Daniel Berdichevsky's NDE: The Blue Orb Who Saw Time as a Wheel
A 19-year-old's heart stops at a monastery, and he discovers we're eternal beings playing in a timeless ocean of light
Daniel Berdichevsky lay on a narrow bed in a monastery room on the California-Oregon border, staring at the ceiling. He wasn't asleep. He was wide awake. And then he felt himself crawling out of his chest. He could hear his heartbeat, slow and deliberate, and then he heard the last one. He found himself on the ceiling, looking down at a body he didn't recognize as his own. Several feet in the air, arms outstretched, he felt completely normal. The monks next door were praying, and he could see them through the wall. More than that, he could feel everything they were feeling, the purity of their intention, their genuine longing to touch God. And then the realization hit: the body on the bed was him. The moment he understood, he shot through the ceiling like a vacuum cleaner had grabbed him and didn't stop until he was thousands of feet above the Pacific Northwest, looking down at wildfires scattered across the landscape like embers.
The Body That Wouldn't Cooperate
Daniel was 19 years old and miserable. For months, his body had been staging a quiet rebellion. High blood pressure, rapid heart rate, palpitations, fatigue, dizziness. He felt unwell in a way that resisted definition. One of the best doctors in his area ran every test imaginable. Nothing came back conclusive. So they put him on medication. When that one stopped working, they tried another. Then another. Five or six medications later, the doctors were considering bringing in a specialist, but they still couldn't determine the root cause of what was happening to his cardiovascular system.
Daniel tried to live as best he could in that miserable state. His mother, deeply religious in the Russian Orthodox tradition, often traveled to convents and monasteries for prayer and retreat. Because of Daniel's condition, she decided to take him with her, hundreds of miles north to the California-Oregon border. She hoped he would be healed. She had people pray over him.
On the second or third day there, around midday, Daniel felt worn out. He went to one of the tiny rooms they'd been given and lay down. He wasn't even trying to sleep, just lying there, wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Not even five minutes passed.
Then he started crawling out of his body.
The Ceiling and the Monks
"I start feeling like I'm crawling out of my body," Daniel recalls. "I start feeling just suddenly that I'm crawling out of my chest and I pull myself out and when this is happening I actually can hear my heartbeat and I could hear it slowly stopping until I heard the last beat."
He found himself on the ceiling, looking down. The experience felt "extremely real, extremely solid, extremely lucid and fully conscious." But it was also profoundly disorienting. He couldn't figure out who he was looking at. He literally didn't recognize the body on the bed as his own. And somehow, being on the ceiling several feet in the air didn't seem abnormal. It "just felt normal to me at that time for some reason," he says.
He looked around. His arms were outstretched. They were made of light, but he could feel them. He could feel his legs too. He still had the sensation of a body, but something was different. Enhanced. He could see 360 degrees all around him. It wasn't like having eyes in the back of his head. It was more like "I'm beaming my whole being all around me," he explains.
Then he noticed he could see through walls.
Next door, a group of monks were praying in the church. Daniel looked through the wall and saw them. But he didn't just see them. "Not only did I hear the monks pray I felt everything they were feeling," he says. "I felt the Deep emotion like I felt like that they were really trying to get in touch with God like they were really like truly their heart was in the right place their intention was pure as to trying to see God in that meditative prayer State."
He felt appreciative. Their sincerity moved him. Then he morphed back into the ceiling, and that's when the realization struck: the person on the bed was him.
The moment he understood, everything changed.
The Upward Pull
"The moment that realization came I shot through the ceiling," Daniel says. The sensation was indescribable. He compares it to "a roller coaster when you're going on that first drop except kind of in reverse because this was upward vacuum cleaner just sucked up into the air right through the wall right through the ceiling super fast."
He remembers almost trying to catch his breath, but he didn't need to breathe. He wasn't in a body anymore, yet he still felt like he was breathing. The paradoxes were already piling up.
He found himself thousands of feet in the air, overlooking the entire Pacific Northwest. Northern California stretched out below him. And scattered across the landscape, he saw "all these little wildfires everywhere." The scene looked surreal, almost like a simulation, but not quite. It had "a simulation like quality to it but not at the same time," he says, struggling with the limits of language.
Then his attention shifted. His consciousness fused with a city. He's 99% sure it was San Francisco, a place he knew well.
The City as Organism
What happened next is one of the most vivid descriptions of interconnectedness I've encountered in thousands of NDE accounts. Daniel describes his consciousness spreading like "tentacles or neurons that were just attaching everything." He could focus on one person, and then his awareness would split off into hundreds of others. "I could feel every everything they were feeling everything they were doing their whole being I could sense what they were sensing and their anxiety and their pain and their joy and everything," he recalls.
