speaker-0: Everything is like has this slow breath like it's all alive. It's like I want to say vibrating but that to me is fast It's just like this breath or pulse of something and the grass was all moving like it was underwater almost in like in unison But there was no breeze there was no climate in a way and the light like this light was like love

speaker-1: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. If you're not familiar with it, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about related topics. And this is our 17th season. We've done over 750 of them now. If this is new to you, you might want to check out the website where you'll find a number of interesting things. One is a categorical index that lets you search for the interviews by category. and there's an NDE category, of course. Another is a video context search thing where you could type in a ⁓ search term such as Kermit the Frog. And if that's been mentioned in a particular interview, you'll immediately see the interview in which it's been mentioned. And if you click on that listing, you'll actually go straight to the point in the interview which has been mentioned. And I actually have mentioned Kermit the Frog. There's also a BatGap bot, we call it, an AI chat bot that has been informed by nearly half a million documents that are relevant to the kinds of topics we cover, including 1700 of the world's sacred texts. There's no charge for any of this, of course, but like today's guest, Jonathan Ashford, we do accept and rely upon donations. So if you appreciate it all and feel like donating, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and there's a page which explains alternatives to PayPal. So as I mentioned, my guest today is Jonathan Ashford. A lot of you who are on this call are probably familiar with him, but many of you may not be. So I'm going to leave it up to Jonathan to decide how elaborate he would like to make his account of his near death experience. Because for many people listening, they will have already heard it half a dozen times and others haven't heard anything. So it's in your hands, Jonathan. Why don't you get us started by telling us what happened to you?

speaker-0: Yeah, I was 46 years old, a C-level executive, single guy, had climbed the corporate ladder rather quickly due to the fact that I just didn't have any empathy or compassion for anybody. I was all about.

speaker-1: that helped you climb the corporate ladder.

speaker-0: By 25, I was a vice president. I just was merciless. I didn't care if you had been there 35 years or 10 minutes. If you had to go, I didn't think twice about it. Yeah, I just didn't connect with people very well. I could not understand the idea of compassion or empathy for others when placed in an environment that required the lack of those things. So. I moved out to Northern Idaho during the pandemic. It was just open and where I moved from was closed. And I quickly found a couple of contracts and things to work through. think I was a chief operating officer at the time. And I kind of found my groove. I was a workout nut during the day. I'd ski, I'd snowboard, I had mountain bike, I had rock climb, I'd hike, snowshoe. I was very active, a couple hours in the gym a day. was my church, super fit, super vain. And then at night I would go out and do debauchery things. I would try to find the other single people and I would do shots and drink and spit chewing tobacco and talk about all the Vegas trips with the guys and. You know, I was just somebody who was not spiritual and it was interesting because where I live now, I would say it's more spiritual. There's more of an understanding of spirituality, I would say in the Pacific Northwest than where I moved from on back East. And I was just opposed to it. I was like, what is this? Like, is this your weakness? Why you guys talk about this? Like people would come up and I would overhear things about astrology or I would overhear things about tarot cards. I'm like, what? I used to call it witchcraft. If I met a girl who was into these things, I'd be like, oh, witchcraft. And I just steer myself away from it. And I just always had this chip on my shoulder, which was if God really exists, why are you worried about it? Like, why are you thinking about it? What does it matter? You're going to die and you're going to meet it anyway. So why are you so worried about it today? And that was my inside joke. Why go into a building every Sunday? Like what's wrong with you? And I would say, if somebody asked me to go to church with them, I would say, meet me in the bar when you're done. And that's just how I looked at life. I've just irreverent, brash. And then sure enough, I was working on an outdoor project at my house. It was on the keto diet. was intermittent fasting, super health freak. And I went to Home Depot to pick some stuff up and I felt really ill. I felt something wash over me. It's just like a blanket of illness. It was immediate. And I couldn't figure it out. And I thought, well, I've only had a cup of coffee today. No big deal. I went home, kind of powered through it. It working outside. It was now lunchtime. I went to a grocery store and I collapsed. I collapsed in the coffee aisle. And about the time I hit the ground, I kind of like snapped too. And being the person I was, I never had massive health problems before. I knew something was seriously wrong. But I didn't know how serious. So I got up and I took myself to the emergency room. walked in there. I live in a town of eight or 9,000 people and I call her medical care. It's actually the town joke. The medical care here is just keep you alive medical care because they'll even misdiagnose a broken leg. It's that bad. So I walk in and they look at me while you're walking. You're fine. I'm trying to describe. can't feel my arms. can't feel my legs. My head's woozy. And they're looking at me while you're walking and talking. So you must not be that bad. And they ran a battery of tests and nothing came back. And the ER doctor said, well, you're having an allergic reaction. And I said, I'm not an allergic reaction because all I've had is a cup of coffee today. So they sent me home for the next week and I'm working from home at the time. So I didn't have to leave the house much for the next week. I was paranoid. I was like, something's wrong. I felt off. felt weaker. I wasn't sleeping well. It seemed to be getting sicker. And like, I just do not feel well. It felt like something I'd never felt before. The following weekend it happened again. I felt that same feeling wash over me and start to come on again. And I was like, uh-oh. And I lived at the time about three quarters of a mile from the hospital. So I'm just jumped in the truck and went, sure enough, same nurse, same everything. you're back again kind of thing. And this time a marker came back in the blood and they said it, my blood was acidic. And I didn't know it at the time, but that was apparently a big marker that they missed. And they attributed my acidic blood to the ketosis that I apparently was in from the ketogenic diet. Well, it turns out that isn't completely true. It can, I guess, increase the acid profile in your blood, but what was really happening was I was let out again and it turned out to be subsist.

speaker-1: And sepsis is a blood infection.

speaker-0: Yeah, as far as I know, it's a bacterial or infection that seeps into everywhere in your body.

speaker-1: It could be in your abdominal cavity and all over the place.

