Bill McDonald's Three Near-Death Experiences: A Lifetime of Divine Encounters

A Childhood Between Darkness and Light

Bill McDonald grew up in a house split down the middle. On one side, terror. His stepfather, an alcoholic World War II veteran suffering from what we now call PTSD, carried a loaded gun and a knife everywhere he went. Bill describes his household as "a place of terror, negative thinking, alcoholism." They were poor. Violence simmered just beneath the surface. On the other side, his mother was a shining light, a fortune teller who taught him about yoga and gurus. "I had a balance between darkness and light going on in my own household," he says, "two different sides of the coin existing in the same place."

From a young age, Bill had visions. Race riots. Towns burning. Airplane crashes. Things happening to people he'd never met, nationally and internationally. He had no control over them, no way to stop them. When he tried to tell adults, teachers, anyone, they didn't get it. "They don't understand that there are things beyond your sight," he learned early on. He had visitors, out-of-body experiences, glimpses of something larger. But none of that prepared him for what happened when he was eight years old.

The First Death: A Child Alone in a Hospital Room

Bill was deathly ill. Kidney disease. Lung disease. A catalog of conditions that landed him in isolation at San Jose County Hospital. Visitors came once a week for ten or fifteen minutes. Otherwise, he was alone. No television. No radio. Just a small boy in a dark room, fighting for his life. The doctors told his stepfather and mother to prepare themselves. They said "they didn't think I had long to live, they thought I was coming into hospital too late."

After a couple of procedures, they left him alone. Bill lay in the darkness. And then, suddenly, there was no air in his lungs. He felt light, like he was floating. He looked around. Underneath him was a body that looked like him. "That's my physical self," he recognized, "but I knew in my mind that's not me."

The body wasn't breathing. The eyes were closed. It looked lifeless. Bill wasn't bothered. Just moments before, he'd felt unloved, alone, abandoned. Now? "All of a sudden a universe is giving me a hug," he says. "I'm feeling the embrace of the Divine Mother. It was just a beautiful experience."

The darkness of the room began to fade. Light filled the space around him. In that brightness, he knew there were other beings. "Lack of a better word, call them angels, guides, ascended masters, whatever name you want to give them," Bill explains. "There was consciousness around me." He felt an exchange of energy, a spiritual recharge. "Like a solar panel absorbing all the Sun," he describes.

And then the vision started. A panorama of the next fifty years of his life. The John F. Kennedy assassination. His wife, whom he hadn't met. His children, not yet born. Jobs he'd have. The Vietnam War, which he didn't realize was the Vietnam War at the time, just "a war with helicopters in it." He saw all of it, decades compressed into a single, luminous moment.

When Bill left the hospital, he became a vegetarian. He didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs. "I really took good care of myself all my life," he says. That vision at eight years old became a roadmap, a set of signposts he'd recognize when he reached them. It also gave him something rarer: certainty. He knew what was coming. He knew he had work to do.

Vietnam: Following the Divine Through War

When the Vietnam War came, Bill's generation resisted. It was the wrong war, the wrong time, the wrong message. But Bill felt, for reasons he couldn't fully articulate, that he was supposed to be there. "By me being there," he believed, "things would be different. Hopefully things would be better. I could be there to help people."

He didn't go with hate. He didn't go with anger. "I prayed for my enemy," he says simply. "The soldier on the other side of the battlefield, he's doing exactly what you're doing but on that side. Don't be mad at him."

One day, flying as a door gunner on a helicopter, a new pilot spotted what looked like troops marching on the ground. They had objects on their shoulders that looked like weapons. The pilot ordered Bill to open fire with his M60 machine gun. Bill's intuition screamed no. He'd seen this moment before, in his vision at eight years old. "This is one of those full moments," he realized. "This is why you were born, to be here for this time. You're not gonna let this happen."

Bill refused. The major threatened him with court-martial. "Do whatever you're gonna do," Bill replied. The pilot swung the helicopter around to give the other gunner a shot. That gunner also refused. "I've been flying six months with Bill McDonald," the gunner told the major, "and if Bill says he feels something's not right, I've been with him long enough to know to trust him."

