Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola magazine, which seeks to illuminate truths common to every spiritual tradition. She believes: “Well-being requires a deep encounter with our experience.”[2] She had such an encounter in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen in the mid-1980s.[3] She describes it in her essay, “The Night I Died,” available online. The experience produced “the impression that behind all the appearances of life, all our separation, there is a force of love and compassion that’s completely infinite and ineffable. It’s holding up the world. We have an opportunity to open to it, to be with it.”[4]
Tracy Cochran – photo used with permission.
She was at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. They were going to have a late dinner. At 10 p.m., she agreed to walk to a bodega for pasta, cigarettes and a six-pack of beer. A “young woman alone at night on a deserted side street” in a “godforsaken place,” she recalled.[5] She’d been “drifting along thinking about what she liked and didn’t like about her life … dreaming that she was in control of what happened …”[6]
Suddenly, “from the shadows of a gutted tenement,” she was rushed and surrounded by three men. Two appeared to be “lanky teenagers.” The third was grim, older, much bigger. “Darting behind me, he jerked his arm tight across my throat.” This made it impossible for her to talk or to reach for her money that he was demanding: “Money! … Money now!”[7]
Her “brain started working faster than it had ever worked.” It “calculated and recalculated every aspect of the situation [and] concluded there could be no escape.” Yet: “Even before I could grasp what was happening, it was as if the animal of my body and my physical brain was heading for higher ground, opening to receive help from above…. my heart was opening to a kind of a feeling that cannot be created or destroyed by anyone, only received.”[8]
Her “brain crashed.” She surrendered. Then she saw the light, which “gained a force and direction—an authority unknown to me…. it became a column of brilliant white light that shot out of the top of my head, arcing high into the night sky. [It] joined a much greater light that descended to meet it. Behind the abandoned tenements, behind my attackers, behind all the appearances of the world, there was a gorgeous luminosity…. this light was the force that holds up the world, into which all separation dissolves.”[9]
She realized she could see herself and the man choking her “from behind and above.” She saw herself gasping, knees buckling. Then she was embraced by the light which, she said, was “wisdom and love [and] vast, vaulted, and all around. I sensed the presence of beings, ranks of beings, an ascending multitude, turning, moving, altogether forming a great witnessing consciousness, in every detail and part infinitely finer and higher than my own…. the majesty and radiance … I glimpsed … made me feel, lifted, seen, accepted into a vast whole.”[10]
A “particular being drew very close.” It looked upon her, she wrote, “with love that had a gravity and grace unlike anything I had known. It proceeded to search me, brushing aside everything I thought I knew about myself… as if it was not just unimportant but unreal…. What was dear and good to this light was not any quality that I knew, but something deep and mute in my being…. this radiant light, this loving consciousness, held everything that is. It was … the unifying force of the universe, suffusing us, carrying us when we leave this body, accompanying us always and everywhere, appearing in us when we are open to receive.”[11]
As she was apprehending this, she was “still struggling to breathe. Yet,” she wrote, “I wasn’t struggling inside. I was still. It felt as if I was … surrendering, not to this attack but to something that was infinitely higher. I understood that a life could have a different meaning, that it could be spent seeking, purifying, practicing.”[12]
The higher being—the “angel of awareness”—told her “without words to relax, the struggle would soon pass.” The man who was choking her loosened his grip. She was able to reach a ten-dollar bill in her jeans’ front pocket. She threw it on the ground. Freeing her, the man scooped it up and ran off with the others.[13]
That night’s experience “never grew dim.” She told it to people she trusted, or the dying. “I know a greater reality and a greater awareness exists. I know there is a truth that cannot be thought, only received.”[14]
Patrick Wolfe thanks Tracy Cochran for supporting this article and for her permission to quote liberally from her original essay, “The Night I Died,” which is available online. That essay is also included in her new book, PRESENCE, which is available from Amazon and other booksellers.
