A scientist who has worked with NASA claims to have clinically died three separate times and says each experience felt almost exactly the same.
Ingrid Honkala, now 55, says she experienced what are known as near-death experiences as a toddler, again in her mid-20s and later during surgery in her 50s.
Despite the wildly different situations involved, she believes each one led her into the same strange state of peace and awareness beyond her physical body.
The oceanographer says that the first incident happened when she was just two years old growing up in Bogota, Colombia.
After falling into a tank filled with icy water at home, she recalled initially panicking as she struggled to breathe before the feeling suddenly vanished.
‘Instead of fear, a deep calm came over me,’ she said. ‘The panic disappeared and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace and stillness.
According to Ingrid, the sensation that followed felt detached from ordinary human experience. She said she no longer felt tied to her body and instead became aware of herself in a completely different way.
‘At that moment, I no longer felt like a child in a body but like pure consciousness, a field of awareness and light,’ Ingrid said.
She says that time seemed to disappear entirely during the experience. Thoughts faded away too, along with any sense of individual identity, leaving what she described as a feeling of complete connection to everything around her.
‘It felt like being immersed in a vast intelligence filled with love, clarity and peace,’ she explained.
One of the stranger parts of her account involves her mother. Ingrid claimed that while she was unconscious in the water she could somehow see her mother several blocks away and communicate with her without speaking.
Her mother later rushed home and found her daughter in the tank. Ingrid believes the moment permanently changed how she viewed death and says she has not feared it since.
The scientist later went through two more near-death experiences.
One happened during a motorcycle crash when she was 25, while another occurred decades later after her blood pressure dropped during surgery at the age of 52.
Ingrid says the experiences all unfolded in a remarkably similar way. Each time she claims she entered the same calm state where fear vanished and awareness appeared to exist separately from her body.
Scientists have long debated what causes near-death experiences. Many researchers believe they can be explained by brain activity during moments of extreme physical stress, though Ingrid – like many others – thinks that the explanation may go further than that.
‘These experiences transformed my understanding of life itself,’ she said.
‘Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals struggling to survive, I began to understand that we may be expressions of consciousness experiencing life through a physical form.
‘From that perspective, death does not feel like the end of existence, it feels more like a transition in the continuum of consciousness.’
Despite the extraordinary nature of her claims, she continued building a scientific career after the incidents. Ingrid earned a PhD in Marine Science and later worked in environmental research projects involving both NASA and the United States Navy.
Rather than pushing her away from science, she said the experiences actually deepened her interest in understanding reality through research.
For years she mostly kept the stories private, though she now argues science and spirituality do not necessarily oppose each other. In her view they may simply be trying to answer the same awkwardly large questions from different directions.
Ingrid explores the experiences further in her upcoming book, Dying to See the Light: A Scientist’s Guide to Reawakening, which focuses on consciousness and what she believes may happen when life ends. Which is a fairly ambitious topic for one 268-page book.
Still, if you’re going to read a book about what happens after die, you could do worse than seek one out written by a scientist who says she’s died three times.
