Jayne Smith's NDE: The Purple-Robed Guide and the Answer She Couldn't Keep
A 23-year-old mother died during childbirth in 1952, met a wise being who told her the meaning of everything, then took it back.
Jayne Smith felt her soul leave her body with a sound she can still describe: whoosh. It rose from her chest, through her head, and out the top, leaving her floating in darkness with no idea what had just happened. She was 23 years old, in the middle of giving birth, and she had just died. What came next would stay locked inside her for 23 years, a secret so strange and beautiful she couldn't risk telling anyone. She met a man in a purple robe on a hill in a meadow that glowed from the inside out. He told her the meaning of everything in three or four sentences. Then he told her she couldn't remember it.
The Whoosh
It started with a sensation Jayne had never felt before and would never forget. She felt her soul rise up from her chest, through her head, and out through the top of her head. She didn't just see this happen. She felt the movement of it, and she heard the sound of it. It went whoosh.
She found herself in a dark space where she didn't know what was going on. She knew something wasn't normal, but she hadn't a clue what it was. This was 1952. The term "near-death experience" wouldn't exist for another 23 years. Jayne had no framework, no vocabulary, no cultural reference point for what was happening to her. She was a young mother in the middle of childbirth, and she had just left her body.
Then the darkness shifted. Suddenly she found herself standing in a gray mist, and in that moment, she understood. "I realized that what's going on is I have died. I have died but I'm still alive," she says. The relief that flooded through her was so intense she thought her heart would burst. She had always hoped there was life after death, but she hadn't a clue, and here she was. Here she was. She knew she had died and yet she was alive.
The Light That Wasn't Static
As Jayne poured out her feelings of love and thanksgiving, something extraordinary happened. The gray mist turned into an enormous brilliant white light. But this wasn't a spotlight. This wasn't any kind of light she'd ever seen. "It was not a static light like a spotlight on the stage would be. It was a dynamic light. In some way, things were going on. Power was going on in the light," she explains.
The light came toward her and drew her in. There was a point at which the light and Jayne became one, or at least that's how it felt to her. And the light consisted of a love she cannot even describe. "No matter how hard I try, there are no words to describe this kind of light, this kind of love," she says.
The love spoke to her without words. "You are my beloved soul. I love you with all of my heart. I love you without condition. You are precious to me beyond belief," she heard. This wasn't a voice. It was a transmission, a knowing that came from being immersed in the light itself.
The light was dynamic. It wasn't peaceful in the way we usually think of peace. It wasn't unpeaceful either. It was a dynamic situation between the light and her. Whatever it is in Jayne that responds to love kept getting higher and higher and higher. The force, the power of this light was such that her response to it kept escalating until there was a point at which she could feel herself being cradled in the light. That's where the peace came in. It was the most wonderful peaceful feeling she had ever felt.
She let herself float in this love and light for a while. But that wasn't the end of it.
The Blocks of Knowledge
Suddenly what Jayne thinks of as a block of knowledge came into her being. She began to know things she didn't know before. It was being fed into her as if she were a receiving station. She had no thoughts of her own at all while this was going on.
What was being transmitted to her was this: She was an immortal being. She had always existed. She always would exist. She was eternal. She was indestructible. There's nothing that ever really could happen to her to wipe her off the face of the earth or any other place. And she knew that was true.
She didn't doubt anything the light was giving her because somewhere inside her, she knew what the light was. She didn't think "oh the light is God." She didn't think that. She just felt the light was from God. She had feelings, not thoughts. And she knew that anything the light was giving her was the absolute truth.
She floated with this knowledge of her indestructibility, her eternalness, for a little while, feeling that she was being cradled and loved beyond any belief system that had ever crossed her way.
Then a second block of knowledge descended upon her. What she knew within that block was this: The world is perfect. When she says world, she means the totality, the all-ness, the everything. It's perfect. She remembers distinctly the very words that came in: "The world operates according to a perfect plan, and the plan is working itself out in its perfection," she says.