The major charged them both with mutiny. Life in jail or firing squad. Bill didn't flinch. He told the major to take the helicopter down low. If they were bad guys, if they shot at them, he'd fire. "I got a machine gun that fires 750 rounds a minute," Bill said. "I'll decimate those people."

They flew down. Crossed over the top of the group. It was a Catholic priest taking young children from the local village to the community vegetable garden. They were carrying shovels and rakes and hoes. "Think about how that major felt," Bill says. If he'd had a different door gunner in that seat, there would have been an atrocity. Thirty-some children dead. The major's life ruined. Everyone on that aircraft, ruined.

"You have to listen to the heart," Bill insists. "You have to have your intentions on the divine."

Bill was highly decorated in Vietnam. They said he was brave. "I'm telling you right now," he counters, "anybody could be brave if you already had visions of all the battles and you go, 'I don't get killed at this one, I'm okay.'"

He'd sit in the middle of a battle, explosions going off, rounds flying around him, picking up wounded men and putting them in his helicopter. "I know I'm not gonna get hit," he says. "That's not bravery. That's knowing that the divine is protecting you."

The Second Death: A Cobra on a Boulder

Decades later, just months before his 59th birthday, Bill returned to India. He was hiking back down from Babaji's sacred cave, the place where the great yogi gave Lahiri Mahasaya the technique for Kriya yoga. On the way down, Bill's brain seized. His heart felt like someone had reached inside his chest and was trying to rip it in half. "It was god-awful bad," he recalls.

He stopped breathing. He fell. Thirty feet down a cliff that curved just enough to bounce him three times on the way down. He landed on a boulder the size of a Volkswagen bug.

"I'm not feeling anything," Bill says. "I'm not breathing. I don't feel my heart. Don't feel any pain. And I feel myself rising." He turned around, looked at the sky. He was happy. "All right, big deal," he thought. "I just went to Babaji's cave, one of the most sacred places I ever wanted to go in my life. If I die now, almost 59, I wasn't worried about it at all."

He floated above his body. The body looked bad, but it didn't bother him. "It's not me," he knew.

Out of the tall grass came a cobra. Large. But Bill didn't feel fear. "There was something about that cobra," he says, "and the depths of me felt great love for it. It was a divine serpent."

The cobra crawled across his shoes. And then, like someone had put paddles on his heart and spinal cord, Bill's Kundalini electrified. "It was like somebody shocked my spinal cord," he describes. "The spinal cord went, it was like fireworks, just like electricity shooting at my whole body."

He jumped up. He'd been lying on the rock, looking up at the sky, and now he was alive again. "It was the love of this cobra, this divine messenger," that brought him joyously back. He tried to grab its body, to thank it, but it kept slithering through his hands. It disappeared behind a waterfall.

Bill had been brought back. But for what? The answer would come soon enough.

The Third Death: A Debate on a Mountaintop

Bill's heart gave out for real back in America. A massive heart attack. He collapsed at Denver Airport. Six hours with paramedics. Four days in ICU before they could even operate. When they finally wheeled him into surgery for a quadruple bypass, the doctor warned him: about five percent of people on the heart-lung machine feel something during the operation. "I was one of those people," Bill says.

He counted back from a hundred. Got to ninety-six or so. And then he wasn't on the table anymore. "I'm at India," he says, "and I'm standing at this temple."

The surgery was going to be six or eight hours long. Bill thought, "I might as well walk uphill." So he did. He walked uphill while the surgeons worked on his body. His physical body felt the pushing and pulling inside his chest, but it was distant, happening to someone else.

At the top of the hill sat ascended masters. Rishis. Great gurus. Saintly, holy beings. And with them was his guru. Bill stood there, arms out, going "this is cool." He didn't have any questions. He knew he was back home. "Frankly, I didn't want to go back to the other body," he admits.

Then the light came. Blazing, shining bright. A soft, feminine, divine, angelic voice emerged from it. "Give up your heart," the voice said. "Let it go. They've got enough. You don't owe anybody anything. You don't need any more pain, no more suffering. I'm gonna give you bliss. I'm gonna give you joy. I'm gonna give you neverending peace and no more pain. Just give up your heart."

Bill was sold. That sounded really good.

