Nancy Rynes: The Atheist Scientist Who Found Home on the Other Side

Nancy Rynes grew up on a small family farm in the northwest corner of Chicago, surrounded by cornfields. As a child, she was what her family considered weird. She looked around and saw divine presence everywhere. She would tell her Catholic family, "Oh my gosh, God's in the trees, spirit is all around us." They looked at her funny. They weren't just weekend Catholics, they were deeply devoted, and her spiritual proclamations didn't fit their understanding of faith.

Everything changed when Nancy was 15. News reports about priests abusing children became prevalent, especially in the Chicago area. That's when she actually began to question her previous viewpoint about whether there was a god. By 16 or 17, she had pretty much decided that God didn't exist because if he did exist, how could this happen. That decision cemented her movement away from religion and spirituality entirely.

She went to college and earned a series of degrees in geology. She became a really rational scientist, very material focused. By her mid-20s, she was a pretty firm atheist. After college, she worked for the Department of Energy doing scientific work across the Western United States. She discovered she had a talent for scientific writing and editing, something many of her colleagues lacked. That skill carried her through the rest of her career into her mid-40s.

By 46, Nancy had moved to Boulder, Colorado. She was beginning to feel a bit dissatisfied with where she was in life. Her marriage had ended. She was at a point of questioning what would come next. She thought what she really needed was another job, maybe in Denver, something different to shake things up.

The Traffic Circle

Between Christmas and New Year's, Nancy took a week off from work. She went out for a bike ride, just to do a little bike ride around town, drop off some stuff at the library and run a couple of errands and then go out on a trail ride.

She went into a traffic circle where the bike lane just completely went away and the roadway got really narrow. She rode in cautiously, noticing traffic coming from her right, from the highway into the circle. It looked like the vehicles were slowing down.

At the last minute, that lead SUV, instead of stopping, she actually sped up. Nancy was in a terrible position, right where the SUV was entering. All she could do was put her hand out in an instinctual response. She has no memory of what happened between that moment and ending up on the hood of the vehicle.

Somehow she flipped up off the bike, up onto the hood of the vehicle, looking in at the driver, and she's texting. Nancy tried to pound on the windshield. The driver kept driving, she didn't see Nancy literally right in front of her. The hood was too slick. Nancy couldn't hang on. She slipped down, desperately trying to grab on to something, but she couldn't find anything to grab on to, and she hit the pavement. She heard the crack of her helmet. The SUV drove over her.

Her backpack got caught on something underneath the vehicle, and at the same time, she reached up with her right hand and grabbed the axle. The driver dragged her at least 60 feet. A man in a truck behind the SUV saw what was happening, drove around the traffic circle the wrong way, and stopped in front of her. Nancy kind of owes her life to this guy.

When the SUV finally stopped, Nancy started wiggling out from underneath. She got to the point where her shoulders were out from underneath the front of the vehicle. A woman approached and said, "I'm a nurse, just stay where you are." Nancy thought, what's the big deal? She was just going to get up and walk away. The nurse insisted she stay on the ground.

When the paramedics arrived and one of them touched the side of her neck, Nancy just screamed at the top of her lungs, it was just so painful. That's when she realized she was in pretty bad shape.

At the trauma center, the extent of her injuries became clear. She had a head injury, a cracked collarbone, five ribs broken in multiple places, and a collapsed lung. But the main damage was really to her neck and her back. The doctor told her every process in her back is cracked and she had major damage to her neck vertebrae and her lower back vertebrae.

A surgeon was called in. He would go in, clean up all the broken bits, and put titanium rods up and down both sides of her spine. The surgery was scheduled for the Monday after the accident, three days later.

Nancy had an unbelievable fear of death coming up to this. That was the biggest fear of her life, the fear of death, she was absolutely mortified by it, it paralyzed her in so many ways. Going into surgery, she was really scared. She almost had herself convinced that she wasn't going to make it.

The Moment Everything Changed

They wheeled her into the operating room and moved her onto the table. The anesthesiologist came up, and as soon as he administered it, within like three seconds she was drifting off.

In her previous surgeries, it had always been gray nothingness until they woke her in recovery. This time she drifted off and she was even more awake than she was before the anesthesia. That was the moment she realized something really weird is going on here.

She woke up and what she's looking around at is this beautiful hillside, sort of like in a meadow, so there's low grass and flowers all around her. She's on the hillside looking out over a series of rolling mountain ranges. She thought, well, this is kind of a cool hallucination. She could do this while in surgery.