She knew that was true. She knew all of this was true. And she lived with this feeling for a while, knowing that all the things we think are cruel and horrible, all the wars that are going on, knowing that somehow this is part of the perfect plan, part of what God is working out. She didn't personally have to worry about it. Although back on earth you want to do something about it, and that's because we live here on earth for the moment, but in reality she didn't have to worry about a thing.
It was all planned out and perfect.
The Point of Shattering
Jayne stayed in that light. The ecstasy, the bliss, didn't ever level out. It just continued and continued and continued until she reached a point where she had her very first thought of the whole thing, and that was: "I don't know how much more of this I could stand before I shatter".
The minute she had that thought, the intensity of the light began to diminish. The intensity of her own ecstasy also began to diminish. Everything just moved down to where she could handle it.
Then suddenly she thought: I don't know what's going on. I don't know where I am. I can't remember what's happened. I don't know whether I've been in this light for five minutes or five years or a hundred years. She just momentarily had her mind blown. And that was only allowed to go for about five seconds.
The Meadow That Glowed From Within
Then she found herself standing in this incredibly, awesomely beautiful green meadow. It had a light that was rather golden, prettier than our light here on earth, but not the great white light she had been one with.
She stood there looking at things she had never seen before. Color-wise, she had never seen many of the colors that these growing plants were. They were in the colors she knows, and everything in this meadow was beautifully colored: bushes, flowering plants. It was just the essence of what beautiful is.
Then she saw something that stopped her. She could see a light shining from each of the growing things, not being shown on them from an outside source, but actually coming from inside them. The life of the plant, she guesses. And it came through as this lovely light.
For a while she just took in all of this beauty and felt glorious, she guesses is a good word.
The Man in the Purple Robe
Finally she looked up and saw at a distance of maybe 500 yards a low hill, and standing on that hill were maybe 18, 19, 20 people at the most. She didn't count, but she made a general assessment. These people were in robes, very simple robes, nothing at all elaborate, just robes. They were in all these many colors. There were actually a couple, two or three in white. The rest were clothed in these awesome colors.
They seemed to be standing around in little groups, waiting, waiting for something. Jayne now thinks of them as helpers. She thinks they were waiting for people like her who had kind of accidentally stumbled in.
The minute she had the thought "I want to be over there, I want to talk with these people," she was there. She didn't have to walk the 500 yards or climb the little rise. She was simply standing there. And a group of three or four men moved toward her.
One man was the one she had all her conversation with. He was really about that much taller than the other men. If she had to guess, he might have been about 60, 65 years old. He had a bald head. He had white hair over the sides and around the back.
He had the most beautiful face she has ever seen on any human being. It encompassed all of wisdom, all of compassion, all of love and understanding. She knew the very second she looked at him that anything he told her would be truth.
She had no clue who he was. Nothing inside her thought it was Jesus, God, Peter, Paul. He was nameless. But he was a spiritual authority of some sort who was going to be someone she could completely believe without a second thought. His robe was purple.
They didn't talk with words. She only had to have the germ of what she was going to say and he received it immediately. She didn't even have to think out the individual words.
The Question About Sins
The first thing she said to him was: "I know what has happened. I understand. I know that I have died," Jayne recalls. And he said, you know, without words, he transmitted to her mentally, "Yes, yes, but you will not be staying here because it isn't time for you to be here yet".
She said, "Oh, well, there's something I want to ask you."
She was only 23. She hadn't accumulated a lot. But she knew about love thy neighbor and don't tell lies and that kind of thing, and she always figured you have to pay for them. She remembers her first feeling of having broken a commandment. She fell off her bicycle and from somewhere she said "Jesus" as she fell, and she lay there under her bike and thought "I have taken the Lord's name in vain" and she waited for whatever thunder was going to come down upon her. Nothing did. Finally she got up and thought, "Oh, I guess it doesn't apply to kids," because she was only about seven.
So she had a concept of sin. And she asked him: What about my sins?