But his guru stood there and said, "Bill, don't give up heart." "You could skip a few beats, but don't give up heart."

Bill asked why. "Because I got more pain and I got more suffering for you," his guru replied.

"What kind of sales pitch is that?" Bill thought. The divine voice was promising bliss, love, joy, no pain. And his guru was saying, go back because I'm going to give you pain?

"Yes," his guru said, "and more pain than you ever had. Because before, when you had pain, you would bliss out and pain would be taking care of you. Everything was taken care of. You didn't have to suffer through pain. But now I want you to suffer real pain so you could tell other people how to handle their real physical pain."

Behind his guru, an ocean of faces unfolded in the sky, rolling out toward Bill. "These are faces of people that need to hear something you need to say," his guru explained, "read something you've written. Maybe it's just somebody you're gonna give a smile to, a hug, pat on the back. Maybe it's just your presence in their life will help them in some way, some large, some small."

Bill still wanted to go. He wanted to stay on that mountaintop.

Then his body went "whoop, umph." They jump-started his heart back on the operating table. Bill wasn't on a mountaintop anymore. He was lying naked on a cold steel table in an operating room. Tubes down his throat. Metal things around his ribs. God-awful pain.

"I still wanted to go," he says. He had a wife, children, grandchildren. All these good reasons to stick around. "I still wanted to go."

For the next ten days, Bill lingered in the hospital. Normally, heart surgery patients are out in three or four days. Bill stayed ten. Five blood transfusions. Congestive heart failure. Fluids filling him up. "I'm not doing good at all," he says.

Every time he closed his eyes, he was back on the hill. The battle raged: give up your heart, love and peace, versus don't give up heart, you can skip a few beats.

On the tenth day, around 11 p.m., they were taking him downstairs for an emergency procedure. "In my mind I'm going, 'I'm ready, let's just let it go,'" Bill recalls. "I'm really ready. And it wasn't morbid or depressed or nothing. I just knew there was something better out there."

The phone rang. Bedside. Bill stopped them. "I got to answer it," he insisted. "No, no, no, we got emergency." "No, I got to answer that."

He picked up the phone. A voice from India. "Don't give up heart," the voice said. "You can skip a few beats. Don't give up heart."

"Wow," Bill thought. "Maybe all this stuff wasn't just, maybe what's real, right? It's not."

He hung up. Told his wife, "I'll be out of here in 36 hours." "I have to live. I can't be selfish."

Thirty-six hours later, he was out.

The Witness: A Young Man in the Doorway

When Bill got home, his daughter came to see him. She mentioned that an old neighbor, David Ryan, about 40 years old, had visited Bill in the hospital on his last day there. Bill said no, he didn't. "Yeah, he came into the room," she insisted. "You were there in the bed and you had some crazy young Indian guy with no shirt on, barefoot, or Levi's on, with long black hair, pouring some oil and water or something on your head, chanting and, you know, hitting your forehead, chanting some crazy Indian language."

David thought it was so funny but didn't want to embarrass Bill, so he left.

Bill remembered. He'd woken up in the hospital bed. There was a globe of energy, like someone had put a large glass bowl upside down over him. "It was just energy," he says. At the end of the bed stood a young man, shirtless, Levi's on, barefoot, long hair. He was pouring something on Bill's head, chanting.

"At the time I'm thinking, 'Well, I'm delusional, right?'" Bill recalls. "If you could have a delusion, this is a good one."

But he didn't know it was being witnessed by someone who had no idea what it was. "I saw it," Bill says. "So it was like the universe said, 'Here's a witness. It was real.'"

Love Is the Only Thing That Matters

Bill McDonald has spent his life since those three near-death experiences trying to live out the lesson his guru gave him on that mountaintop: suffer the pain so you can teach others how to handle theirs. He doesn't go into meditation seeking powers or siddhis or astral travel. "Go into meditation with a desire to love God alone," he says. "Don't go into meditation thinking God's a Santa Claus. 'Hey God, I'm coming to you, I need this, this, this, and give me this and give me that.'"

"This is my time to love the divine," he explains. That's it. That's the whole practice.

