By KEN KORCZAK
Near-Death-Experience of an American civilian contract worker in Iraq is a mind-expanding story like no other.
After getting blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq, civilian contract worker Natalie Sudman “blinked” and found herself in another reality.
It was a strange place indeed. Sudman discovered herself standing center stage in a kind of location she still struggles to describe. It was like a vast stadium filled with thousands of beings — but who or what kind of beings?
Souls? Personalities? Entities? Spirits? People?
None of these terms seemed quite adequate or accurate. Sudman realized that she was having a near-death experience (NDE) after suffering severe trauma to her body. But this event didn’t have any of the classic attributes popularly associated with the NDE.
There was no tunnel of light, no greeting on “the other side” by dead relatives, no experience of a spirit detaching and flying away from her physical body. She just “blinked” and she was there. Once arrived, she felt instantly at home and did not want to go back.
She also became immediately aware of her first function in the afterlife: She acted as a kind of cosmic computer cache with the purpose of “downloading” all of her “stored” information to the waiting gathering of souls.
These souls absorbed the information “with gratitude,” Sudman writes.
By now, you may be getting the idea that APPLICATION OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS is yet another near-death experience book. However, this one makes a significant departure from what have become the conventions of the genre.
This is not just more airy-fairy New Age fodder. It’s more of a thinking man’s (in this case, a thinking woman’s) report on the afterlife. Sudman is at once a serious, sober observer of the extraordinary situation she encountered and an often funny and charming writer with something entirely different to say.
This is a book about the ultimate issues of all reality:
- What is life?
- Who are we?
- What are we?
- What is the meaning of life?
- What does it mean to be a conscious human being?
- Why are we here?
Sudman has a remarkable ability to delve into these weighty questions while never talking down to us, and at the same time, challenging us to expand our way of thinking. This is a slim volume at just over 100 pages, but it has the effect of reading a book of 200 or 300 pages.
Each paragraph seems impregnated with densely packed meaning as if there is information coming at you from the spaces in between the words and sentences. If you read it twice, don’t be surprised is if you get more out of it a second time. It’s important to note that Sudman was not a New Age type or any sort of formal spiritual seeker before she encountered a roadside bomb on Nov. 24, 2007.
She was an archaeologist by profession, and then had transitioned to working as a project engineer for a civilian contractor in the Basrah South Region Office in Iraq. She was managing the building of a health care center in Khor Az Zubair at the time of the incident that transformed her life.
She comes to the NDE subject as an outsider with a fresh perspective, and so with less baggage than those who spend their lives immersed in mystical esoterica — and yet, many can expect to have their comfortable or calcified belief systems wobbled by what Sudman suggests in these pages.
Open-minded skeptics only need apply.
NOTE: For more book reviews exploring NDEs & the Afterlife, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM
Great story Ken, thank you for sharing. I had my own experience with the afterlife when in 2015 John Edward channeled my dad who had crossed over in 1975 and Edward was spot on proving that only these physical containers die, the spirit is indestructible.
Thanks, Michael, and also thanks for sharing your intriguing Afterlife experience!