The Promise We Made: Three Universal Soul Promises We Made to Our Children

The Promise We Made: Three Universal Soul Promises We Made to Our Children by Efrat Shokef, PhD

The morning of January 6, 2011 was a peaceful Thursday morning. Rain was lightly falling. The sun was touching the drops, making everything sparkle. As on other Thursday mornings, the only morning I was teaching at the time, I dressed nicely, got my toddler ready for her day, we all had breakfast, and I nursed the twins together. My mother came to watch them, both happily crawling directly into her arms. My husband walked our toddler and me to the car, helping her in. On the way to her daycare, we sang, welcoming the rain, delighting together in the drizzle washing the air around us. When we arrived, I sat with her for a few minutes. I had plenty of time to get to the college campus in Jerusalem for my class. We hugged and kissed goodbye. I was to pick her up on my way back.
 
Tiny raindrops were pounding on my car window; the sun came out for a few seconds and disappeared. I remember a long wait until I could turn left into the main road. Long, yet calm. Then, less than 500 meters after I left the village, while joyfully enjoying the view of the showered trees and the sparkle of the raindrops on their leaves, a deep, unfamiliar boom awakened all my senses.
 
It came.
Silence
Stillness
Calmness
Peace
 
After the boom, I heard nothing. Not even the birds continuing to sing on the large old carob tree growing by the road. The 9:00 am radio news reported, “There was a serious car crash on Highway 44. Two cars were involved. Two women were injured, one severely. The road is blocked to traffic in both directions.” By the 11:00 am news, the road was open to traffic. My shoe was left lonely on the roadside by the old carob tree.
 
Silence.
Stillness.
A glorious quietness, and the delicate sound of faraway bells.
Light.
Bright and warmly intense. Radiant, yet not dazzling.
The most magnificent place I have ever been to.
 
Immediately after the crash, I felt myself expanding and hovering in soft, white, shimmering surroundings. A feeling I wish I could adequately describe. But words cannot capture the feeling that still, years later, expands my cells. An experience stored not in my mental memory but in the deepest essence of my physical and energetic being. The stillness was magnificent. Tranquil, serene, perfect, and enveloping as only true silence can be. No sound but the sound of inner music and distant soft bells. Waves of soft white light were moving delicately around me. Like feather clouds, yet much softer. A sense of pure love was enveloping me, sliding by my luminous skin, bubbling into my being, reminding me what we are all made of. I felt peace as I never had before.
 
Where was I? It was incredible, breathtaking in its beauty. It was unlike anywhere I consciously remembered, yet I knew I knew this place and had been here before. It was both new and familiar. A place outside of linear time and space as we know them here, and our Earthly vocabulary is not sufficient for describing it. While there, I was unaware that I was not in my physical body, the one I walk within this lifetime. Nor did I realize that my physical body was a mess. I did not know I was in the midst of a near-death experience (NDE). My Earthly identity, family, friends, and children were not on my mind either. It’s not that I forgot them. But for those moments, my Earthly consciousness was not active. I had no sense of self. I was where I was, in the now of those moments. A magnificent present. Nothing else had any significance. Not in any conscious awareness. It was a familiar, new, fabulous, luminous space to be in. The most beautifully enveloping, calm, and loving place I have ever visited. It felt like home. A place to stay in. Forever.
 
The surrounding light was strong and pure, yet its brightness did not dazzle as it would on Earth – but that is an understanding that came later. It felt like this light was bubbling into me and informing every piece of my being. My inner sense expanded. I felt intact, complete, and whole. Whole in every aspect of my being. I was enveloped by the core force of our universe –LOVE. It was all so pure that, within me, I knew there were no questions. This was it – the essence of it all. The core center of our beings, as individuals, as one. As Earth, as the universe and its multiple dimensions. I felt deep acceptance. Self-acceptance and self-love merged with the acceptance and LOVE of everything. I was part of and one with all. Within my being and down to my cells, I gradually recognized that the light bubbling into me was bringing LOVE. Was LOVE. Until I felt that I myself was LOVE.
 
I remember I was floating forward and sensed I was not alone. A few vague beings were floating in the same direction that I was. At the same time, many luminous beings were floating slowly in the direction others and I had come from. Some seemed to be very long and different, and others had more human features. Their movement was soft. As if dancing just above an apparent luminous ground.
 
Slowly, I felt myself floating toward those luminous, dancing, floating beings. Some of them, in small groups, accompanied the others coming with me. From the side, they looked like happy, enveloping gatherings. All of the arriving souls were happily welcomed back home. Once they met, they moved forward together. It was touching to see the mutual recognition and embracement – the meeting of hearts.
 