speaker-0: It can be in three stages. I guess I was in stage two at that time from collapsing. So I went home and then the next day I fell off a cliff physically and I was half a germaphobe at the time. So I figured I had just picked up COVID from being in the ER twice. Like being in the ER once a year was a pain for me, but now I was there twice in two weeks. So I figured, well, I have COVID, I'm going to power through it. My body temperature started to change, at least felt like it was changing. So was bundling up. was 70 degrees outside in May, end of May. And I just started to not be able to control my body temperature, the feeling of my body temperature. Then over the next week, my hair started falling out. My eyesight started going. was having trouble eating. Couldn't digest anything. It was just getting weaker and weaker. I used to go outside with my dog every time I'd let him out in the backyard. had a big fence backyard and I was not even interested. I just opened the door and I'd just leave it open for him to come back. And everything changed. I started sleeping more and more and more and it was just getting awful. I would have like half my face swell, actually have a picture. I don't think I'll ever release it, but it was three days before the event and it just looked awful. And sure enough, about a week later. It was bad enough to where I was so cold. I had the heat on in the house. I was wearing heavy wool socks, heavy sweatpants, heavy hoodie, I was bundled up under blankets. I was not a huge believer in COVID at the time. And I thought, wow, this, this is really kicking my rear end. And I thought, this is real. What I didn't know is it wasn't COVID. And I think it was the next day that evening around five, I think it was like four or five at night. My entire body was yellow. I didn't even realize it. I was sitting on the couch and I had to get up and went to use the bathroom and I looked into the mirror and I was like, Whoa. And everything was yellow. Just everything. Like even like under your fingernails, like every part of me was yellow. dropped my trousers and everything was yellow. And I thought to myself, well, I don't feel worse. You know, the weird thing was I was so worried about collapsing because when I collapsed, I noticed my breathing changed and I was having shortness of breath. And that was my main focus. Like I don't want to lose breath. And in this moment being yellow, it wasn't affecting my breathing. So I just didn't really think much about it. And I went to bed and I figured if I feel worse in the morning, I'll just call ambulance, call the emergency room, get a ride, do whatever. And sure enough that night I woke up at 4 30 in the morning and I was. something else somewhere else in a way. When I opened my eyes at that point, I was sleeping till almost noon every day. I was so sick. So to be up at 4 30 in the morning, I was like, what the hell am I doing awake? I was looking at myself. I'm like, are you kidding me? So when I went to roll out of bed, I put my legs off the edge of the bed and I tried to stand up. And when I did, I fell. I fell right into the wall. My bed was only about three feet from the wall and I caught myself. I was like, ⁓ something's wrong. And I describe it as if you have a small LCD TV screen and you take two hands and you just move it around with your hands. It wasn't like the spins if you've had too much to drink or if you're seasick or something, it was like reality was being moved. And I thought, well, that's strange. That's really weird. And I tried to make my way to the bathroom. It was maybe 15 feet. I had to go down a short hallway and make a right into the bathroom. And as I started to walk, my legs weren't really working too well and I couldn't feel them. That was the weird part. It's like, couldn't really feel my legs. And as I was making my way to the bathroom, I was like, what is going on? And I looked down and I'm dragging my right leg. It's just like this lump that I'm just kind of like placing and it's not really working and I can't feel it. And I'm like, At that moment, I was just like, whatever, just keep going. That was my mentality in life. It was like, it's not killing you right now, just keep going. Why are you stopping? I used to say that to people at work. Why are you stopping? There's oxygen everywhere. Keep moving. So I make it to the bathroom doorframe and I look at the sink and it's, I don't know, six, seven feet away and I'm feeling like I'm going down. And I just said to myself, just dive for it. Just fall into it. So I did. I took like a couple of shuffles and just kind of caught myself on the sink. And when I did, looked down at my hands and they were completely empty. It's like all the fluid had leaked out of probably most of my body at that point, but I couldn't see it because my hands were the only thing sticking out of this black hoodie, this thick black hoodie. They were just completely gray, no fluid, just skin hanging. And I thought, I thought to myself, wow, what a weird hallucination. Strange. I must have like a really bad fever or something. But all week I had been checking my temperature and it was always 97.1. I couldn't explain it. I felt like I would have had the worst fever ever. And it was 97.1. It wasn't shifting at all. My blood pressure was all over the place. I had a blood pressure machine. was just all over. Like within 10 minutes, it was just all over. And I found that to be a side effect of sepsis. Your fluid starts leaking into your cavity, which is like your hydraulic hoses are all leaking, which makes you weak. And your blood pressure throttles. So when I looked up into the mirror, I saw my face. And when I saw my face, I realized in that moment, there was just something that clicked. My face had no fluid left in it. It was ⁓ completely gray. It's like my eyeballs had sunk back into my skull. It was nasty. I looked like a corpse and I only know that because I actually was asked to dress a corpse once while I was in high school. by a neighbor who owned a funeral home. I was cutting the neighbor's lawn and he said, I have a really tall guy. Can you hold him while I dress him? And I said, sure. And I went in there and I'll never forget the look of the color of that skin in that moment. But I saw that in my face and then something happened. Something just clicked. It's like pushing a button on a microwave. just, there's a click. And when I felt the click. It's like I had this knowing that I'm dying, I'm about to die. Like the body just resonates with it. It's not even in your intellect. It's like the whole body just goes into this familiar feeling in a way, but you've never felt it into that moment, but you've probably felt it in other ways and other lives. And I just recognized that I'm dying. I'm about to die. I'm looking at myself in the mirror, looking at my eyes going, this is it. And it was like the body knew first. And then the weird thing is the mind kind of Recognize the signal from the body and the mind just let go of everything. It's like, I was a power hungry guy. I was a type a, like I would play a soccer game and dislocate both shoulders and not take a sub. I would put it back in myself. Like there was no stopping ever. And in that moment, it was all gone. That person was completely gone. And what it just allowed me to shed. any clinging to life that I had. Like I'm too young or what is happening right now? Like the intellectual questions were gone. Like my dog, my, only thing in the world that I loved, I would have, I would have killed an entire village of people for that dog. And not even a thought. And it was just sliding away. And then the last thing to know is kind of like your personality and all this happens probably within just one or two seconds. My personality was, well, this is it. And there was no part of me like, darn, or wow, or why, the why was gone. And it was just kind of, it was graceful for me. It's going to sound strange, but it was beautiful in a way. It was delicate and it just flowed. And in that moment, that was it. That was the last thing I saw. It was lights out. I collapsed. I didn't even feel anything after that. It was just black. And then the first thing I experienced was this velvety blackness. I was actually using that when I returned as a reason why I didn't have a near death experience. Cause I always heard like tunnel of light or something. And I was like, no, didn't, I didn't see the tunnel of light. I saw something like a tunnel of light on the way back, but I didn't see a ton of light going. So it turns out when I took part in my first research study. I found out that there's like a large majority of us, almost half who see darkness, who don't necessarily see a tunnel of light. So this velvety darkness that I experienced, felt horizontal in a way, but I felt caressed and I like to describe it as like, if. It's like, there was like a movement in a way. It's so strange to think about because when I feel it, it's like you're cradled in something. felt like I was cradled, but I also felt like I was moving in a way, but there is nothing there that would give you the understanding that you're moving anywhere. Cause there's no light, there's no distance. There's nothing, there's nothing that would say, ⁓ I just passed something or something's getting closer, but you feel, I felt carried in a way. And the only thing I can describe it as the best description I have for it is when you're a child and you get all swaddled as a newborn and you're pressed against the chest of someone and that kind of darkness is dark. You can't see any light. You're probably your head's nuzzled and mom or something. You're all bundled up, but you feel cradled. You feel like you're not just floating on your own kind of thing. didn't feel like I was floating in space or something like that. I just felt encompassed, loved and comfortable. comfortable. Yeah, there was no, absolutely. got it. And I don't know how long I was in that space. There's no time as I know it, no time as I felt it. And then the next thing I know, it's kind of like you wake up. I call it a long blink. You know, if you blinked your eyes long enough and you no longer in the room, where are you now? Like you're somewhere else. And when I woke in this place, it was a landscape. It was a glowing landscape.

speaker-1: secure

speaker-0: Someone described it once as gloaming. It looks like the Scottish Highlands or the Irish countryside. There was this six inch or eight inch grass, maybe.

speaker-1: Before you go on, I'm wondering if that whole thing you went through where it was dark and you were feeling swaddled and all that stuff was some kind of a portal or some kind of a transition zone that you needed to traverse before you could get to the meadow.

speaker-0: I do believe that's the case. I do believe that there is some kind of mini transition before. To me, there's multiple transitions. think that was one. The next one was when I was welcomed by a being, so to speak.

speaker-1: Maybe the dudes on the other side said, okay, we got an incoming. He's in the tunnel. He's in the dark place now. Get ready. Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, like set the table. The company's coming. Yeah. I woke up in this place and the strange thing about it. And I also understand from the research studies is I didn't know I had passed. Like I didn't know I was dead. I didn't know I was in a place we would call the other side or in another state. It felt so more real than this. Like the only explanation or comparison I can make is this right now feels like a cartoon to me. It just changed. my understanding of what is real and what is illusion or what is manufactured and what is truth in a way. It just feels so incredibly real. And I'm looking at this landscape, right? There's light coming from everything. There's light coming through the grass. There's light coming out of the rocks, out of the hillsides. Everything has this slow breath. Like it's all alive. It's like, ⁓ I want to say vibrating, but that to me is fast. It's just like this breath or pulse of something. And The grass was all moving like it was underwater, almost in like in unison, but there was no breeze. There was no climate in a way. And the light I recognize you could, this light was love. It felt like love. It's, don't want to give you the wrong idea, but it was like tentacles. And as it hit parts of you, which I know I didn't have a body, you just feel this most incredible love, this unconditionally, like everything was there just for you.

speaker-1: let me interject a question here. I've heard it said, and I like your opinion on this, that people, when they cross over, either temporarily or perhaps permanently, they're presented with something they can relate to. So a Hindu might see Krishna or you're kind of an atheistic, outdoorsy guy. So you saw a nice outdoor scene and you're going to tell us in a minute about the guy who looked like a hiker or somebody who has some completely other, a Muslim might see Allah or whatever. So they kind of customize it so you won't feel out of place or.

speaker-0: Correct. learned that afterwards. think it was a year, year and a half afterwards that we all see what welcomes us the most. like I make the joke all the time. If I had seen a church, I would have been like, Oh, yeah. It was just a loving landscape. The light that you could go into it immediately recognize. could see 360 degrees around me feeling was seeing they were as one.

