Philip Hasheider's Journey Beyond Death: A Wisconsin Farmer's Vision of Infinite Creation

The Morning Everything Changed

Philip Hasheider is a fifth-generation Wisconsin farmer from Little Prairie, near Sauk City. His European roots in Wisconsin stretch back to 1845. When he walks through his pasture, he knows he's walking in the same footsteps as his father, his grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather before him. It's a connection to the land and to time that runs deep.

In 2014 and 2015, Philip noticed something troubling. His blood pressure was rising, especially the diastolic number, and he couldn't figure out why. He was active, working the farm, eating what he thought was an appropriate diet. But the numbers kept climbing. His doctor looked at the trend and said something that sent alarm bells ringing: "Yeah, this could lead to a stroke."

Philip had grown up watching farmers in his community have strokes. He'd seen how they became incapacitated, how it shifted the entire dynamics of their farms and families. "When the word stroke came out," he recalls, "it was like these alarm bells ringing."

His doctor suggested the Wellsprings program, a wellness initiative through the local hospital that included monitored fitness training and dietary guidance. Philip enrolled. His blood pressure started coming down. Everything seemed to be working. What he didn't know was that the damage had already been done.

On an October morning in 2015, Philip drove into Sauk City to get the tires replaced on his car. He'd brought his gym bag along, as he often did. When he realized he was early for the tire appointment, he made a split-second decision: instead of turning right toward the tire shop, he turned left toward the fitness center. He could get in a quick workout and still make his appointment.

He parked, went downstairs to change, came back up, said hello to the staff, did a few stretches, and moved to the arm curl machine. He completed a modest twenty curls. Then he stood up, and the strangest thing happened.

He looked down at both forearms because they were tingling, like they'd fallen asleep. One moment he was staring at his arms. The next moment, he found himself in a completely different dimension.

Clinically Dead

What Philip didn't know was that he'd just suffered ventricular tachycardia and collapsed. Sandy Drury, the exercise physiologist and wellness supervisor, was on a phone call in her office when she heard someone yell, "Call 911, get the AED." She stepped out into the fitness center and saw one of the Sauk Prairie Healthcare employees doing CPR on Philip. She grabbed the automated external defibrillator and ran back.

Philip was pale. He wasn't breathing. He had no pulse. Sandy had worked in medical fitness for years and had never once had to use CPR or an AED on anyone. Now she was attaching electrodes to a man who was clinically dead, glancing out the window, watching for the EMTs, hoping they'd arrive soon.

Chris Henry, a volunteer EMT, heard the tones go off: "Man down, unknown problem." He grabbed the defibrillator and the ALS bag and ran across the parking lot. When he arrived, compressions had already started. He got down and did his assessment. No heartbeat, no breathing, nothing.

Philip's heart had stopped. He wasn't breathing on his own. There's a window between three and five minutes, the golden window, when you want to get a defibrillator going as quickly as possible. You want to shock that chaotic rhythm and give the heart a chance to reset itself. Beyond that window, tissue starts to die. "Once you get past that 5, 6 minute point with no cardiac compressions," Chris recalls, "it's adios machos, it's you're not going to make it."

Dean Darling, an advanced EMT, arrived and immediately moved the treadmill out of the way so they could get better access to Philip. At some point, Dean intubated Philip with a King airway, an advanced airway device used when someone doesn't wake up after initial efforts. They were trying to improve the oxygen level in his bloodstream, hoping to get a response from the defibrillation.

The survival rate for cardiac arrest in rural areas is very low, probably around five percent. Philip had been down for at least four to five minutes. "So he had been down, you know, a while where he did not have a pulse and he had no breathing effort," one of the medical staff later explained. "So total what we call total cardiac arrest."

Philip was clinically dead. His brain wasn't getting oxygen. His heart muscles weren't getting oxygen. A dozen people were working frantically to bring him back.

But Philip had no idea any of this was happening.

Floating in the Nest of All Creation

It was like being in a huge open amphitheater, Philip recalls, realizing there's no sky, no stars, no moon, no galaxies. He noticed he kept moving up and down and wondered what that was. Then he realized: he was floating on waves of energetic energy coming toward him. And not just toward him. They were passing through him.

