'I died for six minutes and what I saw made me want to remain dead'

A farmer said “everything changed” during a cardiac arrest where he had a near-death experience. Philip Hasheider, who has a wife and kids, was driving to get tyres changed when he decided to visit his local fitness centre, after realising he was early for his appointment.

After doing a modest 20 arm curls, he noticed both of his forearms were tingling, and as he put it: “The next moment, I find myself in a completely different dimension.” One emergency medical technicianwho was there said: “Philip was clinically dead. His heart had stopped. He wasn’t breathing on his own.”

Medics desperately tried to revive Philip, who was lifeless and turning blue, with a defibrillator at the gym in Sauk City, Wisconsin, US. But during those six minutes, Philip claims he has clear memories of being away from his body.

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And in a profound comment, he said: “At that point where I was sitting there enjoying all this stuff, there were a dozen EMTs and hospital staff trying frantically to restart my heart and had I know that, I couldn’t even call them to tell them ‘don’t bother, this is great.’”

He said the experience in the afterlife is so vivid that it feels like it is “tattooed onto his soul” and he spoke to theabout exactly what he saw – along with the message he believes he was sent back to share.

Setting the scene after his heart stopped, he remembered: “It was like being in a huge open amphitheatre, realising that there is no sky, there is no stars, there is no moon, there is no galaxies, and that is when I noticed that I kept moving up and down, and wondering what that was, and I realised I was floating on these waves of energetic energy coming towards me.

“But not only towards me, they were passing through me and I thought, this is really interesting. I had no fear, it just felt so warm, and accepting and I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t even think about where I was, I was just there.”

Philip described seeing infinite universes of love in an enormous golden yellow sphere that filled up the whole vision around him.

And speaking about being close to God, he added: ”I instantly knew that this was the nest of the source of all creation and this is where everything is created and this is where everything is created anywhere.

“So I knew at that point, this is where I was born, this is where you were born, this is where everyone and everything was born as we understand a birth as a starting point so that each of us carries the DNA of that creator energy and we take that with us wherever we go.”

The lead EMT told Coming Home that Philip’s chances of survival at that moment were just 5%.

Philip said he remembered looking into infinity before the realisation struck that he had transported between time and space.

He explained: “A door had been opened up to me and I had stepped through it. I still did not realise that my body was back on the floor. I didn’t have any awareness that I had died.”

The farmer added: “The moment that I realised that all of this was before me, in less than a blink of an eye, I left that dimension and I found myself back here.”

After recovering in hospital, Phllip soon started to recall exactly what happened to him in those six minutes where his heart wasn’t beating and his lungs were no longer breathing.

He is adamant that it was not a dream and that even now, exactly a decade later, he can go through the whole scene step by step, and that nothing from the dimension changes.

Initially, Philip struggled to comprehend why he had visited the afterlife, and why he had returned, and he said: “I thought, ‘Why do I want to stick around here?’ And it’s not because I don’t love my wife, it’s not because I don’t love my family, it’s just because everything was so far beyond great where I was that this is really not quite that level.”

Speaking on the programme, his wife, Mary, added: “The underlying sense was when you have such an extraordinary experience, that you really would rather be back into that experience, and we talked about that and I can understand that part of it.

“However, you have a family, you have friends, you have people who care about you, and so how do we fit them in?”

However, this message was made clear to Philip during a dream one night, and he suddenly realised why he had returned.

He believes he returned to be a "conduit of hope” and he was then motivated to write and talk about his experiences, eventually leading to his memoir called Six Minutes In Eternity.

He said he does not consider himself special, but that he had an extraordinary experience, and he now has insights that he didn’t have before.

Mary meanwhile described her husband being much more present since his NDE.

And summing up his overriding message after seeing what he saw after being clinically dead, Philip said: “The hope of which I speak has to do with not being afraid of what comes next. We are so tied to physical things here that we don’t want to give them up.

“This life that we understand is not the end even though we decease, that’s what human bodies do, but the internal essence, our internal spirit, is what continues on.

“That is all that death is, it is a transition from what we experience here, to something far greater, and to me that is the hope that I am trying to explain to people.

“Yeah, we are going to lose some of the stuff that we have here that we can’t take back with us. But we’re gonna keep going, going to keep having other experiences as we keep going through eternity because that essence of us that goes on is part of the God creation – and that doesn’t get destroyed.”