He's healed people. His daughter blew out her knee skiing. Doctors said she needed surgery. Bill told her no, put it in a soft cast. When he got home, he laid her down in his meditation room and channeled energy through his hands, using a technique he learned in a dream. Three and a half minutes later, she got up. Nothing wrong. The cast came off. She was walking around. The doctor said they must have made an error.

A couple days later, she fell down two flights of stairs, blew the knee out worse than before. Bill healed it again, but this time he told her it would be 90 to 95 percent healed, taking several months, and she'd always feel a little hitch. "It was exactly what happened," he says, "because she also believed that."

The lesson? "If you don't believe it, you can't see it." Open your heart. It's here right now, all around you.

Bill tells a story about a young man he picked up hitchhiking one rainy, cold day. The kid was 20, had been in foster care, kicked out at 18, lost his grandmother, had nowhere to go. He was trying to get to Texas to see his stepfather. Bill took him home, gave him a shower, threw away his filthy clothes, filled a backpack with food, money, a raincoat, camping gear. The young man told Bill he'd been ready to kill himself. He'd been camping in a field with no tent, his sleeping bag soaked, life not worth living. Then, in a real-life dream, a man dressed exactly like Bill came to him and said, "God loves you."

Bill reached into a kitchen drawer without thinking and pulled out half a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. He put it in the young man's hand. "Now when you get this," Bill said, "you'll know that everything that happened was real."

The young man looked at the gum. "This is exactly what the man in my real-life dream did," he said.

"I prayed for him," Bill says. "That was like 1990. Even to this day, I pray for him. Someplace out there, there's a young adult. I hope I had an impact on his life."

That's the work. Small miracles leading to bigger ones. "A smile is just God's signature of love," Bill says. "If you ain't smile on the outside, at least smile on the inside. Start with peace and love in your heart. There's the ultimate cavern of love and sacredness. And if you carry out the love out there and you pass it on to anybody during the day, then you've made the world a better place."

What Bill's Story Reveals

Bill McDonald's three near-death experiences span more than five decades, from a dying child in a hospital room to a man on a surgeon's table debating with his guru about whether to stay or go. What makes his accounts so compelling is not just their vividness, but their consistency. The eight-year-old boy who saw fifty years of his future lived that future exactly as he saw it. The man who fell off a cliff and was revived by a cobra's love went on to have a third NDE that clarified his purpose with brutal honesty: you're here to suffer so you can teach others how to handle suffering.

This is not the soft-focus, everyone-gets-a-hug version of the afterlife that sometimes dominates NDE literature. Bill's guru didn't promise him eternal bliss if he came back. He promised him pain. More pain than he'd ever had. And Bill, after a ten-day battle with himself, chose it. He chose to come back, not because he wanted to, but because an ocean of faces needed something from him. A smile. A hug. A word. A presence.

The detail about the witness, David Ryan, seeing the young Indian man performing a ritual over Bill's hospital bed, is one of those rare moments in NDE research where the experiencer's vision is corroborated by an outside observer who had no idea what he was seeing. It's the universe saying, as Bill puts it, "Here's a witness. It was real."

Bill's story also underscores one of the most consistent themes across thousands of NDE accounts: we are here to learn to love. Not to be loved, but to love. "It's not who loves you," Bill says. "It's who did you love. Who did you love secretly? Who did you send prayers to that don't even know? What enemy did you love from afar? It's who we love that defines us, not who loves us."

This is the curriculum. This is the work. And if Bill's three deaths taught him anything, it's that the work is hard, the pain is real, and the love we give is the only thing we take with us when we go.

For those of us still figuring out what we're doing here, Bill's story is a gift. It's a reminder that the divine doesn't always show up as comfort. Sometimes it shows up as a cobra on a boulder, shocking your spine back to life. Sometimes it's a guru on a mountaintop telling you to go back and suffer some more. And sometimes it's a phone call at 11 p.m. from halfway around the world, reminding you that you can't give up your heart just yet.

There are people who need you. An ocean of faces. You don't know who they are yet. But they're waiting.

For more on Bill McDonald's experiences and teachings, visit his profile page. His story has been featured in multiple interviews, including "Young Boy Dies From Illness; Sees Future During Life Review" and "Man Died From Heart Attack; Learned The Reason We Come To Earth".