In the summer of 1976, Timothy Cleve Abbott was rushed to the hospital when a blood blister on his foot became infected and spread his leg.
Doctors injected him with penicillin to stop the infection, but the shot caused a violent allergic reaction, causing him to “leave his body.”
The musician from Austin, Texas, said the experience completely changed his life and his views on religion and the nature of reality.
Mr Abbott, now 68, has had several near-death experiences and he believes there is a reason why about a third of people have recurring ‘experiences’.
Tim Abbott says the experiences changed his life and his views forever (Tim Abbott, supplied)
He told DailyMail.com: ‘It started in the summer of 1976 when I left high school.
‘I bought a new pair of shoes and got a blood blister. I didn’t pay attention to it, but the blister reached over my knee to the point where I couldn’t walk anymore.’
After friends took him to the hospital, doctors punctured and drained the blood blister but immediately injected him with the antibiotic penicillin, to which Abbott said he is extremely allergic.
The young man immediately collapsed.
He said, “I immediately left my body. I saw my body fall and bounce off the cement floor.
“The staff started panicking and screaming, and before I knew it, they were trying to bring me back with CPR.”
Abbott said that despite seeing his own dead body on the ground, the experience was “very calming.”
He said: ‘I wasn’t panicking or anything like that. I was just there.’
After three minutes, the medical staff brought him back and sent him for a skull x-ray after his head bounced off the floor.
His second near-death experience came just six years later, in 1982, when he was intubating on the Guadalupe River in his home state.
Abbott said: ‘It’s normally a slow moving river, but it wasn’t slow. It was twenty feet above flood stage, but we went ahead and did it anyway because we were young and stupid.
‘I hit an area of turbulence, fell to the bottom of the river and ran out of air. I got an x-ray vision, I can’t explain it any other way.
When he found the bottom of the river, Abbott kicked himself back to the surface.
Abbott said: ‘I saw a hand, instinctively grabbed it and he pulled me up. And when I came to, I spit out water, and I looked in, amazingly.
Tim as a young man (Tim Abbott, supplied)
‘The strangest thing about this story is that I knew the man who saved my life. He was from my hometown, 400 miles away, and happened to be in the same place when I was with other friends.”
In both experiences, Abbott said, he had a sense of “infinity.”
He said, “I knew I wasn’t in my body, and I was looking at me like you would watch someone in a movie, you know, something you would see on TV.”
But Abbott said the experiences completely changed his views on religion and life and death.
He said, ‘I believe that once you open that window, or open the door to what happens in the afterlife, you carry it with you as a kind of marker, or you can come into contact with things that you don’t know. can do. understand it very well.
“I’ve experienced some strange stories after all that and I feel like it’s all connected.”
Since his two near-death experiences, he has felt a presence watching over him – and he has come to believe it is his late grandmother, Theresa Rigby.
He said, “I was born and raised a Lutheran Christian, and now I tend to embrace something similar, but I believe in reincarnation after experiencing these things.”
Since his experiences, Abbot has spoken to others who have experienced similar things, and they too feel that the experiences have opened their minds to other phenomena.
Abbott said: “Some of these people have taken it to a level far beyond anything I’ve experienced.
“It set me on a path or a journey to find out what the secret of life is. What is the answer to this? Is there really one God, or is there one God who goes by many names?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows what happens when we die, but there are still plenty of clues to figure this all out. Some people have sharp gifts that allow them to be a channel for things we don’t fully understand yet.’
Abbott says the experiences changed his life and his views forever (Tim Abbott, supplied)
Abbott has written rock, country, Americana and blues – and says many songs have themes of life and loss.
Abbott said he has tried to convey his experiences through his music over the decades – and also strives to live “the right way.”
He said, “I truly believe we are the good side of humanity. We are all meant to be here for a reason, and we are all supposed to help each other.
‘Of course it’s so much easier said than done in today’s chaotic world, but I do believe there is a higher power at play.
‘There is so much clutter in our daily lives that it is very difficult for us to find the true meanings in life – unless maybe you have some crazy experience that happens to you, which affects you and makes you turn both inward and outward. looks outside. see what the answers are.’
