Pauline Glamochak's Near-Death Experience: The Girl Who Met Jesus

The Girl Before the Fall

Pauline Glamochak grew up Catholic in southeastern Australia. In 1977, she was an ordinary 11-year-old spending a day at the picnic grounds in the Mount Macedon Ranges, a place she describes as particularly stunning and spiritual. She was chasing her friends down a hill when everything changed.

She tripped on a rock. Instead of letting herself fall forward, she threw her weight backward and hit her head on stone. She closed her eyes, expecting pain. None came.

When she opened her eyes, she was in blackness. But only briefly.

Out of the Heavy Coat

What happened next felt like relief. "It felt like I'd taken off a really heavy coat," Pauline recalls. "It felt as though I'd peeled away layers of anxiety and every incumbrance. I just felt extremely free and blissful."

She was out of her body, floating upward, being drawn through the clouds. She glanced down briefly at her physical form lying on the ground but felt no interest in it at all. Instead, she took in the vista of the Macedon Ranges below, the landscape growing smaller as she rose.

Then she hit the clouds and everything went white.

The sensation of cold startled her. Trepidation crept in. When she emerged above the cloudscape, she looked up and wondered how far she would go. "I thought what am I going to be floating around in space, what's going to happen," she remembers. As soon as the thought formed, a black hole appeared above her.

It was a portal. Once inside, it became a tunnel.

The Tunnel and the Light That Knew Her Name

She traveled very fast. Stars streamed past. The speed was so intense that the stars blurred into grayness. "I had this sense of going traveling very very far," Pauline says.

She looked up again, worried about how long this would last, and saw a speck of light. The light grew. It rained into the tunnel, permeating everything.

"As soon as I felt that light, I immediately had the sense that I had been there before," Pauline describes. A calm came over her. The calm grew until she was completely immersed.

This wasn't just visual light. "The light had energy that was not just a visual gold patterned spectrum, it also had qualities of feeling and the emotion of this love like I'd never experienced on Earth," she explains. "It was a very accepting love. It's hard to understand that sense of safety. It's certainly something that's not attainable here on Earth but it was an incredible sense of safety."

The light was personal. It knew her. It loved her. It answered every question she had.

The Ancestors Who'd Been Waiting

As she became accustomed to the light, she looked around and saw a group of people below her, looking up with anticipation. She traveled down to them and they greeted her. She realized they were her ancestors.

At 11, she'd only lost one grandparent, when she was three years old. She didn't recognize them by name, but she knew they were her family. "They were so happy to see me as if we'd known each other all our lives," she recalls. She basked in their welcome.

Then she began to take in where she was.

She stood in front of a large arch in a wall, a wooden door. But she could see over the wall. "I saw these beautiful rolling hills and children playing and this scene like otherworldly beauty," Pauline describes. "I just thought to myself wow this is incredible. I was just so happy to arrive there."

She noticed what she thought was the sun. But as she looked at it, she saw the aura around it was different. Not yellow but gold, a mercurial kind of gold. As she studied it, it started traveling toward her.

The Man in the White Robe

As it came closer, she could see it had a white center. Closer still, the white center became a silhouette. Then a figure emerged: a man in a white robe. "He exuded energy that was incredible and his stature was majestic and he was very handsome," Pauline says.

Inside herself, she asked, "Is this Jesus? He's really real." When she realized it was him, "he projected this laugh into me and this laugh was just, it wasn't laugh at me, was a delighting in me and he filled me with that emotion of delight," she recalls.

Then he called her to him using a name that wasn't her earthly name. "When he spoke that name to me a whole story unfolded with that name and I understood the story of my ancestors within that name and I understood that we belonged to his tribe, that I was his," Pauline explains.

The revelation was too much. She found herself at his feet, crying.

When that subsided, she looked up and saw his foot in its sandal. On the top of his foot was a gold hole. As she realized it was from the crucifixion, she was immediately transported to the scene itself.

The Unbearable Compassion

"I'm immediately at the level of the flagstones and I'm seeing blood dripping and water dripping on the flagstones," Pauline describes. "As I look up from the flagstones I can see a mutilated figure and I realized that it was him. He was completely disfigured, unrecognizable, all of his dignity stripped."

The gravity of it struck her. "I just thought inside of myself oh just still hurt because it was unbearable, it was just beyond imagination," she recalls.

