point, the doctor actually said that whatever we have, the chemo and everything that we have, will no longer work for you. It's too late. That's what the doctors said. They said, You know, we can throw everything at it, but it's too late. It's not going to save your life. They even said that I was aware, for example, that my husband was rushing me to the hospital when I didn't wake up. That was when he rushed me and he called the doctor. The doctor said, Bring her to the hospital. I was aware of everything that was going on around me. My husband being frantic, rushing me to the hospital, my family being there, my brother, my mom, they were all there. They were all told that these were my final hours and that I was dying and I wasn't going to come out of the coma. So I was aware of everything that was happening around me, but I was also aware that to them, I was not there, like nobody was home. I was gone, and I was aware of that. And it was when I was in the hospital that I started to realize, Oh, I'm not just in my body. I'm more than my body. And it felt like I was expanding outside of my body, and I started to become aware of things like what the nurses were doing, what the doctors were doing and and I was aware of things that were happening outside the room, and the conversations they were having, I was hearing. Okay, and watching the conversations between my doctor and my husband and the I saw and heard the doctor tell my husband that, oh, she's not even going to make it. You know that she's not even going to make it through, through tonight, and these are her final hours. And I watched him say that, and then I felt myself continue to expand though beyond the hospital. And the next thing I remember is that I entered what I call like a state of clarity. But in this state, I was surrounded by other beings that were not on this world. So I started to lose the awareness of the physical of the people that were physically around me, and started to gain awareness of people that were non physical, that were around me, and some of them I recognized as being people I knew in this life. One of them was my best friend, who had passed from cancer. She passed two years prior, and she was there to greet me. Another one was my dad, who had passed 10 years prior. I'd always felt I'd let my dad down, and we'd always clash, and that he was disappointed in me, but here in this other realm, all I felt from him was pure, unconditional love, just love, and it felt like we don't have physical, biological bodies, we don't have vocal cords, we don't have eyes. So it's a very different type of perception, and it's pure awareness. So my dad didn't have to speak to me. It was I knew what he wanted me to know. It was like his energy and my energy just just merged together, and I knew everything so, so what happens is, you see them, but not with physical eyes. It's like you know that their physical body is not there, but my awareness was able to have images of who that is. So I would get images of my dad as I knew him in this physical life, but he wasn't physical. It was just his essence. And one of the things I realized is that when we cross over, not only do we leave behind our physical bodies, but we also leave behind our gender, our race, our culture, our religion, our beliefs, and that's when I realized that the only thing that crosses over is our pure essence. And our pure essence is, I would call it pure love or pure God, or pure source energy or pure consciousness. We can call it whatever we want, but it's pure essence. And so here I was with my dad's pure essence and my pure essence, and it was like we could just merge. So I could understand him, and he could understand me, and I understood that, just as I had always believed, I was a victim of my culture, he was a victim of the same culture, and just doing the best he could within the culture. So when I would focus on my husband from this life, Danny, when I'd focus on him, I would see other lives that I've had with him. I would see the potential future I have. So the space would be filled with other time and places that I have encountered with this person. It was very abstract and esoteric. And so my brother was there. My brother had flown down from India to get to me before I passed. And I remember, as soon as I put my awareness on my brother, I felt, Oh, I can't I can't die just yet. And I immediately saw a lifetime, and this is what was in front of me, a lifetime of him and me together where I was much older than him. He's older than me in this life, but I saw a lifetime of him and me together where I was much older than him, and I was very protective of him. And it's true that even in this lifetime, even though he's older, I feel protective of him. So when I saw when I was my awareness was on my husband, Danny. I was immediately aware of a scene in my future of this life, which hadn't panned out yet, of Danny and I fulfilling a purpose together, and I understood that we still had work to do together here, and I hadn't fulfilled it yet, and that if I didn't come back to fulfill it. If I crossed over, he wouldn't be able to fulfill his side of the purpose. And this is why I often say that time is not linear on the other side, because I could access the future, I could access the past, I could access any life that pertained to my experiences right here. So it's sort of like my experience is here in this physical life, it feeds into that narrative, that total narrative of who my soul is. My soul has this journey that's experienced multiple lives, but my soul has access to this holodeck of all the lives and all the experiences to allow it to. To inform this current life, for want of a better way of saying it. But this experience changed my view on karma. It changed my view on everything, on spirituality, or what it means to be spiritual, on religion, on karma, on everything, because I thought of karma as straightforward. You know, it's like you do something bad, you pay it back. And so when I was having going through the cancer and it wasn't healing, I've had people, even spiritual gurus, tell me, it's your karma. You need to do more good work. And when I crossed over, I realized it wasn't my karma, you know. So I was somebody prior to the near death experience, who was very much a people pleaser. You know, I was always taught to serve other people, to be subservient, to be groomed, to be a good wife, to a husband someday. So when I was told that it's because of your karma, there's something in your karma that you have to clean up, and that's why you have cancer. So there where I was already a people pleaser, a doormat and everything, and now being told, Oh, I need to do more good work. And so that made me even more of a people pleaser, martyr, charitable. So much so that that I was, you know, practically like prostrating myself for anybody to walk over me because I did not want to contribute to the bad karma that was feeding the cancer that was not healing. I realized was that it was the complete opposite. I was meant to express myself fully, not suppress myself. I was meant to come here and be a full expression of this soul that chose to come into this body, and the fact that we believe that we constantly have to work at being good, means our fundamental belief about ourselves is that we're not good, we're bad. We need to work on ourselves. That is actually the flaw, the belief that we're not good. We really have to know that, hey, my soul is amazing. My soul is a facet of God. So basically, what I learned is that each one of us is a facet of God, or love or pure consciousness, expressing itself through this body. The body is kind of fighting back. Your soul is fighting back. And so when I learned that I'm much more powerful than I thought, I'm an expression of God, that's when I made the decision to come back into my body. And then I had this message. It was actually my dad, that now that you know the truth of who you really are and who you're meant to be, your body will heal very, very dramatically. So my version of it is that we do choose, we definitely choose to come here. But I the way it felt for me is that my soul chose to come here, and my soul had an intention. So it comes with an intention, and this addresses, you know, what is free will, and what is destiny? So for me, Destiny is not written in stone. Following your destiny means following the intention of your soul. What did my soul plan to come here, to accomplish and achieve and do and be, and how did my soul plan to come and change the world and be of service and so on. And so you come with this intention, but while we're here, we sometimes get knocked off the rails. We get derailed our things, we learn things, we teach. We lose our way. And in my case, I've forgotten. We all forget along the way. In my case, I completely repressed who I am to the point where my soul was fighting back by giving me symptoms and wake up calls in my body, like this is not who you are. So the intention is what I call the destiny, and we can choose to follow that intention or not, and that is our free will. You can get your lessons even from between your lives, or even from having experienced something, doing something horrible to somebody. You don't need to have it done back to you. You don't have to work at being good. You are already spiritual. You were born spiritual. Just let that spirit shine. God is the infinite energy that runs through all of us, the infinite energy. And I sometimes call God the infinite man, because we are all a part of God. We're all the facet of God. It's like, sometimes I'll use the analogy of a mirror ball. And if you think of a mirror ball and imagine there's billions and billions of little mirror tiles instead of just a few. And imagine if each of those mirror tiles is one of us, and we're all connected to make this bright, shiny ball. And that is God, because we're all connected. It can come from anybody's soul.
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