Diane Goble

Diane Goble (1941-) was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island until her family moved to south Florida in time for her to go to Coral Gables High School. Following graduation in 1959, she attended Florida Southern College then the University of Miami, leaving before graduation to begin her first career in radio. Within 2 years she was promoted to Creative Director then hired away by a R&B station in Chicago. There she met her future husband and put aside her career goals when they married in 1963 to raise their three children and support her husband’s career as a motion picture cameraman.

On his first big Hollywood production, they found themselves in northern Georgia for a summer in 1971 while he worked with the camera crew filming the movie “Deliverance.” The movie was shot entirely on the Chattooga River in northern Georgia so the crew was familiar with the rivers, and on Sundays groups of cast, crew, and family members would take the 4-person rafts out just for fun. On one of those occasions, things went horribly wrong in Woodall Shoals, one of the most dangerous sections of the river. Diane was thrown out and her body was sucked under the raft, which was trapped by a hydraulic. They all thought she was gone but she was having an amazing, fully conscious out-of-body experience in otherworldly dimensions. Upon surfacing 100 yards downriver, she needed no resuscitation and was uninjured.

When attempting to describe her experience, all she could say was that she had gone “somewhere else.” Most people, including her husband, thought she was just a little nuts.

So she stopped talking about it and tried to get on with her life as if nothing extraordinary had happened… that it was just a hallucination, though she had never used drugs. It wasn’t long before her life began to unravel as her husband left her and took their children away from her, and she struggled to survive on her own in a world where nothing made sense anymore. No one would even consider hiring her because, as one interviewer told her, she hadn’t done anything for ten years.

Seven years post-NDE, Diane returned to education after she was injured on a job and was disabled for 6 months. Once she could manage to be up for more than a few hours at a time, she volunteered at a battered woman’s shelter within walking distance in Santa Monica, CA. Through her experiences there, she realized she wanted to become a counselor. With a little help from her friends, she had learned how to get government assistance and then student loans.

Diane got her children back and graduated from Cal State-Long Beach with a BS in Psychology in 1981 and MS in Community-Clinical Psychology in 1983. Her innovative thesis involved coordinating existing education and government services to address the mental health needs of employees of small businesses, whose biggest productivity problem, she determined from having been one, was the stress of juggling career and family life.

During post-graduate studies, Diane interned with a group of therapists studying Family Systems Theory, and on her own studied Psychosynthesis and Transpersonal Psychology, while deepening her own practice of meditation.

After graduation, Diane moved to Tampa, FL and marketed herself as a Management/Employee Development consultant for small businesses teaching classes in stress management, time management, assertiveness training, communication skills, personal development, and meditation, which she developed independently. In 1986 she opened The Stress Management Center, probably one of the first in the country, and successfully marketed her classes to salespeople, multi-level marketers, and small business owners.

Over these 15 years, she had buried her experience in the river. Then one day while perusing books in a Light Center she picked up a copy of "Strangers Among Us" (1984) by Ruth Montgomery who described spiritually transformative experiences and for the first time she realized she wasn’t alone… that people have been having NDEs for thousands of years—but this information had been suppressed by certain religious and political leaders who claimed it was the devil talking or evil entities trying to grab one’s soul, etc. People were burned at the stake, beheaded, drowned, thrown into mental asylums for such blasphemy.

Next, she came across Raymond Moody’s book “Life After Life” (1971), which just confirmed everything she had tried to deny, but knew to be true. She had had a “near-death experience” and Moody's book made it OK for her to speak her truth to others.

She could no longer deny what happened to her when the river took control of her body. She shared her story for the first time at (of all places) a gathering of alien abductees...who didn’t think her NDE sounded so strange.

Her remembering coincided with the developing New Age movement around Tampa-St. Petersburg and the Harmonic Convergence in 1987. Her sister JoAnn, a massage therapist, practiced a form of deep tissue massage, called Postural Integration, which she found elicited a lot of emotions from her clients as she worked through the tissue layers, and realigned the spine and chakra system. Working together with clients, they developed a mind-body-spirit healing therapy, which included Diane helping clients process those emotions after a session with JoAnn, and teaching meditation to clients to help integrate this new learning. Theirs was among the first “mind-body-spirit healing centers,” which also relates to a component of Diane’s NDE. She was given a tour of the healing centers newly arriving souls were guided to for a readjustment period after leaving their physical bodies and returning home.

Diane began volunteering at a hospice in St. Petersburg in 1990 to prepare herself to be a caregiver for her mother. She volunteered on and off over the next 25 years with hospice, moving back and forth between Florida and California, through her father's death, her stepfather's death, and her mother’s end-of-life journey.

This work led Diane to return to her love for writing and her articles were published in local and national New Age publications. In 1991, she began writing “Through the Tunnel: A Traveler’s Guide to Spiritual Rebirth”… not about her NDE but based on the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead because she realized from her counseling practice that fear of death was one of peoples’ greatest fears/stressors and her mission, her reason for choosing to come back to this life, was to let people know there’s nothing to fear. We don’t die! We (who we truly are) simply step out of our worn-out overcoats and return home where our journey continues in ways we can barely imagine as human beings.

But as she began writing that book, other information started coming through that had little to do with that book. It wasn’t her own thoughts. Rather than fight it she decided to let it flow and just transcribed. There were different feelings/voices from different writers and she finally realized she was channeling information from other beings so she asked them who they were and what they wanted, and together they agreed that she would transcribe the information they wanted to pass on if they would then help her finish the book she had started. And so they did.

She posted the entities' information as “Spiritual Lessons” on her website BeyondtheVeil.net (1996-2017) and later as an ebook in 2010 “Sitting in the Lotus Blossom.”

In order to deepen her work with clients who were awakening to higher consciousness, Diane undertook another Master's degree program in Clinical Hypnotherapy graduating from St John's University in Louisiana in 1996. She realized some clients needed to explore beyond early this-life memories to release blockages so they could be processed. They needed to go back to relevant past lives to understand the karma they are dealing with in this life. And due to her realization during her NDE, that she had done this before—lived a human life then died and returned home just like this—it made perfect sense for her to explore past-life regression as a therapy tool. She also began several years of studying the world’s great religions and became an ordained minister in the Congregational Church of Practical Theology in order to be allowed to practice hypnotherapy as there was no state licensing process at that time. She wrote about reincarnation and karma in “Reincarnation is the Evolution of Consciousness” (Kindle-Revised 2023).

For over a decade, Diane corresponded with thousands of people from all over the world by email who expressed their deepest fears and anxieties about death and what happens after, who hoped someone who had been to the other side and back could offer answers. She put a sampling of those Q&As in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Cosmic Consciousness" (Kindle 2016).

In 2008, she developed an online training program to train healers and caregivers in the art of conscious dying. She called them Transition Guides and certified a number of peoplearound the world to carry on her work. She revised “Through the Tunnel” and turned it into a marketing tool for her students in a book she called “Beginner’s Guide to Conscious Dying” (2009). But then the economy collapsed and nobody had any money to spend and that business plan dried up.

The next step on her path was to put the entire training course into a book designed to help patients and caregivers learn to practice the Art of Conscious Dying together. In 2015, she released “Beyond the Veil: Our journey home” in paperback and as a Kindle. Her books, videos, meditations and interviews are all available on her website dianegoble.com

Diane retired to eastern Oregon in 2009. When she turned 80 (50 years post-NDE), she took up painting to continue sharing more of her NDE visually and is working on her family history project.