The first thing she noticed was this wave of peace. It felt like standing in front of a fireplace when the fire is on and that heat kind of coming through you. It felt like she was being hugged. But there was this big moment of feeling acceptance and really just unconditional love coming into her. It was powerful. That's when she knew something was not right.

"I thought, oh my God, I died. I thought I died. I remember being in surgery and at that moment I felt love. I thought I must have died on the operating table," Nancy recalls.

Then her analytical science mind kicked in. "The second thought, now here's my analytical science mind still kicking in, so wait a minute, if I died, what's all this? Because first of all, I don't believe in anything. Second of all, my parents told me that you're going to go to hell because you're an atheist now. So I'm not experiencing either one of those."

That's when she really began to wonder what the heck was going on and why am I here. She asked that question in her mind, but then there was an answer to the thought she had.

Welcome Home

The answer came kind of from around her in the atmosphere. The answer was: "This is your home. You are a part of me. You're a part of us. Welcome home."

When it said that welcome home, Nancy lost it. Because she remembered. That's when it came back to her and she knew immediately. "Oh my God, that life that I had on Earth was just an illusion. That thing that I was doing down there on Earth was really just a temporary state," she realized. This place, this was real. It was just so obvious.

She all of a sudden saw someone kind of materialize out of fog. The figure was very ephemeral, so vaguely a human, and she had what appeared to be long hair, but Nancy was never able to see her face because it wasn't about her, it was about Nancy learning what she needed to learn.

The guide said, "It's time for you to learn what you need to learn in order to go back and make your life one that would be worth living," and those were pretty much her exact words. Nancy protested. "I'm like, whoa, I'm not going back there, what are you kidding me? I am not going back to that place," she remembers.

The guide said, "Well, you've already agreed to go back,". Nancy challenged her, going back to her younger self when she was always challenging her parents. "I was like, I don't want to go back there and I don't remember agreeing to go back," Nancy says.

The Life Plan

The guide said, "Well, you did that before you were born into your life, and so let me show you." It was this weird movie moment where, like in the air in front of her, sort of materialized almost like a movie screen, and she showed Nancy herself planning her life before she was born.

So in a way, the experience was sort of planned out, and Nancy got to see that.

Nancy also learned about the nature of the place she was in. There was a point at which she looked behind her and all it was behind her was fog, it was this foggy gray, whereas in front of her it was this really vibrant, maybe it was a forest or a canyon she was walking in or a mountain or something, but behind her it was just gone. When she asked about this, the guide said, "The place that you are in now is not the ultimate reality of where you're going to go. It's sort of a holding place. In this place, it is your place of learning, and here what we do is we're making this an environment that is comfortable for you to learn in, things that you enjoy, places that make you feel comfortable, and that will allow you to learn what you need to learn in order to go back and make your life one that's worth living".

The guide taught Nancy things about not only this spiritual place she was in, but that everything was based on an energetic structure, not a physical one. "Everything you see around you, it's an illusion," the guide explained. The more Nancy thought about it, the more she knew it to be true.

One of the most striking aspects of Nancy's experience was the nature of time itself. The equivalent amount of time that was out on the operating table, because she did code, her blood pressure tanked, her heart rate stopped, the flatline part lasted at most about two minutes. But if they were to do here what she did, as far as places that she traveled and things she learned, it would take about two or three months here to do that.

But it also seemed like forever there. It was a completely different experience of quote time. What Nancy realized from that is that it's not that time passes differently, it's that they are on the, at the spiritual level, outside of our perception of time.

Nancy also experienced what she would later learn was called a near-death experience, though at the time she had no knowledge of such things. She describes being shown multiple teachings through various experiences, each one designed to help her understand how to live differently when she returned.

The Map of Life

She went to one place where she stood there and all around her she saw the map of her life. It was like this virtual reality map, like an old timey nautical chart laid out all around her, and she was at the center, and there was this big compass rose. She's looking all around it and there's these different pathways that she can see from one end of the map to the other, and she knew those were all of the different paths she had taken, or she should say that she could have taken up into this point. And then there were a lot of pathways kind of branching out from where she was, but all going back to the same place.

The point of that particular teaching was, first of all, we can take one of many paths in life and they pretty much bring us to the same place, so it's not like there's a particular right path that you need to be on. The other part of that was she noticed that compass rose was centered figuratively in her heart area.

The point of that teaching that she finally went into was, "You don't just use your brain, your human brain, to make decisions. You also have to dig deeper into what we would call intuition or that inner knowing. Balance those two out so that you're making decisions from a really holistic place rather than simply an analytical decision". Up until that point in her life, she had completely ignored that, she didn't pay that any attention at all.