speaker-1: Ha!

speaker-0: It was like the color green that was the grass. was like alive. It was everywhere. It was its own being. And I just felt called to move a little bit. And as I moved, it was like, there was this fog, this boundary or border around me. And it's like, I could see things on the other side of it, but I couldn't really see things. It's like, if you're driving in a car and it's fog, as you drive further, things start to come through the fog. You start to see them take shape. And it felt like that. It felt like I was always in the middle of it. like a video game almost. remember playing Legend of Zelda as a kid. And it's like, as you walked, there was this bubble of light around you. Yeah, as I was moving, this hill started to take form and it was on the right-hand side of this essence that I was. And it was weird because you feel like you're walking, but you're not. It's like you recognize there's no weight. Like it was weightless and weight at the same time. It was very bizarre. I can't replicate the feeling I've tried. ⁓ It's interesting, but so as this, this hillside came about, I saw rocks, like a huge gray rock start jutting out of the side of it. And right there kind of like 10 feet up, I would say at the one o'clock or two o'clock position was just a dude, a guy, a hiker just sitting on the edge of a rock. had his hands crossed, his elbows on his knees and he's dangling his legs. It was like he was looking out. at this beautiful landscape, just admiring it like he had taken a break. And I'm, my attention is on this being. And as he turned his head to me and he just, he just made eye contact, but I didn't have eyes. It's like, you get this immediate welcome, this knowing it's like, you know, I knew in that moment I'd been told this being says you're dead. You're on the other side. It's my translation of something telepathic, but you know, I'm like in an in-between stage, she describes ⁓ kind of the welcome. There's nothing to fear. It's unconditional love. It's just like all of these things just get placed in you immediately, like a snap of a finger. And there's no part of you, I like to say there's just no part of you that makes the trip that's like, ⁓ really? Like, wow, right? There's no humanness that goes, hmm, are you sure? shed, that ego piece gets left behind. That part of you does die. So he, made his way down off the, off the rock. And then as he was moving towards me, I recognized that he is not human in a way he started to shimmer in a way. And you could see through parts of him at times. And, he came right up to me, stood right next to me and he could feel me asking without verbalizing it in any way. Who are you? It was like seeing your long lost friend that you can't recognize and having the amnesia and going, I know you, but how do I know you? And it's the weirdest feeling because you're like, it's a good feeling. It's not like, ⁓ I'm so upset. don't recognize you. And he felt that and he started to shift from his chest up to his head and flip through different existences. All these different people, like a deck of cards just boom, boom, boom.

speaker-1: And you are seeing that in his form.

speaker-0: Yeah, I'm seeing him, the hiker from the chest down still in the hiking clothes.

speaker-1: Becoming different people from the chest up.

speaker-0: dressed up, he'd turn into a woman and then a man. And I recognized all these people and it was the same feeling. I recognize them. don't know how I recognize them, but I know them as well. And until he landed on me, the person who had just passed. So I'm looking at myself as this being and I'm making eye contact with this being. then he quickly, he didn't, he actually didn't stay on that very long. He just kind of. showed me and then zip. And after he turned back into the full hiker, he said, I am you and you are me. And when he said that, like the whole place shook. It's like all things everywhere just was like, boom.

speaker-1: Every time you say that I'm reminded of I Am The Walrus by The Beatles. Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's good.

speaker-1: But so let me ask you, so this guy, do you have the feeling like he was your higher self? Because some people say that we have this higher self and most of us actually does not even live on this plane. There were just a portion of us here and the rest of us is there. And therefore he was showing you all the past lives that he as the higher self had gone through and you just having been the most recent one or some other interpretation.

speaker-0: Yeah, I have a different interpretation because I was shown over there on the second part of the experience ⁓ that you can access your higher self. ⁓ It was something else. It was a God being, ⁓ was not me, was not my higher self.

speaker-1: some celestial beings, some cosmic beings.

speaker-0: I use the name Jesus or Yeshua, but I also know that this thing is beyond, I think is probably not the right word, but it is beyond ⁓ manmade identification. Like we have names for these things and words for them, but I will tell you meeting them, it doesn't cut it. And the incredible unconditional love I felt from this being was beyond his name. Right? Like we have an identity and we shoe box people. We're like, okay, he's this. You put all this stuff in and you're like, okay, there's my Yeshua box and put that over there. And there's my Krishna box. there's, and I will just tell you that whatever boxes we have, you can get rid of because it's far beyond any box. ⁓ and it's, it, you would say, and I don't use the name often and people get P, you know, they PO'd about it. And the reason I don't know the name is because your identification of what it is here is through something that's only a partial truth. It's much bigger than everything ever written here. Um, what you will read here is the smallest fraction of it. And I replaced that name with love because that's what it is. It's an unconditional love, you know, that can peel paint off of a wall. It's, um, and he would say the same thing. He's. He does not have the ego that says, me by my right name or else, you know, it's there, there is no ego in that state. So, um, he, he directed my life review and it just started, there was no warning. It kind of after his message of I am you and you're me, it just started. And I will just say that my life review was spicy. Um, I wasn't the best guy. did have experiences in the life review that I said. I would say are beautiful and loving and showed me when I was love. But a lot of it was how I dealt with people. A lot of it was understanding I was just walking around in denial of what I was, what you are, what everybody is, ⁓ denying my connection to others. I was an elitist, right? ⁓ If you weren't close to the top like me, why would I even talk to you? You're not worth my time.

speaker-1: And during that life review, were you feeling remorseful or guilt, know, embarrassed or, you know, going through all kinds of emotional conniptions because of the influence you'd had on people?

speaker-0: No, you know what it was? It's worse than that. It's, I didn't have regret or I didn't have the emotional side. When you're there with this being and you're feeling the loves that comes from this being and you're witnessing yourself play out something and you're either in your body or in somebody else's receiving kind of the garbage you're spitting at somebody, you recognize that you're letting this being down. And that's the worst feeling. It's not like, I really regret, you know, like treating this person poorly. That's very human calculation. There is some of that in a way, but what really hurts is when you understand that that being is also that person that you had spit that at. Right. I am you, you are me. It is everything. We are it. When you realize what you're doing to somebody else, you're doing to it. Then that's the worst feeling.

speaker-1: Yeah, remember Jesus, you probably don't remember this because you didn't go to church, but Jesus said, you know, whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.

speaker-0: There you go. There you go. Perfect. ⁓ and I would say that's the feeling that is the worst because you recognize how much love you're receiving from this being like unconditional love, even doing the worst thing I had ever done in my lifetime, all of the worst things unconditionally love, not even a flinch. And it's like your best friend, your brother, your buddy, your maker, your all kinds of things, right. Wrapped up into one ball. you're like, I let you down. You know, I just. I let you down and that is the worst feeling that I can put it. Like I tell everybody, if you do one thing here, recognize how you treat people. Cause you don't want to feel that you just don't. It's, it's not fun. It's not fun at all. And it's not about like how many F-bombs I dropped or how much porn I watched or like those are human things, but it's about our connection to each other. It's about understanding how connected we are to each other. about understanding we are love itself in a way. And I would say that was the biggest takeaway for me in my experience. I can't speak for anybody else's, but that was rough.

speaker-1: I've heard you say that we're not judged, but it sounds here like you were judging yourself at that point. This being wasn't like, you know, giving you a hard time, but it's like, okay, let me just play this movie for you and see how you feel.

speaker-0: Correct. Yeah, it's like in that space, the human filter is removed. Sometimes I say, you know, we have excuses here why we act a certain way. Like I could have taken everything in my life review and said, you know, from the age of 21 to 46, everything that I did bad was because I was stressed because I was working a lot of hours, right? That's an excuse. There's no excuse there. It doesn't exist. There's no like you're too tired. You know, you were tired and you yelled at your kid, right? We're going to do these things because we're here to experience. However, if you're awake to the fact that this is an experience, you won't have the excuse of why you do certain things. And that, that was the eyeopening piece for me. There was no judgment from that being whatsoever. And I've done some really crazy nasty things.

speaker-1: He just weren't awake. Remember what Jesus said on the cross? said, forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.