"I thought, well, this is really interesting," he says. "I mean, I had no fear. It just felt so warm and accepting. And I didn't know where I was. I didn't even think about knowing where I was. I just was there."

He looked at what he thought were his hands. They were translucent. He could look through them. The energy waves passed through his hands, his arms, his body. It felt like he was being washed with liquid love as the waves moved through him.

Then he looked up and saw something extraordinary: an enormous, voluminous, golden yellow pulsing sphere that filled his entire field of vision. All the energy waves were coming from this source. It was just a golden glowing pulsing eminence sending out waves. He could feel the love, the total love, the welcome, the acceptance.

"It was like 10 million suns being packed together," Philip describes. "And yet I could reach out and touch it and not get burnt. And it was these waves that were coming and enfolding me and asking me to merge with it."

"Not once did I think this is really unusual," he says. "It just felt so good."

Then he noticed something else: little sparks shooting out all over the surface of the golden sphere, like sparklers, billions and billions of them, heading out in all directions. At one point, he heard what he thought was music, but the closer he listened, it was tones, vibrating out with the energy waves.

He interpreted it as a beacon. Because what he'd seen coming in were other sparks from the other direction, kind of like him, all floating out in this eternal dimension. "It was like we were all honing in on this vibrational sound, this beacon that was extending out through wherever it went," Philip explains. "It was like it was calling us home."

That's when he understood: "I instantly knew that this was the nest of the source of all creation and this is where everything is created anywhere."

"So I know that at some point this is where I was born," Philip says. "This is where you were born. This is where everyone and everything was born as we understand a birth, a starting point. So that each one of us carries the DNA of that creator energy and we take that with us wherever we go."

The Architecture of Eternity

Philip decided to look around to see what else was there. When he turned, what he saw was an infinite multitude of dimensions and universes suspended in eternal space.

The best way he's been able to explain it is this: take everything we know about our universe, all the billions of light years in every direction, all the comets, planets, solar systems, everything. Compress it down to a single sheet of paper. Suspend it in this eternal space. Then do that with another complete universal system. Put it right next to it. And another next to that. And another. Keep going as far as you can imagine in infinity in one direction. Then go the other way. Go vertical. Go down.

There were all of these suspended universes and dimensions out in eternal space. But each one had attached to it an energetic filament that reached back and attached to a spider web-like matrix that surrounded the divine creator. It was sending the same welcome and love and acceptance and knowledge to each one of these universes and dimensions suspended in space.

Then Philip turned around again and saw infinity itself. The immulsion of eternity acted like a magnifying glass so that the farther he looked, the clearer everything became. To see into infinity didn't surprise him. "It was just like wow, this is really neat," he recalls.

"I understood that I had transported myself through time and space," Philip says. "A door had been opened up to me and I had stepped through it."

He still did not realize that his body was back on the floor. "I didn't have any awareness that I had died," he explains.

Back in the fitness center, the EMTs were rotating through compressions, switching out every minute because CPR is exhausting work. If you don't push hard enough, you're not compressing the heart enough to eject blood and circulate it through the body. The goal is to profuse the brain, to get oxygen to it before too much tissue dies.

They switched the pads to their defibrillator. They were watching the monitor, looking for any sign of organized rhythm. Then they delivered the second shock.

A defibrillator doesn't jumpstart the heart. "It's like an eraser on a chalkboard," one of the EMTs explains. "You're wiping away all this electrical activity. So you're taking, wiping it all out. Hopefully, the heart will reset itself."

And that's what happened. They started seeing an organized rhythm on the monitor. "Hey, I think his heart's starting to come back," someone said.

"And lo and behold, we had a pulse," Dean recalls.

The Return

"The moment that I realized all of this was before me," Philip says, "in less than a blink of an eye, I left that dimension and I found myself back here."

At some point, Philip started waking up and looking around. He was very confused because the last thing he knew, he'd been working out. He still wasn't making much sense. Confusion is common after cardiac arrest because there usually isn't as much oxygen getting to the brain. The EMTs tried to calm him down and loaded him into the ambulance. By the time they got him in, he was actually talking.

But Philip has little recall, in fact no recall, of the 8 hours after his collapse. He was told by several EMTs that he was talking with them, answering questions, making jokes. But he has no recollection of that whatsoever.