The Pond of Memory

After that, Nancy had what people call a life review. Now at the time, you have to understand, she didn't know any of these terms, she didn't know about NDEs, she didn't know about life reviews, she had no idea all of this stuff.

The guide brought her up this kind of meandering mountain valley into what looked like a pond up in the mountains. She said, "Well, I want you to kneel down by the side of the pond and just touch the surface of the pond". So Nancy just did it, and she just sat back kind of on her heels and just watched the surface, the ripples going out.

She could see on top of the ripples there were small little pockets all across the surface of the pond that to her looked like little videos, vignettes of specific moments in her physical life. But when she would focus on one, she was back in it. It wasn't like she was watching it from outside, she was back in it experiencing it again from her perspective, but also experiencing it from the other people, and she could feel everything they felt as if it was hers.

And that really got to her. Because there were times when she helped someone or said something nice, and she could feel that person's, for want of a better term, she could feel their spirit soar. She could feel how buoyant they felt because someone said something kind. And then she could also see the downstream effects of those actions too. So if she said something positive and uplifting to someone, she in turn saw how that allowed them to be more positive with other people.

So this teaching was: you have an impact on the people around you, not just physically, but there's also an energetic or spiritual component to every interaction that you have, whether it's a verbal interaction, whether there's something non-spoken, it doesn't matter. Everything that you do has an impact, and therefore be more conscious of how you impact others.

On the flip side, so it was balanced out for her to learn from, with things that weren't so great that she did. There was a time when she was a teenager and her younger sister and she got into a fight. They fought like cats and dogs when she was a kid. They just did not see eye to eye, and she loved her, but they didn't get along very well.

There was one point when she was probably like 17 and her sister was 14. Nancy said something not so kind to her, and she didn't think anything of it at the time. It was just a way to get her off her back. She was really tired of the fight they were having, so she just said something stupid and not very nice, and her sister didn't react. Nancy didn't see any reaction in the moment from her except she left.

But in her review, Nancy could feel the hurt that she caused her in that moment. "And this really, this is the second thing that always gets me. When I felt her pain at what I said to her, that was like biggest teaching moment ever," Nancy says.

"And that's the one thing I wish I could give to people was understanding viscerally how your impact affects, your actions affect someone else, your words affect someone else. And in that moment I realized, okay, I'm changing the way that I interact with people right now. Like that's it. That point woke me up like nothing else. That was just this big aha moment," Nancy reflects.

"And ever since I've come back here, I remember that almost every day, and it helps me formulate how I interact with people every day. I'm very concerned and careful about how I interact with people," she adds.

The Clouds and the Return

All of a sudden, for the first time in her whole experience there, she looked up and there were clouds in the sky. They were just kind of looking around, like when you were little kids looking for animals up in the clouds, and so they did that for a while. And then the guide got up and she said, "Well, it's time for you to go now".

Nancy was not happy to hear that. She thought she had passed some kind of test and was going to stay there. She was really planning on doing this end run around her teacher. She was like planning, "Can I just like run around her and just keep running until I find where I'm supposed to go?" That was one of the things she wanted to do. She also thought, "Well, if I pitch a fit enough, they'll just let me stay".

She started getting a little bit weepy with her. So at that point, the guide laid hands on her shoulder that was broken, her ribs, and right up here because the top of her sternum was the part that was cracked, and then she sort of sent Nancy back. And Nancy woke up.

In the recovery room, Nancy was actually screaming when she woke up. She was yelling and she was not happy. She was really angry to be back. And the nurse who was helping her literally jumped back, but Nancy kept yelling, "Where is she? Where is she? I don't want to be here. Can I go back? Can I go back?". And they thought she was having some kind of psychotic episode, she's sure.

The anesthesiologist came in and talked to her a little bit. He got her calmed down, but she kept asking, "Can you please send her back to me? Can you please send her back to me?" And they had no idea who she was talking about. She had a friend in the waiting room, so they went and got her, and Nancy said, "That's not who I'm talking about. I don't want to see her. I want to see the woman I was with during surgery." And they were like, what in the world is going on?

So finally Nancy realized, "Well, okay then," her rational mind kicked in and she remembered everything that happened, but she thought, "Okay, you need to shut up because they don't get it. They don't understand what you went through." So she just stopped talking.

Nancy was in a Lutheran hospital, and the next morning, one of the chaplains stopped in from the hospital. She poked her head in like, "You awake?" And Nancy could tell who it was, and she said, "Oh, thank God you're here," out loud. [And the chaplain came