As soon as she felt that compassion, he immediately said no. In that expression, she was blinded by his glory, his gold light, and found herself over the clouds. He was taking her over Jerusalem, over Israel, over arid hills that looked like a moonscape, nothing like she'd ever seen. She'd never dreamed of flying. The experience erased what she'd just witnessed.

Then he placed her next to a woman standing on a platform above a crowd. The woman was older, nondescript, her face covered, with very black hair. Her skin was aged and sun-worn. Pauline took in every detail: the woman worked in the fields, had a very hardworking life. She could see it in her hands.

Then she felt the woman's sorrow and understood: he'd taken her to stand next to his mother. She realized what he was showing her. No, the crucifixion didn't hurt him anymore. What still hurt was that he'd hurt his mother. That his crucifixion had hurt her.

He told her it was his glory to die for the world. The entire world. Pauline, a Catholic girl, asked, "The whole world? The whole world hasn't had the sacraments," and he laughed. But he imbued to her the importance of having passion for every living creation of God's, having respect and honor towards animals. It was a deep and surprising message about love and compassion.

The Life Review on the Black Rock

He took her to sit on a big flat black rock. He was to her right, she to his left. She remembers looking at her knees dangling over the edge of the rock into space, her knees next to his knees. Below them, a nebula was forming.

"I just was overcome with this longing to stay with him," Pauline recalls. Sensing this, he said, "Look here my child," and waved his hand in front of them. A book appeared in the energy traces of his hand. The book tilted toward them. There was writing on the first page, but she can't recall what it said.

What followed was like one of those old-fashioned slide movies, fast moving. "I had empathy and was involved with every character in it," she says. She didn't recognize it as her life review at first. She didn't recognize her parents because everybody looked extremely beautiful. She understands now that he'd shown her how he sees us. She was looking through spiritual eyes. He was only showing her the most beautiful moments.

Until it came to an argument between two young girls. She recognized the argument. It was her life review. "I'd hurt this girl," Pauline admits. (She later took this girl to be her godmother at her Confirmation.) "I felt her hurt and I was mortified because I felt it so intensely," she recalls.

"I thought oh wow I'm leaving all wrong, I didn't get it," Pauline says. She told him, "I don't know what life is about, tell me. If I can't defend myself I really don't know how to live. It's a really hard world out there, you don't know."

She realizes now: he'd just shown her the crucifixion and told her to have compassion for people who hated him. And she was telling him he didn't know.

He told her, "Life is about love," Pauline recalls. She said, "Yeah but it doesn't work that way, it's not like that."

Then he told her, "Your life will be on whatever you focus on. That's what creates your life, your focus, what you look at, what you look to, what you imagine, that's what you create," Pauline recounts.

This is the teaching she's carried forward. Not just that life is about love, but that our attention shapes our reality. Where we place our focus, there our life follows.

The Vision of the Future and the Gentle Push

She was still wrapped up in what had just happened. The information was interesting, but she still didn't want to be parted from him. She let him know.

"He just said to me, 'I will never leave you, you'll never be parted from me,'" Pauline recalls. "And still I was no but I just want to stay here with you," she says.

So he showed her a holographic image of a beautiful young man. She understood this was going to be in her future life. She thought it was her husband. But as time went on, she recognized it was her son. When she'd asked if it was her husband, he didn't share any information, didn't say yes or no, he just was very quiet.

He showed her other scenes. She told him, "This looks like a wonderful life," but she still hadn't decided to go back.

He said, "Yes it is," but there was this flash of sadness. As soon as she saw it, she realized: either she was going to disappoint him if she didn't go back, or there was some kind of disappointment.

She agreed immediately. As soon as in her heart she agreed, he gently pushed her back.

The Return to the Heavy World

She was returned to the consciousness, or semiconsciousness, of her very heavy, constrictive, throbbing headache body. A beagle had come up and was licking her right temple. She had spinal fluid or brain fluid coming from her right ear. She didn't recognize anybody at all.

The first words she spoke were, "I've just been with Jesus. Jesus is real. Jesus is real. You've got to believe me. Jesus is real," Pauline recalls.

Someone she didn't recognize confronted her with logic: "Oh you were only gone for a few minutes," when she expanded on her story. For her, that didn't make sense because it seemed she was there for hours.

Her parents bundled her up and took her to the closest doctor. They asked her to retell her experience to him. As she finished, he completely disappeared and looked at them and said, "This is called confabulation. She has had traumatic brain injury and this is what happens when there's brain savage," Pauline recalls. He gave them instructions about when to take her to the emergency room.