He was not cognizant of his surroundings until 8:30 that evening. He couldn't understand why he was lying on a gurney. The first thing he recognized was a clock on the wall. It said 8:00.

"I said, 'That can't be right,'" Philip recalls. The person standing next to him asked why. "I said, 'Well, I went to exercise at 11:00 and time doesn't run backwards.'"

"And he said, 'Well, it's 8:00 at night,'" Philip continues. "I realized I better keep quiet because I have no idea what he's talking about."

"It was like I had one foot planted in this eternal dimension and another foot trying to find the floor in this one and I couldn't," Philip explains. "Absolutely nothing made sense. And it took me an awful long time to fully understand what happened."

Piecing Together the Impossible

After Philip left the hospital, things slowly started to coalesce. He could start seeing and recalling what happened. "What I experienced is very vivid," he says. "It wasn't a dream. And even after all this time now, almost a decade later, I can go through the whole scene of where I was, what I experienced, what I felt while I was in that dimension, and it still is the same. Nothing changes."

"It's like it was tattooed onto my soul when it came back," Philip reflects.

He started sharing pieces of the experience with his wife Mary, not knowing if she'd understand or think he was crazy. It came out in such pieces, Mary recalls. Philip didn't even know what near-death experiences were at the time.

Philip had difficulty finding words to express some of these things. Some of what he experienced is beyond human vocabulary. The only times Mary would get snippets of it was when they'd be sitting in church listening to the choir, and Philip would close his eyes and feel it, feel himself being pulled back to where he was.

Or he'd be looking for the gold, trying to find that yellow, trying to find that color he'd seen, searching for it everywhere. This went on over a period of months, Mary says, as Philip slowly remembered things.

But eventually, Philip had bills to pay. He had to follow the rules of the road like everybody else. Some people think that once you've had an NDE, everything goes like butter, Philip notes. "And that's not true because I have my days when I get frustrated. I have my days when I get angry. I have my days when I want to chuck everything and walk away from this life."

Initially, he thought, "Man, why do I want to stick around here?" And it wasn't because he didn't love his wife or his family. It was just because everything was so far beyond great where he was that this life felt like a significant step down.

Mary understood the underlying sense: when you have such an extraordinary experience that you really would rather be back in that experience. But she also gently reminded him: "You have a family, you have friends, you have people here that care about you, and so how do we fit then?"

The Answer That Came in Sleep

One morning, Philip came downstairs for breakfast. Mary waited until he was ready, then asked, "Well, do you want to hear what you said last night?"

Philip looked at her, confused. "I didn't say anything last night," he thought.

"Oh, yeah, you did," Mary said.

Mary had been on high alert during Philip's recovery, especially at night. She didn't sleep very soundly because she was always listening: Is he breathing? Is he okay?

One night, Philip was mumbling in his sleep. Mary didn't know if he was in pain or what was going on. Then he started talking. He sat up and started repeating, "I don't believe it. I don't believe it."

Mary asked what he didn't believe. "Why I came back," Philip said.

"Well, why did you come back?" Mary asked.

"I was told to come back to be a conduit to those who do not have any hope or think there is any," Philip said.

"It was to be a conduit of hope," Mary later explained.

When Mary told him what he'd said in his sleep, Philip had the answer he'd been searching for as to why he returned. Some doctors at the hospital had told him, "Well, you got lucky. You were at the right place, right time." Philip knew it was more than that, but he'd had no answer to it. When Mary told him what he'd said, he knew that was the answer to the question he was really seeking.

That has been the motivation to write about his experience, Philip explains. That's been his motivation to talk to people, to groups, to do interviews. "For me, it's just a matter of this is what I can do to help others," he says.

Since he's been doing that, Philip has found there are many others who have had a near-death experience or a spiritually transformative experience or something out of the ordinary, and they don't have to be afraid to share it. "I'm just a fellow traveler with everyone else," Philip says. "I don't consider myself special. I was given an extraordinary experience."

A Life Divided

The interesting thing about that day, looking back on it, was that it became a demarcation line in Philip's life because it gave him insights he didn't have before. It gave him peace he hadn't had before.