It was cohesive. Oddly beautiful. He moved through the city for what felt like a long time, sensing everyone's presence. The city felt like an organism. "Each person was an individual cell and they're part of this Collective unit," he explains.
This is a pattern we see again and again in NDEs: the discovery that separation is an illusion, that we're all connected at a level most of us never perceive in ordinary consciousness. Daniel experienced it directly, viscerally, as he moved through San Francisco feeling the emotional texture of thousands of lives simultaneously.
Then he went higher.
The Living Earth
Daniel rose into space, far enough above the Earth to see the whole planet at a distance. What he saw startled him.
The Earth was "shimmering with this sparkling crystalline sort of substance," he says. He thought to himself that it was "beautiful and alive and that this rock that we call home is no rock at all that this is a living real sentient being."
He could sense the planet breathing. It looked like the motion of breath. But when he looked more carefully, he noticed something troubling. The breathing "was labored it was in distress it was in discomfort," Daniel recalls.
The crystalline structure covering the Earth looked strange to him. It resembled "some kind of weird mesh spider's web," and he had a paradoxical sense about it: "it almost looked like it shouldn't be there but yet it should and it's good that it's there but at the same time it's not good."
He felt worried and uneasy. Something was wrong with the planet, and he could feel it.
Many experiencers return with an acute awareness of Earth as a living being. They describe feeling the planet's consciousness, its pain, its beauty. Daniel's vision of the labored breathing and the ambiguous crystalline web is haunting. I don't know exactly what he was seeing (and neither does he, fully), but the emotional truth is clear: our home is alive, and it's struggling.
Daniel continued outward. He saw the Milky Way, radiant and beautiful, looking very much like Hubble images (which puzzled him, since he knew many of those images are color-enhanced). He saw the universe. And then the golden light appeared.
The Waterfall of Endless Love
Golden sparkles began to surround him. He was enveloped in "this ethereal light mist," and it was humming. It was musical. It was singing. "It felt like home it felt very familiar immediately," Daniel says.
He still had the sensation of a body at first, but it started to dissipate. He flipped forward to face the light directly, and then his body sense disappeared completely. He became pure consciousness.
"I remember distinctly I had a dark blue color with this radiant blue orb a very electrical very alive," he recalls. Being in that form felt "so pure... so natural so much more natural than being here." It was "the most perfected kind of version of my character at that moment."
When he faced the golden light, his entire Earth life collapsed into insignificance. It felt "like an absolute minuscule tiny irrelevant little speck," he says. He uses a beautiful analogy: "just like you go in and you just like tap your toe in the water that's it and it's done you don't jump in the ocean and swim around for days and days no this life felt like you just take a tiny little toe there you dip it and it's done like that blink of an eye."
Earth felt like it had happened eons ago. Totally irrelevant.
But what he felt from the light was anything but irrelevant. "I felt this love from the light I felt this love and I knew everything I'd ever done and everything that I ever will do for all of eternity I will be loved and cherished exactly the same way it will not deviate one bit it will not change one bit it will stay the same now and forever doesn't matter what circumstances I'm in or what I've done that love is so powerful," Daniel says.
He describes it as "a waterfall of Endless Love."
This is the core message of nearly every NDE: you are loved unconditionally, eternally, without exception. Nothing you do can change that. The light doesn't judge. It doesn't withhold. It simply loves, completely and forever. Daniel knew this with absolute certainty.
The Reunion
The light directed Daniel toward another blue orb. He was very familiar with this being, though he couldn't put a name to them. "I knew this orb for eons for timelessness forever it was like the closest Family Reunion," he says.
Time felt completely absent. "It felt static it felt like suspended animation," Daniel recalls. He saw other orbs, many different colors: yellow, white, pink, blue, velvet red. "All these different colored Souls floating around in total freedom they were in greatest Bliss and joy you could possibly imagine," he says.
This is what we are. Not bodies. Not personalities. Orbs of colored light, consciousness in its purest form, playing in an ocean of love. That's home. That's where we come from and where we return.
The Wheel of Time
Then Daniel saw something that defies our ordinary understanding of reality. He saw a wheel, and "this wheel is the Earth but it's actually all the events of the earth past present and future all of them occurring simultaneously."
It looked like a film reel, but not quite. A film reel moves in one direction, projecting images onto a screen. "This was not like that there was no One Direction all of this was in every direction there was no distinction between a future event a past event a current event it was all fused and moment into this singular moment," Daniel explains.
Yet he could still differentiate between what he perceived as past and future. He projected his consciousness into specific events. He saw ancient Rome, chariots, coliseums. He saw the British Isles and Ireland, different kingdoms and ruling bodies throughout history. And he saw the future, though he has no memory of what he witnessed there when he returned.