speaker-0: Absolutely, absolutely. it's weird. It's like you feel like a child there. Like we live at a complete adult life. We think we know what's up. You you die and you have an experience. You're like, I was eating. I was the kid in the corner of kindergarten just eating crayons. So thought I knew what I was doing. You know, it's like, you just have this difference of feeling between you and what it really is. And you just realize we're all children here, just feeling our way through it. We're all in this stage of trying to remember what this is about. And how could a God being in a sense, look at you and go, well, you know, when you were 16, you did this and I'm going to punish you for it. There's no punishment in a sense. So it's beautiful. It's, it was a little rough. mean, to feel that feeling through the experiences of others and things that I had done wasn't great, but. you leave it, like I remember when it ended and it was just like, happened instant. It felt like it was instantaneously and a hundred years long. was the weirdest thing. was both at once. And I can't explain that in human terms, but I remember when it ended and just turning, turning and looking at this being. And it was just like radiating love, just like, now you know, and I love you incredibly because you know. You know what it is now. And I just remember that feeling was so overwhelming. Um, it just changed me on the spot. It, just made me realize what connection meant. Like, you know, everybody here on this planet, you don't realize, you know, everybody here on this planet, but you do. We're connected to people.

speaker-1: Do you think everybody encounters something like this when they cross over? Adolf Hitler is, hey, welcome home. Or do you think there's some kind of variation depending upon how we've behaved? I you're kind of an innocent little boy scout compared to somebody like that. then how does it, I don't want use the word, retribution would be the wrong word, but how do the scales get balanced if a person has lived a really horrible life? And obviously as a soul, they're going to continue evolving. how does that get worked out? mean, obviously some traditions talk about hell and all that stuff, but what's your take? ⁓

speaker-0: I know that there's no hell other than what we manufacture. If you believe in it, you will manufacture some version of it there. That's in the studies as well. But for someone of that cloth, there are two parts to that. The first part is how much of that was his own free will and how much of that was he supposed to do? The hard part to understand is our lives are actually really planned. We don't have as much agency as we would like to believe. And everything here serves as contrast for somebody else to have the opportunity to be a loving person. Right? If everybody here is perfect, no one would have the opportunity to love anybody because you'd be like, everything's perfect. We just walk around in love. But when people are hurting or people are suffering or you see injustice in the world, that is your opportunity to choose love. Oftentimes we don't, we choose action. But in this case, I would say from what I felt in my life review, that person, let's say it was all free will. Yeah, their life review is going to be a bear. might be eternity in that review, right? There's no time there, but there are parts of it that felt eternal for sure. And it's like, how long was I feeling that disappointment of letting this being down? Was that a second? Was that a minute? Was that a hundred years? Was that eternity itself? The feelings are so strong and you don't have anything to judge them or filter them in any way. I have no idea how, how long it is, but let's say he did commit all those things out of his own free will. yeah. ⁓ wow. What he's going to feel. Yeah. It might be an eternity. Will he come back? Yeah, certainly. He'll have to, but if it's part of something that he was supposed to do. Yeah. Is he going to be judged? No, no.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's a tough one for people to swallow. We could spend an hour talking about it. If Hitler was supposed to do that, and then if all the people, all of his victims were supposed to experience that, there's a whole metaphysical can of worms that would have to be sorted through to come to terms with it. In the interest of time, we'll probably have to keep going.

speaker-0: So after the life review, just felt the connection to all things. It just changed me. realized, you know, I always felt alone. I always felt singled out. I felt like a lone wolf kind of guy. I had the group of wolves that I hung out with, other animals like myself. And I just then realized we're so much more connected than you could possibly imagine, deeper than any familial tie. And then I was given a choice in that moment, that second. That being still on my right side, telepathically said, I'm going to offer you the decision. I'm translating it, but you could stay here with me or you can go back and help others. And the weirdest thing is I know that it has a sense of humor because there was no way in that moment I would have chose to stay there. Like no, no matter how much love that you feel there, you also feel unconditional love when I was shown the good times. I was shown that the same unconditional love exists in us now and we can have that same love that I felt on the other side here. So there were these moments where I recognize, it's not just here. It's also back here in this state. And I thought to myself, of course I'll go back. Why wouldn't it? There was this immediate understanding that life, was shown to me as these sparks. As soon as one would get hot and red, it would dissipate and life here is instant. Like we feel it as a hundred years, but it's instant on that side to make a decision. Like, would you make a decision to snap your fingers on the other side if it helped, you know, thousand people? Of course you would. Like, why wouldn't you? And when I made that decision, everything changed. When I ⁓ telepathically agreed to come back to help, it was like, of course I would. It was just a strange feeling. Like, how could you ask me to stay when you now know that I know my connection to all others? And when I did, everything changed. As you say, as you said earlier, you know, we're all welcomed by something. realized the whole landscape was just created, manufactured just for me to experience, just for a warm hug. You know, it was like this embrace and it just disappeared. Everything disappeared. The being kind of changed out of the hiking clothes. You look like more of a God type of being very tall, ⁓ powerful. ⁓ and that we're in. I will call it a version of space. call it the void. It's like this living place that you just have this understanding all form comes from. It's like what's behind the form. It's like, if you're in a, factory of ceramics that makes ceramics, it's like, this is where the clay starts. And then it takes the shape of a pot when it goes through the machine. So it's like, it's like space, but it's not like space. The darkness is alive. It's ⁓ fluid almost. were the celestial beings or stars that was big as homes. Just boom, boom, boom all around. ⁓ The interesting thing was the darkness that was between them, which was like a tar pit almost like a just bubbling moving darkness was just as alive as the celestial beings. It was like you could reach out and grab it. A handful of it was strange. And we're

speaker-1: Celestial beings that were like homes. When you say celestial beings, I picture some kind of angel or some kind of sentient creature of some kind. Very sentient. insentient. ⁓ they're as big as homes. Big What do they look like? Can you describe them?

speaker-0: Size wise, size wise. Giant orbs

speaker-1: Okay, so they were sort of a featureless but luminous and sentient. ⁓

speaker-0: Yeah, definitely sentient, massive and glowing a color. It's like a bluish whitish, but it's not bluish white. It's some other color. Color was very strange there. There are colors, experienced colors there that I can't describe. Their color is alive. Like we would say, well, it'd be like red being alive, but it's really like more than that. It's like its own essence and the color that this thing emits is like the communication you receive. So it's like when you feel the color, when you feel the light, you're actually feeling the communication coming from it. It's like nothing.

speaker-1: So it's some kind of a medium through which information can be transmitted or something.

speaker-0: And in this place, I just experienced just information. It went on forever. It was started with truth. remember the first thing being shown was truth and it was a perfect circle. It just appeared, just a perfect circle. And it was a description of how we live in partial truth. And it was showing me full truth, which means every possibility all at once exists on that circle at all times, all versions of you, which means it's infinite. And it also means all because it's all possibilities. means all good and all bad. Right.

speaker-1: It's interesting that this started just after you agreed to come back. Yes. Because it was like, okay, he's going to, he's agreed to come back. Let's give him the down boat. Yeah. And then all this started. ⁓

speaker-0: It's very strange to me because when I play it back in my head, like chronologically, it's kind of like, it's very strange. The other thing that I found very strange was they could have snapped their fingers and I could have just had it.

speaker-1: Yeah, but maybe it takes a while to kind of download, just like you download a file off the internet or something. Yeah, that's possible. it might take a little while.

speaker-0: I know there were things when I started giving talks, there were connections that I made realizing that the way it was shown to me on the other side was the way I could present it to others. used to use a whiteboard and I used to draw the shapes and I used to draw the things that I experienced. And I found myself creating the same things from there and realizing, okay, that's why you showed it to me that way. So I can show it this way to others.

speaker-1: Yeah, interesting.

speaker-0: It was just props. There were props would appear like voids and screens and things that look like openings to infinity and golden letters and things would shoot. it was all about perception and time and love. And it just went on forever. Like it was, it's interesting. Like I come back with it and I have it all. And I just call myself a search engine. Like you ask a particular question. I know the answer is in there, but it's not, it's not here. I don't have to think about the answer. just, it's like comes from here and.

speaker-1: And you probably start answering questions before you even know what you're going to say. And it comes out as you're saying it, right?