He said to her: "There are no sins. Not the way you think of them on earth". He said the only thing that matters here is what you think. And he asked her a question. He said: "What is in your heart?"
In some way that she cannot ever understand or describe, she was enabled for a few seconds to look into her soul, the deepest part of her. They say the heart is the gateway to the soul. She thinks that's where she went. She saw what the core of her was, and it was love. It was perfect love. It was the same thing that she had been immersed in with the light. That was the core of her.
And she knew it wasn't just the core of her. It was the core of human beings. It was the way in which we are created in the image of God. That's the part we are, that piece of God ourselves. That is who we really are.
She remember thinking: "Of course. Of course. I used to know that. How did I ever forget that?"
The Answer She Couldn't Keep
Then Jayne asked him: "Well, since I can't stay, since I have to go back, can you tell me what everything is all about? Everything. The whole of creation. What is it all about?"
And he did tell her. She's sorry to tell us she can't tell us. He told her and it was so simple. It wasn't more than three or four sentences. She comprehended that totally.
Of course, that was the one about what is it all about.
The Return
At that point, everything became blackness again. She heard an incredibly loud and unpleasant, irritating sound which sounded like somebody had grabbed an oven door and decided to just slam it as hard and as loudly as they could, and it was just bang bang bang bang bang. It was soon over, and then there was silence.
Then she heard in her ear an electronic click, which she always wondered afterwards, what was that about? She's read a few times in the passing years of people who in their NDE at the end heard the click and felt their bodies, their spiritual body, lining up with their physical body and clicked in. She didn't feel all that, but she heard the click.
So she was indeed back. And she woke up to find that her doctor was killing her. The doctor had her fist and she was doing things on Jayne's sternum that just felt unbearable. Jayne had had a baby before, and nobody did anything like that to her.
She said to her doctor: "I don't mean to be rude, but I wish you would stop that". And the doctor said, "All right, I will," with a little smile, very little smile on her face.
Jayne didn't have a clue about external heart massage, so she didn't know then that that's what the doctor was doing. She found out later. The doctor was a good friend of Jayne's mother's.
Jayne thought: "I cannot tell her what has happened to me. I can't ask her any questions. I don't dare, because she will think I have had a postpartum breakdown of some kind, and mother and daddy will think that". She didn't think her husband would think that, interestingly enough. But she thought: "I will just cause trouble, and I know I'm just fine." So she didn't ask her anything.
From then on, Jayne truly doesn't remember very much when she was back on earth the first maybe half hour because things were being done to her. She was getting a shot. Somebody was kneading her tummy. She was more out of it than in. Not in the spiritual world, just out of it in the physical world.
The doctor did say to her: "You know, when she came in the room, 'How are you feeling?' 'I'm feeling fine. You gave me a little bit of a hard time for a while, but everything is just fine now, and you're fine. The baby's fine'". The doctor said the same thing to Jayne's husband when she came out in the hall with him. She went a little farther. She said: "I thought I'd lost her for a minute, but everything is just fine, and so is the baby".
Jayne's husband didn't ask any questions because he didn't want to hear any bad news. Jayne asked him later: What did you ask? What was the hard time? He said: "No, I wanted to hear the part about you were fine and the baby was fine, and that's as much information as he was interested in".
So Jayne was never able to talk to her doctor about it.
Twenty-Three Years of Silence
Jayne lived with the experience for 23 years before Raymond Moody wrote his book. Twenty-three years. Think about that. She was 23 when it happened. She was 46 when she finally read someone else's account of the same thing.
She can't even describe what it was like to read that book. She cried her way all the way through it. Copious tears. She knew for the first time that she was not the only person on earth to have had this experience, which Moody called the near-death experience. For 23 years she thought she was. And what was she supposed to do with it? It was just her.
"I wasn't Mother Teresa. I didn't even know about her then. But I didn't know what I was supposed to do," Jayne says. Ultimately she did know she was supposed to get the word out, but not back then. The time was simply not right. She thinks her experience would have been derided, ridiculed. There was nothing inside her that felt the time was right to start trying to talk to people about it.
