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Jonathan Ashford was not the kind of man you would expect to return from death with a message about love. By his own admission, he was a high-powered marketing and technology executive who described himself as aggressive, manipulative, and entirely self-serving. Spirituality was a joke to him. Empathy was a liability. His philosophy could be summarised in a single offhand quip he used to make: “If God exists, I’ll just meet him when I’m dead.”
He had no idea how literally that would come true.
A Medical Crisis That Slipped Through the Cracks
For two weeks before his near-death experience (NDE), Ashford had been deteriorating rapidly. He had visited the emergency room twice after collapsing, and both times his condition was missed. What was actually happening was a gallstone lodged in a bile duct, causing a cascading infection that progressed through three stages of sepsis until his organs began to fail.
The reason doctors missed it was as extraordinary as the NDE itself. Ashford carries a DNA mutation that dramatically alters his experience of pain, meaning he felt none of the severe abdominal agony that would have signalled the problem immediately. Combined with a blood acidity result that was explained away by his ketogenic diet, the diagnosis slipped through. Multiple organ failure followed. His body shut down.
On the night of his experience, he woke at 4:30 in the morning with an unusual sense of serenity. He had been sleeping with his phone pre-dialled to emergency services and his front door unlocked as a precaution. When he staggered to the bathroom, he found himself dragging one leg and using the walls for balance. Looking into the mirror, he saw a face entirely drained of fluid, skin sagging, eyes sunken. In that moment, he says, came a wordless knowing. A click. Then peace. Then he collapsed, and his journey to the other side began.
The Void, the Landscape, and the Being on the Rock
Ashford’s account begins not with light but with darkness, though he is careful to clarify that this darkness was nothing like the word implies. He describes it as an enveloping, unconditional love, something like being swaddled as a newborn against someone who loves you completely, with no need for explanation or orientation.
From there came what he calls “the long blink.” He opened his awareness somewhere entirely different, a landscape resembling the Scottish Highlands, rolling hills of emitting green light, breathing stones, and grass that shimmered as though underwater. Everything was conscious. Everything was connected. There was no body, no weight, no separation from the environment. He was part of it all in a way he had no words for.
Moving through this landscape, he was drawn toward a large rock on a hill. Seated on it, casual and unhurried, was a figure dressed like a hiker, someone you might wave to on a trail. As they connected, not through speech but through instant, total knowing, Ashford received what he describes as the summary of a life, a three-hour conversation condensed into a single moment.
The hiker approached him and began showing him faces, flicking through them like a deck of cards held against his chest. Different lives. Different forms. All of them familiar in a way Ashford could feel but not explain. The last face was his own, the man who had just died. Then the being spoke four words: “I am you and you are me.”
The universe shook. The idea of individuality, the very thing Ashford had built his career around, dissolved. He understood in that moment that separation is the fundamental illusion, that the self we guard so ferociously is a costume worn over something infinite.
A Life Review Without Judgment
The life review that followed was, in Ashford’s words, “a little bit spicy.” He had not been a kind man. He had broken up families in the pursuit of his own desires. He had argued, manipulated, and used people as instruments for his goals. And he saw all of it again, from three simultaneous angles: his own perspective inside the moment, the felt experience of every person he had harmed, and a third-party view where he also inhabited the environment itself, the pavement, the air, the building, every particle of the space between two people exchanging cruelty.
[Also see: 25 NDEs that Reveal the Nature of Consciousness and Reality]
And yet he was not judged. Not for a moment. The love that surrounded that review never wavered, never flinched. What the review communicated was not condemnation but an invitation to see the missed opportunities. Every painful moment he witnessed was reframed as a chance to have chosen love instead, a door that had been open and left closed.
One moment stood out as the counterweight to all of it. He was shown a memory from second grade, a classmate crying because his grandmother was dying. The young Ashford had not known what death was, had no idea how to help, but had felt a pure ache to relieve that boy’s suffering. For twenty years afterward, every time he drove past the nursing home where the grandmother had died, the memory surfaced. That boy’s grief never fully left him.
This, he was told, was the truest example of who he actually was beneath the costume.
Beyond Form: The Void of Everything
After choosing to return, which he describes as an obvious and immediate decision because “a hundred years is a snap of a finger from the other side,” his experience deepened into territory he says few NDEs venture into. The landscape dissolved. The hiker changed. He found himself in a formless void, the place, as he describes it, from which all things come.
In that space, knowledge arrived continuously. He no longer needed to access it through memory or recall. It was baked into him, a living thing attached to and within him, available whenever a question surfaces. Time, reality, love, guilt, desire, connection, perception, the nature of seeking itself. It all came, he says, and it all boiled down to a single point: the infinite complexity of existence exists only to remind you of the infinite love that you are.
Then came the light. A small golden-white glow the size of a basketball that grew until it consumed everything, the void, the being, the darkness, and finally Ashford himself. He understood in that integration that the light had a personality, that it knew everything that had ever happened in every corner of every universe, and that in the moment of meeting, it directed every last drop of that vast attention entirely onto him and said, wordlessly, “You are the one I love.”
He describes this as the reason a soul would choose an infinite number of lifetimes on earth. Not for achievement. Not for experience. But for the chance to feel that again.
Choosing Love Over Judgment: A Practice for Waking Up
Since returning, Ashford has reframed existence as a continuous series of free-will choices, each one either love or judgment. He is careful to say that judgment here is not about morality but about measurement, the mental act of deciding that a present moment should be different from what it is.
Every thought, every conversation, every experience is offered as an opportunity. The choice to love does not require perfect circumstances or spiritual readiness. It simply requires noticing the moment and selecting love anyway, including when you fail, because even that failure is the next opportunity. The practice is not perfection but awareness.
On the question of compassion versus detachment, Ashford draws a careful distinction. Understanding that life is designed for awakening does not mean standing back while others suffer. It means walking through the fire with them rather than trying to pull them out prematurely. “I will just walk through that flame with you” is how he puts it, a presence of accompaniment rather than a rescue mission driven by the desire for a particular outcome.
Self-love, he insists, is the starting point for all of it. You cannot pour from an empty cup. The unconditional love available to others only becomes genuinely unconditional when it begins with the person looking back at you in the mirror, including every bad decision, every failure, every messy chapter of the story.
What He Came Back to Tell Us
When asked for a single message for everyone alive, Ashford does not reach for doctrine or complexity. He returns to the only thing the other side communicated across every dimension of his experience: love everybody. Every person around you is operating from varying degrees of the same amnesia. Some are deep in it, acting out in ways that seem incomprehensible. Others are making their way back toward the light. Either way, hold their hand.
The costume of ego, identity, politics, trauma, and ambition is not who any of us are. According to Ashford, we have never been human for a single day of our lives. We have only ever been the awareness behind the experience, temporarily renting the body, temporarily forgetting the love that we are, waiting to remember.
Jonathan Ashford can be found at jonathanashford.com.
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