Before his experience, Philip was kind of floating off in his own path, Mary observes. After his NDE, he was much more present.

Dr. Brent Bauer, Philip's physician, has experienced numerous patients who've had near-death experiences. "They've all said they're profoundly changed. Profoundly changed," he notes. Some are more articulate about it than others. But the two things that are profound are the degree of acceptance that they felt and also the unboundless love that they felt. "And as a result of that, they truly feel they're different people," Dr. Bauer explains.

You can hear more of Philip's reflections on his experience in several other interviews he's given, including "Clinically Dead 6 Minutes; Man Visits Infinite Universe And Is Shown Our Purpose On Earth" and "This NDE Will Give You Goosebumps", where he explores different aspects of what he saw and understood.

What We're Here to Do

Philip would say that the reason we are here is to accept and acknowledge the divinity in everyone around us: the person in the car next to us, the person in the grocery store, whether we like the people or not. Because we are all part of the divinity of the source of all creation.

"And hope is the pathway on our journey," Philip says.

The hope of which he speaks has to do with not being afraid of what comes next. We are so tied to physical things here that we don't want to give them up, he notes.

"And that's what death, I think, is: a fear that we're going to lose our identity. We're going to lose who we are. Then they're going to forget. We're just going to go to this abyss and that's going to be the end of it," Philip explains.

But this life that we understand is not the end. Even though we may decease, that's what human bodies do. But the internal essence, our internal spirit is what continues on.

"That's all that death is, is a transition from what we experience here to something far greater," Philip says. "And to me, that is the hope that I'm trying to explain to people, is that, yeah, we're going to lose some of the stuff that we have here that we can't take with us. But we're going to keep going. We're going to keep having other experiences as we go on through eternity because that essence of us that goes on is part of the God creation. And that doesn't get destroyed."

What Philip's Experience Reveals

Philip Hasheider's account stands out for its remarkable specificity and coherence. He wasn't a seeker. He wasn't particularly religious or spiritual before his cardiac arrest. He was a Wisconsin farmer getting his blood pressure under control. What happened to him wasn't something he went looking for. It found him.

The details he describes align with patterns we see across thousands of near-death experiences: the sensation of floating, the translucent quality of the body, the waves of energy, the overwhelming sense of love and acceptance, the golden light, the feeling of being home. But Philip goes further. He describes an architecture to the afterlife, a structure to eternity that's both vast and intimate. The image of infinite universes suspended like sheets of paper, each connected by energetic filaments to a central source, is one of the most detailed cosmological visions I've encountered in NDE literature.

What strikes me most is Philip's description of the sparks. He saw billions of them shooting out from the golden sphere, heading in all directions. And he saw others coming in from the opposite direction, all honing in on the vibrational beacon. He understood immediately: these are us. We are those sparks. We originate from this source, we carry its essence wherever we go, and we return to it. The idea that we each carry the DNA of creator energy, as Philip puts it, isn't metaphor to him. It's what he saw and understood directly.

Philip's experience also offers something rare: a clear answer to the question of why experiencers come back. He didn't consciously choose to return. The decision was made for him, and the reason was revealed later, in his sleep, through his own voice: to be a conduit of hope to those who have none. This sense of purpose, of being sent back with a mission, is common among NDErs. But Philip's mission is particularly poignant. He's not here to preach or convert. He's here to tell people what he saw: that death is not an ending, that we are eternal beings, that the love waiting for us is beyond anything we can imagine in this life.

The fact that Philip was clinically dead for nearly five minutes, with no heartbeat and no breathing, makes his account all the more significant. His brain was deprived of oxygen. According to materialist neuroscience, he should have experienced nothing, or at most, random neural noise as his brain shut down. Instead, he experienced the most vivid, coherent, meaningful event of his life, one that remains unchanged in his memory nearly a decade later, tattooed onto his soul, as he puts it.

Philip's story is a gift. It's a window into what awaits all of us. It's a reminder that this physical life, as real and demanding as it is, is not the whole story. We are sparks from an infinite source, traveling through eternity, always connected to the love that created us. And when our time here is done, we'll float on those waves of energy again, we'll see that golden light, and we'll know we're home.

You can learn more about Philip Hasheider and explore other accounts he's shared about his journey beyond death.