This article was originally published by the Times Colonist newspaper’s “Spiritually Speaking” blog on May 7, 2025. ↑
Tracy Cochran and the reality behind the world
Tracy Cochran and the reality behind the world[1]
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola magazine, which seeks to illuminate truths common to every spiritual tradition. She believes: “Well-being requires a deep encounter with our experience.”[2] She had such an encounter in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen in the mid-1980s.[3] She describes it in her essay, “The Night I Died,” available online. The experience produced “the impression that behind all the appearances of life, all our separation, there is a force of love and compassion that’s completely infinite and ineffable. It’s holding up the world. We have an opportunity to open to it, to be with it.”[4]
Tracy Cochran – photo used with permission.
She was at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. They were going to have a late dinner. At 10 p.m., she agreed to walk to a bodega for pasta, cigarettes and a six-pack of beer. A “young woman alone at night on a deserted side street” in a “godforsaken place,” she recalled.[5] She’d been “drifting along thinking about what she liked and didn’t like about her life … dreaming that she was in control of what happened …”[6]
Suddenly, “from the shadows of a gutted tenement,” she was rushed and surrounded by three men. Two appeared to be “lanky teenagers.” The third was grim, older, much bigger. “Darting behind me, he jerked his arm tight across my throat.” This made it impossible for her to talk or to reach for her money that he was demanding: “Money! … Money now!”[7]
Her “brain started working faster than it had ever worked.” It “calculated and recalculated every aspect of the situation [and] concluded there could be no escape.” Yet: “Even before I could grasp what was happening, it was as if the animal of my body and my physical brain was heading for higher ground, opening to receive help from above…. my heart was opening to a kind of a feeling that cannot be created or destroyed by anyone, only received.”[8]
Her “brain crashed.” She surrendered. Then she saw the light, which “gained a force and direction—an authority unknown to me…. it became a column of brilliant white light that shot out of the top of my head, arcing high into the night sky. [It] joined a much greater light that descended to meet it. Behind the abandoned tenements, behind my attackers, behind all the appearances of the world, there was a gorgeous luminosity…. this light was the force that holds up the world, into which all separation dissolves.”[9]
She realized she could see herself and the man choking her “from behind and above.” She saw herself gasping, knees buckling. Then she was embraced by the light which, she said, was “wisdom and love [and] vast, vaulted, and all around. I sensed the presence of beings, ranks of beings, an ascending multitude, turning, moving, altogether forming a great witnessing consciousness, in every detail and part infinitely finer and higher than my own…. the majesty and radiance … I glimpsed … made me feel, lifted, seen, accepted into a vast whole.”[10]
A “particular being drew very close.” It looked upon her, she wrote, “with love that had a gravity and grace unlike anything I had known. It proceeded to search me, brushing aside everything I thought I knew about myself… as if it was not just unimportant but unreal…. What was dear and good to this light was not any quality that I knew, but something deep and mute in my being…. this radiant light, this loving consciousness, held everything that is. It was … the unifying force of the universe, suffusing us, carrying us when we leave this body, accompanying us always and everywhere, appearing in us when we are open to receive.”[11]
As she was apprehending this, she was “still struggling to breathe. Yet,” she wrote, “I wasn’t struggling inside. I was still. It felt as if I was … surrendering, not to this attack but to something that was infinitely higher. I understood that a life could have a different meaning, that it could be spent seeking, purifying, practicing.”[12]
The higher being—the “angel of awareness”—told her “without words to relax, the struggle would soon pass.” The man who was choking her loosened his grip. She was able to reach a ten-dollar bill in her jeans’ front pocket. She threw it on the ground. Freeing her, the man scooped it up and ran off with the others.[13]
That night’s experience “never grew dim.” She told it to people she trusted, or the dying. “I know a greater reality and a greater awareness exists. I know there is a truth that cannot be thought, only received.”[14]
Patrick Wolfe thanks Tracy Cochran for supporting this article and for her permission to quote liberally from her original essay, “The Night I Died,” which is available online. That essay is also included in her new book, PRESENCE, which is available from Amazon and other booksellers.
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