Death and Dying and What, I mean What, Lies Beyond?

I sat next to my mother as she lay dying and, as the mum I knew took leave of her body, something happened. I was taken way down deep, deeper than any state of consciousness I had ever experienced.

Well, I stayed there for 2 weeks. In that state everything I looked at was lit with the most wonderfully solemn, sad beauty. Think of the effect of a Bach fugue and lift it by several powers. My spirit attained a stillness and liberty that meditation only touched. Every, and I mean every, question was answered. I felt a level of peace and healing I could not even begin to plumb.

Um, all good things end. I surfaced 14 days later to the day after mum died returning to normal but with the effects of that time still swirling around me.

My spiritual mate said later, “yep, that's definitely the Holy Spirit”. But, I wonder, was it? Did I actually experience a person? If so, what order of person and why did I not experience him or her as a person? What was it I experienced?

I remember that my normal sense of me running the show was "taken over" and suspended. My life seemed to be run for me on remote. In this state I functioned normally on the outside but inside I inhabited a state of blissful loveliness and protectedness.

The thing is, the experience was both undeniable and long lasting. I suppose it can be described in stock Christian words about Gift and Spirit and God etc but none of those words catch it because while I may have got the action-of-a-person (a definite sense of intervention) I didn't get any of sense-of-a-person. Now, this is curious. Why not?

Buddhism might be helpful because they talk in a quite frank and objective way in terms of higher and different inner states we can attain, especially in and around death. In that sense it may have been something pre-wired into the software for me triggered by Mum's death. In Christian language, the word providence seems closer to the mark than anything angelic, divine or personish. It was quite like something falling on me from on high (supplies parachuted into enemy territory?).

Now, when I was young, after a long period of suffering, mummum told me of a vision of heaven she had been given with all the gold'n rubies'n bells'n whistles of Revelation. She thought it had been given to her as compensation for a very difficult life. The thing that is really interesting here is that our two experiences were so very different. While I got the “all is really well with the world” number, Mum got the red carpet with Cecil B de Mille visuals and sound track.

Hmm.

What is this telling me? Am I just a heathen garlic muncher fallen from glory, or, is my experience just what Mum experienced, but, our thinking and the words we use to think it shaped and coloured 2 entirely different experiences?

There is definitely something there. Its major. Its bigger and much much better than what we normally experience. It 'told' me that yes, there is a ‘place’ that is ‘heavenly’, but that it has nothing to do with what I am or do to ‘deserve’ it.

Why I raise this is that, neither through religion nor secular life, have I encountered a way of adequately recognizing or dealing with such inner experiences and give them the response they deserve. What do they mean? How do I respond? Can I get this majestic sense of wholeness back?

Would anyone else care to comment or offer their own big picture experiences?