speaker-0: It comes out before I know. fact, that happens very often when I give ⁓ interviews. I have to go back. I have to go back because I oftentimes, or even talks, I, people ask me, then where's that one thing you said in that last talk? And I'm like, ⁓ I got to go back and look, started, I started recording them just because of that. now we're like, ⁓ they're not my words. ⁓ so it's, yeah, it's, ⁓ It stopped when in this void, there was this one celestial light or sun that was different from all the other beings. And it was like, they dropped back in a way. And this light just grew and grew and grew and grew. And it was just getting bigger. was swallowing everything. Swallowed all the blackness, swallowed all the beings that were left there. It swallowed the being who was with me. And then it swallowed me and there was nothing but this light. There's nothing front back, nothing but this light. And it's a golden whitish yellow light that isn't golden whitish yellow, but those are the closest things I can use to describe it. And in it, you feel everything. And when I say everything, I mean, you can feel every hair on everybody's head. You can feel every. blade of grass, every bird, every molecule of anything here, you feel all. And you realize that when you feel it, it's all for you. All of it. Everything that's been created is just for you and your experience. And it's an unconditional love that even I can't quite describe because when you look at the world and you look at, wow, there must be a billion leaves on that tree out there to know that every leaf on there is for you to look at as part of your experience. You will know that that tree is made out of love just for you. Every car going by you, look at cars all day and you're like, you know, it's just a car. But when you realize that you viewing the car as part of your experience is the reason the car exists. Then you start to plug into something greater. Everything here exists for our experience.

speaker-1: Well, could the person in the car say, okay, that guy on the sidewalk who's looking at me, exists for me. The reason he exists is for me. So in other words, this, what you're saying here could be applied to all 8 billion of us. Yeah.

speaker-0: It was shown to me as a giant sand castle. It was one of the things that showed up. It was a sand castle, like a hundred miles high. And I was being shown the bottom, like kind of where the sand castle rests on the beach. So you're looking at this massive thing. And I was shown that each one of us is a grain of sand with just a grain of sand in the castle. But if one grain was removed, the whole thing falls. That's how important everybody's life here is to each other.

speaker-1: Yeah, no man is an island apart from the main. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. John Donne, yeah. ⁓

speaker-0: There you go. Yeah. But it's interesting. Like you remove the grain from the bottom and the top is affected. And you would say, the top of the sandcastle doesn't know the bottom. I will argue, you absolutely do because you're together. are the sandcastle. So we have this sense of individuality, the ego, which allows us to believe, ⁓ this is my life and this is the way I'm doing it. And this is me. But then in that place you understand, well, yes and no. You're experiencing it through an individual experience, but for the connection of all others, your experience, your existence and shown to me like, everybody asks me, what's my purpose? And I laugh and like, take your next breath, please. Like start there. And it's like, we're so important to each other's experience here because it is the very thing that allows us to remember more. Cause without each other, couldn't, we couldn't have. you know, the neighbor who hates my guts, which is the opportunity for me to love them, right? We wouldn't have the back and forth, the contrast. So, yeah, in that place, in that, I call it the embrace of God in that light. It just, I can't explain it well enough and anything I do is not even close.

speaker-1: Is that why we come to earth? Somebody sent in a question of like, why do we have to come down here and experience all this junk, you know, when there's this lovely realm that you, know, but maybe what you're saying is can learn lessons or something, or there's, there's value to be found in this concrete, difficult dimension of life that you're just not going to get if you just hang out in the, in the heavenly realms.

speaker-0: We It was shown to me as a gift. This is going to sound crazy to half the people listening that life is a gift because I sometimes explain it as ice cream. You're, know, you're like a three year old, you have ice cream for the first time and you're like, ⁓ my God, I didn't know ice cream exists. And you're just amazed by it. And every day you want ice cream, but if you eat it every day, you get bored of it by the seventh day. You're like, meh, ice cream. But imagine you would forget every day. So every day you tried ice cream, was the first time again, the first time again, the first time again. And that's why we're here. We're here to forget love, to remember it. Because when you remember the unconditional love that you are, it is, there's no greater feeling. None. Not even winning the lottery. It beats that. And it's just, the gift is knowing that you remembering love is serving the whole. You not remembering love is also serving the whole. So your individual free will piece is, can I remember today? Can I remember it right now? Yeah. Ooh, ice cream for the first time when you start to feel it truly authentically, but it won't make sense to our intellect here. It won't make sense. It's kind of like that embrace of God, which I was in created everything for us to experience this divine intelligence created everything for us to experience. So it could experience our laughter, our love. our sorrow, it's experiencing through us. It's like walking away from the sun, forgetting the sun exists and you turn around and you're like, ⁓ a sun. And the sun is like, you remember. And it's like hugs and love. And it's just, it's an exercise. And the unfortunate part is we look at it as something to solve. And in trying to solve it, we create our own suffering. And I would just say, it's an exercise. It's an exercise in right now. So right now, can you be loved right now? Don't worry about tomorrow. Don't worry about five minutes. from now, just right now, can you do it? Good. Now, remember as many right nows as you can throughout your life. You're going to forget, you're going to be the nightmare in somebody else's life. You're going to be the grumpy person. That's to be expected. This was never about perfection. But when you get to the right now, I remember, that's what changes the world. That's what changes the experience. That's when you turn and face the sun and go, ⁓ I know you're there. And that's where magic happens. That's putting yourself in a state where magic can happen.

speaker-1: Do you find that ⁓ you don't have to practice this anymore, like ⁓ be attentive and remembering it and so on? Does it become second nature after a while? So it's just your spontaneous way of functioning. Whereas for maybe somebody who hasn't experienced what you have, they really need to make an effort because otherwise it's so easily forgotten and they have to be more vigilant.

speaker-0: Yeah. I tell people kind of don't make it an effort, make it a practice, right? Fake it till you make it. know, once I pray or give thanks or connect three times a day minimum, but those three times a day are always my meals. I three meals a day. Breakfast. Thank you for the day. Thank you for the opportunities, right? I'm trying to be love in the moment. Allow that love to come within me. And I do that three times a day.

speaker-1: an effortless practice.

speaker-0: But then you can expand that. can expand that into gratitude and gratitude is setting the stage for, recognize this as a gift. I don't feel it right now. Not feeling that unconditional love in this moment. Cause my boss, well, I hate his guts, but I recognize there's a gift in it. And that's just starting the process. It's a muscle in a way. It's kind of like, the more you exercise it, the more you use it, the easier it is to flex it. ⁓ sometimes I say it's the shedding. So you have all these layers of the onion and you're just peeling away layer after layer after layer. And you're just getting to the source of what you are. And some people do that in this life. And some people won't, some people refuse and love them anyway, because they're serving to help you do it. Right. You recognize the action in another and go, I just don't condone that behavior. wait a second, but that behavior is serving me because now I'm being the witness to it that says, okay, I'll choose to be love at the moment and not judge the behavior. So we're all serving each other, breathing, serving each other, handing out sandwiches on the church steps, serving each other all the time. And, ⁓ in that space, you feel that you recognize that. And then coming out of that, it was like dropping in slow motion back into a body.

speaker-1: The question just came in that's directly relevant to what you were saying from a guy named Martin Klein. If the only decision we can make is whether we choose to be awake or asleep, how do we actually do that? Do we make the decision once and ask the thing in the room with us, please, I choose to be awake? Or is it more like thousands of little micro decisions in daily life where we try remembering to choose to act or react from a space of love rather than from a space of fear?

speaker-0: think it's a little bit individual, but I'll tell you how it was shown to me in my life review. It was shown to me that it's a state. you're not, we use the words like decision. You're trying to make a decision and that's true, but think of it more as a state. I'm trying to put myself in a state where I'm aware. And if I'm aware, I tend to see if I am loving or I am not rather than blindly walking through life. It was kind of like, ⁓ ⁓ I'll use it. ⁓ You know, I wasn't a good guy. I hung out with people that weren't great people and I would say, hey guys, let's go to the bar. First one to pick up a married lady wins. it's kind of like, yeah. And it's kind of like, that's who I was. And it's kind of like, you would look at that and say, well, obviously don't do that, dude. Like go to a movie. And I was shown if I had gotten to the movie, it wouldn't have changed a thing. It would have changed nothing because I would just be the same being. in the movie wishing I was at the bar. And it's, it's about state. It's like, think, well, it's this decision or this decision. And we're like, well, kind of, but it's more about the state that you're in. If I had woken up and said, well, obviously I should go to a movie because I want to be a good person or I recognize that I am love. Then you've changed state. So it's, it's a reflection. It's like you're dropping rocks in a pond and those ripples go out. So you drop. the rock in the pond that says I'm a loving being, your next 10 decisions look like love, right? You drop the pond that says I'm not, the next 10 decisions do not look like love. And we try to go forks in the road, every decision I would say that's, you're going to burn up trying to do that. Think about your state. What state are you in? Less about the decision, more about the state.