What struck him most was how small it all seemed. "I'm looking at these rulers and they think they're so important," he says. He mentions Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" speech, about all the kings and queens who thought they were almighty. "He was spot on that's exactly what I saw they're like oh they're so important give me a break," Daniel says.
He extends the analogy to our own time. "Who are the kings and queens of our day is it presidents no it's Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos those are who we worship really," he observes. The wheel showed him that all of human history, all the empires and ambitions and struggles for power, is just a tiny blip in the timeless existence of consciousness.
Daniel has been obsessed with trying to discover the future ever since. He knows he saw it. He just can't remember what he saw.
The Return
The golden light spoke to Daniel. Most near-death experiencers remember exactly what the light told them. It's often the most important part of their whole experience. Daniel remembers everything else in absolute detail, but not what the light said. He remembers it speaking very clearly, but "it wasn't like a voice but it was at the same time."
"It's both a voice and not a voice at the same time almost like a paradox like everything is a paradox," he explains. The light told him he couldn't stay. He was really upset. He wanted to stay desperately.
The light started sending him back through all the realms again. He saw everything in reverse, "like in a sequence like almost like it was on purpose."
Then he slammed back into his body.
The Sledgehammer
Daniel "came to and took a very heavy breath like gasping for air like I didn't breathe for like 10 minutes," he recalls. It felt like "somebody took a sledgehammer and hit me as hard as they could in the chest." The pain was extraordinarily bad, agonizing.
He sat up on the bed, dizzy. He walked around. The first thing he did was look in a mirror. He looked "pale as a ghost... white... bags under my eyes."
Several days later, Daniel was healed. "My blood pressure went back to normal I had no heart palpitations I had no medical issues except for my lifelong asthma but everything was fine everything was just fine," he says.
The mysterious cardiovascular condition that had stumped the best doctors in his area, the condition that had required five or six different medications, simply disappeared. His mother's hope that he would be healed at the monastery came true, though not in the way anyone expected.
Daniel told his mother and brother about the experience almost immediately. They discussed it with one of the Orthodox priests that night.
You can hear Daniel Berdichevsky tell more of his story in other interviews, including discussions of visions of the future he experienced and his understanding of time after the NDE.
What This Tells Us
Daniel's experience is remarkable for several reasons. First, the sheer scope of it. He didn't just leave his body and float around the room. He traveled through multiple dimensions of reality: from the monastery ceiling to the Pacific Northwest to San Francisco to space to the edge of the universe to the realm of pure consciousness. Each stage revealed something new about the nature of existence.
Second, his description of interconnectedness is unusually vivid. The way he felt the monks' intentions through the wall, the way his consciousness spread through San Francisco like neurons connecting to every person, the way the city felt like a single organism with each person as a cell—these details paint a picture of a reality where separation is the illusion and connection is the truth.
Third, his vision of Earth as a living, breathing, struggling being is both beautiful and troubling. Many experiencers return with an ecological awareness, a sense that the planet is conscious and in pain. Daniel saw this directly. The crystalline web he describes is enigmatic (he himself doesn't fully understand it), but the labored breathing is clear: our home is alive, and it's suffering.
Fourth, his encounter with the wheel of time is one of the most explicit descriptions I've seen of the timeless nature of reality. Past, present, and future existing simultaneously, not as a linear sequence but as a single eternal moment—this is what mystics and quantum physicists alike have tried to articulate. Daniel saw it. He experienced it. And he came back knowing that everything that ever has happened or ever will happen is happening right now, in the eternal present.
Fifth, the waterfall of endless love. This is the heart of every NDE. The unconditional, unchanging, eternal love that doesn't care what you've done or will do. The love that is the ground of all being. Daniel felt it completely, and he knew with absolute certainty that this love is what we are, what we come from, and what we return to.
Finally, there's the healing. Daniel's cardiovascular condition vanished. His blood pressure normalized. His heart palpitations stopped. The doctors had no explanation for what was wrong with him, and they would have no explanation for why he suddenly got better. But Daniel knows. Something happened to him in that monastery room. His heart stopped, his consciousness left his body, he traveled to the source of all existence, and when he came back, he was whole.
We are not our bodies. We are eternal beings, orbs of colored light, playing in an ocean of unconditional love. Physical life is a tiny toe-dip in the water, a brief excursion into matter, and then we return home. Time is an illusion. Separation is an illusion. Death is an illusion. What's real is consciousness, connection, and love.
Daniel saw this. He lived it. And now he's telling us about it, as clearly as language allows, so that we might glimpse what he knows: we are so much more than we think we are, and the universe is so much stranger and more beautiful than we imagine.
Was this article helpful?