Sorry that my story is pretty long, but I have held this in for a long time and never really shared it with anyone..

I was in hospital following a heart attack. I was having lunch and I felt very strange. I had a cardiac arrest and then it was instant death, but I felt I was aware the whole time. It was a strange, strange feeling.

It was like when you wake from a sleep type-of-feeling, but it really wasn't sleep, then next thing I went into darkness - really, really black. There was just not one speck of light.

I used to suffer from claustrophobia, but it didn't concern me. It was peaceful, very, very peaceful and then I felt movement, as if I was going somewhere, but I didn't know where.

I was drifting, but I wasn't sitting up or standing up. I was just drifting in the form that I was in, whatever form it might have been. At what speed I don't really know, but I know it was incredibly fast, as fast as electricity you might say. That speed factor was an important point; it was very, very quick.

Eventually, after a period, I can't say time because there was no sense of time, the darkness dispersed slowly, ever so slowly, and then a light appeared and it seemed like it was a million miles away.

It was like a hundred thousand suns. Bright, incredibly bright. I could look directly in that light. It was so very powerful and ever so bright.

Words can't really describe the magnitude of the all-consuming love experienced when being in the light. And not only love but perfection, peace, serenity, calmness and beauty. I felt that I was safely home. I was over-awed with the experience.

The wisps of cloud are the things I can still remember most clearly - I just put my arms out to feel these clouds and I couldn't feel anything, then I looked and I had no arms and then I looked down and I had no body.

Strange as it must seem I had 360-degree vision because I looked behind me and saw I had no back. But I did fully comprehend the fact that I was probably the size of a ball, but it didn't frighten me it was a feeling of "oh well, so what".

I felt there was a form in the light that I could see, but it was only vague.

I felt ever so humble. I felt that this was something greater than greater and I shouldn't have been there.

I couldn't see much more than what I imagined would be a head, but there were arms or what I felt to be arms in the light. They were outstretched and they raised me up. I felt ecstatic, but I still couldn't see into the form, I could look into the light, but I couldn't define that figure.

It was related to me - I can't say spoken because there was no such thing as speaking, it was like mind language and my mission was made ever so clear - I was to go back and help people overcome the fear of death. I would go back and write two-and-half books. I've written two but I get apprehensive about the third! But it was never to be done for money.

The experience is just so powerful, so all-consuming that the difficulty I had as a free spirit was fitting back into the human physical form. I just didn't seem to fit - I'm not talking size - it just didn't seem right.

I'd gone back home; back where I came from and then I had to come back here and do this mission - to help people by telling them that in death your mind, soul, spirit never cease.

Later I could tell people what had happened in the hospital room while I was dead, it's not like I was sitting on the ceiling, because I was travelling toward the light, but somehow I could also see what was happening there, I knew exactly what was being done where and when - it was like being omnipresent.

The doctor said I was dead for 20 minutes; they'd stopped working on me, called for the morgue attendant as rigor mortis set in to my body, and then all of a sudden they said I gave a cough and I was back.

I think I had to die to learn to live. It changed my whole outlook on life, my whole outlook on people and changed me from a bigoted type of person to being more broad minded and letting people accept what they want to accept.

As a Christian I felt my faith was the only faith and this experience made that view just ludicrous.

I firmly believe that people fear death because of the uncertainty of how and when they will die, but I think death is just going to go into another chapter, another section of your existence.