speaker-1: Okay, good. And then presumably as the state becomes more elevated, then the decisions spontaneously flow from that state and are loving or,

speaker-0: And it's, it's multi-dimensional, not only that, ⁓ but your existence just seems to randomly turn onto a different set of tracks. It kind of picks you up and says, ⁓ you're on these loving tracks. So you won't even get put in the situations as often where you need to go, ⁓ I need to be loving this moment. It's like, there's a reward system in place that is in it directly coincides with the state that you're in. So if you're authentically in the States, it goes, okay, I'm not gonna challenge you. You don't need it. I would prefer you to just be loved so that others can recognize it in themselves. So it's not like, well, you're a loving being. Let me give you a bunch of stuff to really mess with you to see if you are. It doesn't work that way. But it's more loving than that.

speaker-1: Cool. So, okay, so you were about to turn to the emergence from your death experience.

speaker-0: It just felt like I dropped back into my body, like a raindrop. was, in fact, when I say it that way and I get a vision of this slow motion, just raindrop falling. And it felt horizontal at a point, kind of like going in and that's when I had like the tunnel of light. It was on the way out, way back into the body. It was like that light was pulling back from me. Was I moving? Was I actually falling or was it just pulling away? I don't know, but it felt like I was slowly like a feather. If it just floated down, not that it was swinging, but it just gently slow motion just placed back in the body, which is very, very strange. was like there was a, it's almost like you could say there's a, a point or ⁓ a platform or a level or something that you come through. And when you get on it, get through it, it's like you feel material again. You feel the heavy, like you feel oxygen. It would be like coming from space into oxygen, right? There's a point where it's just there. And I felt that before I had reentered the body, it was kind of like I was back in reality or this illusion or this matrix. And it was the weirdest feeling. It was like being in the center of my chest. It was like I was standing inside my body in the middle of my chest in darkness, knowing that I was in a body, but couldn't feel any of the body, which was very strange. And it wasn't until recently, like maybe in the last year, ⁓ was talking to someone who's a big Rudolph Steiner reader and he said, ⁓ he describes it in the same way. And I don't know much about Rudolph Steiner. And, ⁓ I expanded, I felt like I was expanding into the torso. I felt like I was just. just slowly growing kind of like that light grew that embraced me like a slow one month thousand to one thousand through just very delicately expanding. And that's when I felt things that I don't think anybody should feel. felt like the heart struggled to take our first beat and it was like a half beat first. It was the strangest feeling in the world. Don't recommend it at all. ⁓ I felt the first beat. felt like I felt it. like cramp, like it was cramped and it didn't want to be, it like struggled. Um, I recognized that I could feel my lungs on my back. I was when I woke up, I didn't even know it was on my back, but I was looking at the ceiling. Um, I felt my lungs inflate slowly without ever taking my first breath. I felt fluid start on my left side. After my heart started beating, I felt fluid move down my left arm first. And it had a weird like a texture to it almost like a sound too. It was very strange. And then, about that time I, I took my first breath. all this time I was expanding into the body. wasn't until I took my first breath. was like, it was like sand filling a shoe box. It's just slowly filling the shoe box and I'm expanding into this body. And when I expanded up to the head, I took my first breath and it was a gas. huge gasp, like somebody drowning. Yeah, I don't recommend that either. It was excruciating in a way. And I just laid there. I was just trying to catch my breath. I was just trying to breathe. was just sucking in wind like a Hoover vacuum. And I looked up at the ceiling. I opened my eyes. I'm looking at the ceiling and then the confusion started. Like what happened? And then I reached, I went to reach for my phone and it was, kind of looked to my right and it had fallen out of the hoodie pocket. It was laying facedown on the bathroom floor and I picked it up and I went, that was so weak. Even picking up the phone was a struggle. And I just kind of looked at it, clicked the button and it said 4 30 or 7 30, 7 30 and the morning light, light was now coming through the bathroom window. And it was like, what ha what happened? Like I felt different. I felt.

speaker-1: 730

speaker-0: empty in a weird way. ⁓ I felt the mind was empty in a weird way. And I'm just trying to figure out what's going on. And then, I tried to get off the floor and I couldn't move. Like my left leg was kind of under my right leg. was like, I twisted and just kind of fell. And I tried to move my left leg out from under my right leg and it wouldn't move. And it just kind of sat up a little bit. I'm reaching for the sink. And when I reached for the sink and I grabbed it, the thermometer slid off. This digital thermometer and I know nothing is random. Nothing here is random. I was showing that not even the piece of dust that's flying by your face right now, nothing. So I stuck it in my mouth and came back 94.0 and I know that's emergency hypothermia because I grew up as a hunter. I'm like, you're in deep, deep trouble. What if you see that? And I looked at it and I said, Hmm. That was my response. Hmm. And I put it down on the floor. And I laid there for a minute. Nothing. was like no thought. was very strange, very empty. Caught my breath, then sat up again, tried to get off the floor. And this time I used the sink, helped me more to, um, to get up. stood up and when I stood up, there's the mirror right there. And I'm looking into the mirror and I'm looking at the same spot that three hours earlier I'd gone out and I'm looking in the same eyes and the eyes are forward. The face is filled in. I've got a little bit of color in my cheeks and I stared at myself. just stared at myself like what's, what's going on. And I didn't know what to do in that moment. I just, it seemed like forever. I don't know how long I was staring at myself, but I turned to walk out of the bathroom and I noticed while my leg was working again, my right leg, it was no longer dragging it and I could feel my legs. I can feel my arms and I'm like, I still felt awful, but I could move. And then I walked into the bedroom to see what my dog was doing. I figured he would have got off the bed if I was laying there on the floor for three hours. He never got off the bed, the lazy lump. And I walked in there and he just turned, he was facing the wall, the other wall. And when he heard me walk into the bedroom, he looked over his body at me and he gave me the most eerie look. Like he didn't recognize me. I'll never forget that look. He's passed now he's gone, but I will never forget that look. He was my. baby, that dog. And he always looked at me with nothing but eyes of love. And in that moment, it was almost like there was a touch of fear in him. It was like, he didn't really recognize me and he, he saw through me. looked like he was looking through me. And I, I looked at him and I said, what's your problem? And then I turned around and I walked out to the kitchen and I'm just slowly trudging along just to make his breakfast. And the weirdest thing, which I know is part of the experience is for two weeks, I was sleeping with my phone pre-dialed on 911 with my front door unlocked in case I collapsed again. was like monitoring my breath, monitoring my body temperature, taking my blood pressure every half hour on the hour for two weeks. And I'm walking around going, no desire to call anybody. Like it never even crossed my mind. Like, ⁓ maybe you should seek medical help. Like nothing, zero. And I went into the kitchen and made his breakfast and called him out and he ate. And then I sat down on the couch for like three hours and I just sat there, no TV on, no music, nothing. And it was like, I was not here. It was like, I still had one leg. started replaying this experience. I had one leg there and I had one leg here and I could feel everything. I could feel like the couch was hugging me. Like it was alive. I could feel the walls felt alive. The sun coming through the windows felt alive.

speaker-1: this point, did you actually start remembering everything you had just been through, that whole near-death experience? It's not like it took you weeks before it came to you. You realize, holy mackerel, I just went through this whole thing when there was this being and there was a field that looked like Ireland. That was all coming to you now.