I floated forward until I couldn’t continue. I felt I had reached an invisible boundary the others had crossed, but I could not. Everything around me was so still and beautiful. I felt like I was me in my essence, absorbing the LOVE bubbling in, and it did not matter that I was not moving forward like the others. At the time, I did not understand that these were all souls who had just emerged from their physical bodies – died – and were now being welcomed by their guides and soul families.
 
After a timeless time, a single figure floated towards me from that invisible border I could not cross. The closer the single glowing, luminous figure came, the stronger the sense of familiarity grew. It looked like the father of my father, who had passed away from cancer when I was nine years old. He did not look like I remembered him, yet he did. It seemed like yesterday. We did not talk. Just looked into each other’s eyes. Talking through our hearts, knowing all was well. Signaling how much we love one another. This wordless communication strengthened that feeling already bubbling into me that I was LOVE too, and I am always loved as I am.
My grandfather invited me to stand by him on a shimmering white stone balcony and view the universe. He was there to make the most out of my visit to the realm of LOVE. To be a guide and open my heart, mind, cells, and whole being to the possibilities and knowledge of our universe. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if it was indeed my grandpa’s soul coming to guide me, or if it was my luminous guidance, always watching over me, that embodied his image to ease our meeting in those sacred moments.
 
It felt like the balcony was standing in place and that, in parallel, the areas below were flowing. And yet, it could have also been the other way around. We observed the Earth. Its people. Some in cities. Some living on distant mountaintops. Some listening to their hearts. Others swept away by human noise. Often, they create a pool of sorrow, pain, and loss around them, drowning in their own tears. My grandfather, my guide, was expanding my understanding of humanity. It was so rich. So magnificent. At times also extremely sad. We humans so often forget our pure essence. I was shown so many different places. So many dimensions of life. So much beauty, so many alternatives and choices.
 
After what seemed to be days but was only a few minutes in Earthly time as we know it, my grandfather told me, “This is not your time. You must go back now,” adding with his eyes the urgency of returning to my body.  
 
He had shown me all that I needed to see. All that I could absorb at that time. I was there, in what some would refer to as an altered state, outside of time and outside of space, for almost as long as was possible. The way he urged me to return to my body, I understood that staying in this serene, beautiful place of LOVE – meaning not coming back to my body, my family, Earth –was not an option. I was not asked or given a choice; I was to return, immediately. This knowing was within me, just as it had been given.
 
In the flip of a second, I was floating backward, departing from my beloved grandfather with my distancing eyes. Then I was pulled down, and I fell into my own physical body.
 
Returning to my body was another crash. I was overwhelmed with the pain sending signals from my leg, arm, neck, back, and especially my belly. The pain was tremendous. It was stronger than the one intense pain I was familiar with, of birth contractions at their peak. It was so strong. I could not breathe. I could not even cry.
 
“Were there babies in the car with you?” I vaguely heard someone ask. I did not understand why someone would ask me about babies in my car. I did not see any cars around me in this luminous, serene space of LOVE.
“Were there any babies with you?” The unfamiliar voice asked again. I tried to answer, but he did not seem to notice.
“Were there any children with you? Talk to me,” he kept repeating. But he did not seem to hear any of my responses. I was coming and going in and out of my body. Not managing to bear the pain, confusion, smells, and noise of ambulances and paramedics, watching them from above carefully breaking my car door to remove me, while putting out a fire that had started in its front.
 
A little over a year after the car crash, my husband and I gratefully met the man who was by me, talking to me. In our meeting, he told us that he did not see the crash happen but arrived immediately after it and that he was afraid these were my last moments. My eyes were rolling back in my head, and I was hardly breathing. The ambulance driver told him to keep talking to me. He saw the bases of the click-connect infant car seats in the back seat and repeatedly asked if I had any babies with me. I came back and drifted away. He said that he thought it was several stressful minutes until I suddenly opened my eyes and clearly stated that my daughters were not with me and gave him my home number, asking him to call my husband. After that, I drifted away again. For me, those few minutes of our Earthly linear time seemed much longer. It felt like days. So much had happened.

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As soon as my husband got the call, he left everything. He quickly told my mother that he would update her, did not even kiss the twins, and drove to the location of the crash, which was less than ten minutes from our house. He drove on the road’s shoulder, trying to pass the traffic jam the car crash had created, until he could no longer proceed. He parked on the side and threw the keys to a friend stuck in the traffic jam (who did not know it was me ahead), asking him to bring his car home. Then, he managed to make his way through the police and paramedics to me. By then, I had already received strong painkillers, reducing the pain but not removing it.
He reached his hand through the paramedics, putting it on my forehead, saying to me, “I am here.”
 
I could let go. He was there, and I trusted him to take care of whatever needed to be taken care of. I surrendered to the painkillers and drifted away. He was shocked, yet supportive to me as only he could be at that time. Simply with me. As he always is, from this time, from others, from eternity.