Maybe she told her husband the entire thing, and bless him, he said to her: "Honey, I don't understand that any more than you do, but I know if you say it happened and it's true, I know it's true". And that was good enough for her.
What This Experience Reveals
Jayne Smith's account is one of the most detailed and articulate descriptions of the classic near-death experience on record. What makes it particularly significant is not just the richness of her recall but the precision with which she describes the mechanics of what happened to her, the sequence of realizations, the way information was transmitted to her in blocks rather than words.
The detail about feeling and hearing her soul leave her body with a whoosh is reported by many experiencers, but few describe it with such clarity. The progression from darkness to gray mist to brilliant light mirrors the structure of thousands of other accounts. The transmission of knowledge in discrete blocks, the sense of being a receiving station, the inability to have her own thoughts while this was happening, these are the hallmarks of what researchers call the "life review" or "knowledge download" phase of the NDE, though Jayne's experience went far beyond a review of her own life into cosmic truths.
The man in the purple robe is a figure we see again and again in NDE accounts, though his robe color varies. Sometimes he's described as Jesus, sometimes as a spiritual guide or teacher, sometimes as a being of indeterminate identity who simply radiates wisdom and authority. What's consistent is the experiencer's immediate, unshakable trust in this figure. Jayne's description of his face, encompassing all wisdom, all compassion, all love and understanding, is nearly identical to descriptions given by experiencers across cultures and decades. This isn't a learned response. It's a recognition.
The answer to her question about sins is one of the most important messages that comes back from the other side. There are no sins, not the way we think of them on earth. The only thing that matters is what you think, what's in your heart. When Jayne was enabled to look into her own soul and saw that the core of her was love, perfect love, the same love she'd been immersed in with the light, she was seeing what every human being would see if given that same glimpse. We are, at our core, made of the same substance as the light. We are created in the image of God not in form but in essence. That piece of God is who we really are.
And her reaction, "Of course. Of course. I used to know that. How did I ever forget that?" is the reaction of someone remembering, not learning. This is one of the most profound and consistent features of the NDE. Experiencers don't describe being taught something new. They describe remembering something they always knew but had forgotten. The veil lifts, and the truth that was always there becomes visible again.
The fact that she was told the meaning of everything in three or four simple sentences and then had that specific answer taken from her is maddening and beautiful in equal measure. It suggests that the answer exists, that it's simple, that it's comprehensible, but that we're not meant to carry it back in verbal form. Maybe because words would reduce it. Maybe because knowing it here would short-circuit the whole point of being here. Jayne was allowed to bring back everything except that one answer. She could bring back the knowledge of her own immortality, the perfection of the plan, the primacy of love, the absence of sin as we conceive it. But the ultimate why? That stays on the other side.
What she did bring back, though, is more than enough. She brought back proof, at least for herself and for anyone willing to listen, that we don't end. That the core of us is indestructible. That we are loved beyond measure. That the plan is perfect even when it looks broken. That the only thing that matters is love.
Jayne Smith lived with this knowledge in silence for 23 years, raising her children, going about her life, carrying inside her a secret that would have sounded like madness if she'd tried to share it in 1952. When Raymond Moody's book finally gave her a vocabulary and a community, she wept her way through it. And then she began to speak. Her willingness to share her story, her precision in recounting it, her refusal to embellish or theologize it beyond what she actually experienced, has made her one of the most credible and valuable witnesses we have to what awaits us on the other side.
She met a man in a purple robe who told her the meaning of everything. She can't tell us what he said. But she can tell us that he said it, that the answer exists, that it's simple, and that when we get there, we'll understand it too. And we'll probably think the same thing she did: Of course. Of course. How did I ever forget that?
You can learn more about Jayne Smith and explore additional accounts of the Being of Light in near-death experiences and stories of leaving the body to deepen your understanding of these profound experiences.
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