speaker-0: The strange thing is I didn't know what it was because I didn't know what a near-death experience was. I was not as fearful. I was like, what the hell just happened? And I had done psychedelics in college. I mean, I had some wild trips and I'm thinking, this is far beyond that. It felt way different. And I was just sitting there just trying to resolve it. Just trying, what do I do with this? What do I make of it? And I had this overwhelming feeling of love I could not place. It was just so foreign to me. to who I was three hours earlier. And I'm like oozing love like out of my chest. I'm thinking about the neighbors. I love them. I'm thinking about the neighbors, doors down that I hate. I love them. I'm thinking about how much I love my dog. I'm just like tearing up in love sitting in the space. And it's like, I lived like that for the next three days. I literally just did nothing but sit in a quiet house with nothing on. just experiencing the experience like I was still there.

speaker-1: So you still didn't go to the hospital or anything? just sat there?

speaker-0: I had, you know, it's funny. I had a doctor appointment scheduled for like four days after the event. And when I walked to the kitchen to make his breakfast, I said, I guess I'm good. I'm no longer yellow. ⁓ My leg is working. I'm like, man, I'll wait till the appointment and no nothing, which is, know was part of the experience because I was like literally at a button. would sit on the couch like this. I'd have the blood pressure machine going. I'd be having trouble breathing and I'd be sitting there with the phone like this.

speaker-1: Getting ready to dial 911.

speaker-0: I'm to push the button because if my breathing gets worse, I'm like, I'm in trouble. And, ⁓ no, nothing like no, no desire for medical help. No worry. No, like, Hey dude, you, you were gone on a bathroom floor for three hours. I fell for literally a split second collapsed face first down in a grocery store, caught myself before I smashed my face. And that was enough for me to be lined for the emergency room. And here I know that I've been gone for three hours. know my body temperature is 94 degrees. And I'm like, ⁓ well, like what a beautiful day. It was the strangest experience. still can't resolve it completely other than it was part of the experience, which I wasn't supposed to call. wasn't supposed to do anything.

speaker-1: Before we get any further, I warned you by email that I had a skeptical question. So I'm going to ask that now. And I want the audience to understand that I mean no disrespect. And I actually think that it may help you to discuss this a little bit. ⁓ you know, medically speaking, if you're, if you stop breathing and your heart stops beating for 10 minutes, you pretty much have irreversible brain damage. I think the longest than anyone has recovered from such a thing is like some kid who was in icy, icy water and the really cold temperature kept him from having serious brain damage and he was under there for nearly half an hour. But three hours, I don't think there's a doctor on the planet that you would be able to convince that you had been in a state of no heartbeat, no breath for three hours and not be dead, dead instead of near dead. And I'll just say one or two more little things here. You came out of, you were completely unaware of your body during this whole three hours. And when you began to be aware of your body, you had the subjective experience that your heart was now starting after having not beaten, but you don't know for sure if it had beaten for three hours and you were starting to breathe, but you don't know for sure if you weren't breathing during those three hours. It just seemed like they were starting up again, but it could be that they had been going maybe in, you know, awkward sort of jerky way, but they, got to have been going. or you wouldn't be having this conversation with me.

speaker-0: Yeah, from a medical standpoint, it makes zero sense. None. And there are two others that have me beat, one at five and a half hours and one at 16. And I think the interesting part is not how long people were gone. I think it's more along the lines of ⁓ what people came back with. Like I could care less if people think I had an experience or not.

speaker-1: If I know you had the experience, I'm just skeptical of this no heartbeat for three hours thing. I wonder if you've ever discussed this with somebody like Jeffrey Long or Sam Parney or Pim Vam Lamel, these doctors that are into near death experiences and what they would say if you did.

speaker-0: I believe those two others are part of Jeff's experience or research study, which I am also a part of. I'm also a part of his. But you know, the interesting thing is when science is starting to catch up just now, ⁓ recently in the past year, they've come out with what they call the third state, right? There's science has always known two states, life and death. You're either alive or you're dead. And there's a third state that they've come out with recently, which they're saying they've discovered is a state between life and death. Where something is clinically dead, but also still has life function. So they're recognizing now that there are more states than medical science books currently have in them. The other thing that I find really interesting now that science is starting to catch up is When they break it down beyond quantum level, they find that everything is light. That nothing is actually material. Everything here is light. Probably that same light that I experienced on the other side. So if we're not even physical, if we're not even material itself and we're just light, what's time? Right? So it's like on the other side, it did not feel time. I did not experience time. didn't even experience distance. But everything we have here is, well, according to time, well, what's time, right? So yeah, I understand according to any medical literature that you will read, absolutely, it makes no sense. And I will argue that I have all the brain damage. Cause when I tell you what happened after this, you will say, yeah, you definitely are brain dead. But yeah, it's.

speaker-1: I mean, you wouldn't be able to talk. I'll be dead.

speaker-0: It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. you know what? There are many things about it that don't make any sense to me. One is it's like, why do I remember all the information? The average time for, according to the studies, I've done four research studies now, according to all of them, the average time for a near death experience or to remember the experience is seven to 10 years. Mine was hours, right? All of them.

speaker-1: I know, I've interviewed Anita Murgiani and Eben Alexander and people like that. I don't think it took them that long to remember it all. Yeah, it's the average. Maybe the average.

speaker-0: ⁓ I'm not saying that there aren't many out there, but the average is seven to 10 years. And then to remember all of it, which is also ⁓ not normal, but ⁓ no, none of it makes sense. Absolutely none of it. would agree. None of it. None of it will make medical sense. of it. None of the information I have will make sense to people who are in the academic community. ⁓ I've spoken with many researchers, doctors, psychologists, all kinds of people. And there are two groups, one where it makes sense in a way, in a spiritual way. And others were like, no, I don't believe any part of it. And that's okay. That's part of this existence. That's part of this experience. I don't seek any validation. don't, I'm not here for anything. I don't want anything from anybody, not even money. just, I don't. ⁓

speaker-1: Well, I won't belabor it. There's so many things we can talk about and and and obviously I believe everything about your spiritual experience, you know this other side experience. I'm just a little maybe I'm a little stuck in the current medical paradigm in terms of heartbeat stopping for three hours, but there's so many things I want to talk to you about. But before I start asking more questions, is there something on your mind that you want to keep going with before I start jumping around with different questions? No.

speaker-0: Well, let's, let's jump in. I'll just say that from that point, I was completely different. The cord was cut. That person who I was before did not return. Yeah. Not even close.

speaker-1: I'll let you elaborate on that because you haven't had a chance to say it, but your entire lifestyle changed. ⁓

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you an example. The last social event, it's really interesting. I can't, I'm missing memories from the previous life, ⁓ up to that point, but I have some that are very vivid. And I remember the last time I went out was maybe like a week and a half before my collapse. I met a bunch of guys in a bar, you know, doing my thing, drinking beers. I'd done a three hour workout. I felt good. I'm like, yeah, let's go out guys. drinking beers and spitting my chewing tobacco into an empty beer can. And we're talking about the debaucherious things that a friend had just done down in Las Vegas. And we're trying to plan a guy's trip. And in that moment, if you had told me, if you had come up to me and said anything about love, I would have told you to F off. Like if you had told me if, somebody walked up and said anything spiritual or even hello, I would have stared at you like, why are you in. You're interrupting me. Yeah. Yeah. I was that kind of guy. It just, I was always cocked and loaded and, um, waking up in a place of love. I immediately knew that didn't come back. immediately knew I was never going to work in an office again. At that point I had, I was sitting on a move.

speaker-1: You would've spit tobacco at him.

speaker-0: to Dallas, Texas, I had a job offer for $216,000 a year to be chief marketing officer with a large company, which I find this ironic, a large company who buys up residential properties and turns them into commercials so they can raise the rents and basically kick people out of towns, right?

speaker-1: Well, that's a creepy thing I've read about that.

speaker-0: Then I had an offer and I was about to take it and lightning struck and I knew, you know, I just could never go into an office again. I had a 25 year career in marketing and technology. knew I would never ever work in a scenario in any way where I would manipulate somebody for my gain or the gain of a company. And that ended that day. It's the weirdest thing. just, I wasn't that person anymore. And everything I had owned, had multiple boats, I had an antique, high-end antique sailboat. I had a motorboat on one side of the lake, sailboat on the other. I used to drive one boat to the other. thought it was great. look at me, I can drive multiple boats to each other. And all the other stuff that I had, all the money, all the trips, everything, it just stopped immediately. Immediately. Everything changed. And there was no slow integration. It was a light switch.