She knew she wasn't believed. So she compartmentalized the experience and doubted her perceptions for 45 years.

The Confirmation 45 Years Later

In 2015, Pauline had another near-death experience on the operating table. She encountered negative entities who were trying to pull her to come with them. When she said she was waiting for Jesus Christ, she just fell back into the blackness.

When she awoke, she could see everybody with those spiritual eyes that Jesus had shown her in her life review. The second experience confirmed the first was real.

She started researching. She learned more about near-death experiences. She became a counselor and now supports people in overcoming trauma and in integrating their near-death experiences. She's shared her story on multiple platforms, including Love Covered Life Podcast and NDE Radio with Lee Witting.

"Often there is trauma wrapped up with the experience and it often happens to people who have experienced a lot of trauma in their lives," Pauline explains.

"I take it as a gift from God," she says. "My life is really changed not since the experience but since integrating the experience."

She would say to anybody who's had a near-death experience to be sure to integrate it. "For me it's become the cornerstone experience of my life and it's changed my life, it's enriched my life in ways that I can't begin to describe," Pauline reflects. "It opens up a new dimension spiritually and it certainly helps to get through the challenges in life."

What This Experience Reveals

Pauline's account sits at the intersection of several recurring patterns in near-death research. The sense of peeling away layers of anxiety, the feeling of having been to the light before, the ancestors waiting with anticipation: these aren't unique to her story. They appear again and again across thousands of accounts, across cultures, across decades.

What stands out here is the specificity of the teaching she received. Most experiencers return with a general sense that love matters. Pauline returned with a precise instruction: your focus creates your reality. What you look at, what you imagine, that's what you create. This isn't metaphor or poetry. It's practical guidance about how consciousness works.

The life review she describes is also instructive. She didn't see her worst moments or her best achievements. She saw how Jesus sees people: beautiful. The only moment that broke through was the one where she hurt someone, and even then, the lesson wasn't shame. It was feeling what the other person felt. The review wasn't judgment. It was education in empathy.

And then there's the matter of time. She was gone for minutes. She experienced hours. This temporal distortion appears in nearly every NDE account where the experiencer comments on duration. It suggests that whatever realm they enter operates under different rules than the physical universe. Or perhaps it suggests that time itself is a feature of matter, not of consciousness.

Pauline spent 45 years doubting what happened to her because a doctor told her it was brain damage and confabulation. This is the cost of materialist certainty. A child has a profound spiritual experience, and the authority figure in the room explains it away with a diagnosis. She believed him. She compartmentalized the most significant event of her life and lived with doubt until a second experience forced her to reckon with the truth.

Now she helps others integrate their experiences. She knows what it's like to be dismissed, to doubt yourself, to carry something beautiful and urgent that no one will believe. Her work is a kind of repair, not just for herself but for everyone who's been told their consciousness is just neurons firing, their love just chemistry, their glimpse of eternity just a dying brain's last gasp.

The teaching about focus is worth sitting with. If what we look at creates what we experience, then the practice of attention becomes the most important spiritual discipline we have. Not meditation, not prayer, not ritual, but simply: where do you place your eyes? What do you imagine? What do you look to?

This is optimistic in the deepest sense. It means we aren't passive recipients of reality. We're participants in its creation. And if that's true here, in the heavy world of matter and time, how much more true must it be in the realm Pauline visited, where thought and form are one, where to see something is to be with it, where the light knows your name and has always known it?

She came back because she saw a flash of sadness in Jesus and couldn't bear to disappoint him. That's the hinge the whole story turns on. Not duty, not obligation, not unfinished business, but love responding to love. She agreed to return to the heavy coat, the constrictive body, the world where people hurt each other and don't understand why, because she loved him and he wanted her to come back.

And he told her he would never leave her. She's never been parted from him. That's the promise every experiencer seems to receive in one form or another: you're going back, but you're not going alone. The light that knew you, that answered every question, that showed you how beautiful you really are, it's coming with you. It's in you. It always was.

Pauline's story isn't unique. But it's hers. And in its specificity, in the details only she could provide (the beagle licking her temple, the mercurial gold of the sun that wasn't the sun, the dangling knees next to his knees over the forming nebula), it becomes a window into something that belongs to all of us. The place we came from. The place we're going. The love that's both the journey and the destination.