speaker-1: ⁓ So he sold all that stuff. I mean, did you have much equity in it? Because you must have a little nest egg if you sold all those boats.

speaker-0: I I did. blew it. I came out of a divorce and whatever I had left, I put into the house. I bought a house about a mile from the biggest lake in Idaho, but it was expensive to live out here. It was a resort town. So I put the money into the house, had a little bit left over. bought the first boat. Then I started earning again and I was like, okay, I need another boat. I need a bigger boat.

speaker-1: Because then when you had your NDE and you sold all this stuff, didn't you have some?

speaker-0: And I lived off that for the first year or so, paid down all the bills. I think I was $40,000 in debt at the time. So I paid that down. So I blew the money. Basically I went through the money in two years.

speaker-1: Okay. And we didn't, you didn't get a chance to finish your story, but the audience should know that what was wrong with you was that you had a gallstone stuck in a duct and you weren't aware of it because you had an insensitivity to pain. And that's why you were so sick. And I presume you've had gallstone surgery or something to get the stone out now or whatever. So that's not happening. No, it's just.

speaker-0: Yeah, I got healed. It was like the fourth day, third, fourth day in there. I had this giant flush come through my body. ⁓ was disgusting. I'll just say that I won't go into the detail, but my entire body kind of detox and flushed on that day. However, I was still severely ill and finally I convinced the doctor to do ultrasound and they found all kinds of damage to my organs and. What happened? It wasn't until months later, I gave up on the medical community. They couldn't figure it out. They're like, yeah, you've got some real problems. We don't know what caused it. And I went to a, what do call it? A functional doctor, homeopathy functional medicine. And she said, well, let's do a DNA test. do all the tests that the medical community won't do. And she put it together.

speaker-1: Medicine.

speaker-0: She said, well, first off, you have a DNA mutation to pain. You know, she could see the markers. I showed her the ultrasounds. She's like, here's what I think happened. I think you went septic. You're showing signs of having gone septic. And she said, well, you're really lucky to be alive. I just laughed. I was just like giggling to myself because I was not sharing this with anybody. Nobody was going to know about this. And the funny thing is I was sitting in this place going, I know on the other side, I had agreed to come and help people. but I don't know how and I don't know what that means. So I was just sitting, I was like, I'm not telling anybody. I'm like, just tell me how to get better. And so it took me six months before I could eat food. Normally I was on a liquid diet for six months and then it was like a little piece of meat. And then it was like, just grew, but it took a solid year before I could eat well again. I still, I'm going on third year. I still have medical problems that aren't completely healed. I'll probably have damage for life, but. ⁓

speaker-1: heard you say that about every six months you have a health crisis of some kind, you kind of crash and then you come back from it, but you've been upgraded a little bit. There's been a reset and there's some new level of wellness that you hadn't had.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's wellness. It's strange. It also coincides with the psychic gifts that I have. It's like every six months I come back and just get a little bit more psychic when I go through that experience. ⁓ I can feel more, sometimes physically feel more.

speaker-1: You know, there have been people in history like Saint Francis who nearly died and was out for a long period and then kind of came out of it transformed. If you ever watch the movie Brother, Son, Sister Moon about Saint Francis, you see what he went through. But there are numerous other examples like that where people go through this catharsis by virtue of a health crisis that alters them dramatically.

speaker-0: I do know, you know, over the, people that I've met over the last couple of years, just doing what I'm doing. I find there's a common ground that is found in suffering. Physical suffering unlocks something in some weird way. Trauma ⁓ in some weird way unlocks something more within us that doesn't, if you haven't gone through it. But ⁓ yeah, it was a long, you know, on the other side, before I came back, I was given some warnings. one of them was the recovery was going to be long, but from that side, you're not thinking, well, what does that mean? Like you just like, whatever it's okay. The recovery is going to be long. And it turned out to be long. It was, I'm still dealing with my third year. So it started then the whole experience really started then.

speaker-1: Okay. Okay. I don't know how we're going to do this, but I have like a couple dozen questions I want to ask you. So let's kind of go back and forth and get them in. So, ⁓ and they're not necessarily in the most logical order, but, ⁓ here we go. So some of them are from me and some of them are from various people, but here's one from me. During your life review, you saw that there were guides accompanying you during your life. I've known people who say that there are guides accompanying all of us all the time. And some of these people I've known and have talked to claim to see them quite clearly. Do you agree with those people? And do you see guides or celestial beings as you function now as a back to earth human being?

speaker-0: Yeah, it's a yes and no because we influence what we see in a way. So those who see God, you know, I speak to people and they're like, I have my guide, Michael, my guide, Mary and Lisa, and they look a certain way. And I just know that that is a formless divinity taking the shape for them. It's kind of like the welcome that I received in landscape. takes the shape for you. We all have. call it guides around us, but you don't have to call it guides. If you're breathing air, you're breathing it. It's around you. It's everywhere around you. However, some of us would prefer it in a shape.

speaker-1: Well, some people say we all have a guardian angel or two that are actually entities that have been assigned to us for life to look out for us or something. What do you think about that?

speaker-0: the board, I would say maybe in some circumstances, but the way it was shown to me is there's a formless divinity in the room that you can't see, that is always around you. It's a super intelligence, call it a quantum field if you want, but it's all around you all the time. Does it need a name? Maybe for you, you need to have it a certain way or you agreed to have it a certain way in this existence. For me, I do see celestial beings. see orbs, I communicate with orbs.

speaker-1: Well, yeah, I want to talk to you about orbs. We're going to do a whole thing on orbs. Let's do that now. ⁓ what are they? What are these orbs you see? I've heard you describe them in interviews, but tell the audience.

speaker-0: I think it's a manifestation of that formless divinity. Some might call it consciousness. It's not a thing. It's, it's.

speaker-1: Or means like a circle. So if you look up and you see one, are you seeing a luminous circle?

speaker-0: Yeah, it's like those celestial beings that I saw in the experience, smaller version. you're seeing an orb of light in the sky at night. see them in the day too, but most people will see them at night, recognize them. The interesting thing is I came back seeing them almost immediately within the first week. And when I first saw them, I recognized them from the other side. There was a feeling that it, it emits, psychically, guess for me. that I recognized, ⁓ hey, it's like, I know you ⁓ from being there. So I think it's more of a consciousness manifestation, manifesting in a way that allows you to look at something and say, ⁓ there it is, which is a version of it you can point at versus the understanding that everything, your kitchen table is also an org. Right? Like everything here is an orb. Your shirt is an orb, but it's a lot easier to point at the thing in the sky where like, what is that? Right? So it's, it manifests in different ways. It, ⁓ I've seen those orbs show up as many different things, not just balls of lights. I've seen them turn into shadow figures and turn into birds, turn into rainbow color.

speaker-1: it has a subtler dimension to it.

speaker-0: disappear, turn into clouds of white smoke, ⁓ hundreds of different things, which is why I don't call them, you know, yes, I'll refer to them as orbs, but I think it's more of a consciousness thing. It's much bigger.

speaker-1: Or do you think they exist primarily in a subtler dimension and we're kind of seeing them indistinctly as an orb, but if we could see them more clearly, we might see more detail and more specificity.

speaker-0: I think it's that super intelligence, so it allows you to see it. It's not floating around just for fun.

speaker-1: must be some reason for it or some evolutionary purpose.

speaker-0: It's for you to see it. ⁓ I do know like when I show them to people, I will take somebody out who's never seen one before. I know when they're coming, they will tell me if I should take this person out. I take them out and then they see the orbs. And it's like seeing something for the first time. And then they find that they can see them now on their own. So it's a recognition that it's there. Now that I can see it, I know, ⁓ wait, it's probably always been there.

speaker-1: Yeah, I had a thing like that one time. This is like 1973, probably before you were born. And I was giving a meditation lecture and there was a snowstorm. So only two people showed up and one was sitting on one side and one was sitting on the other side. So as I was talking, I was looking at this person and looking at this person going back and forth. And all of sudden I felt like another person had entered the room and I looked to the center and there was an orb like right there kind of, and it felt like a conscious being that I You know, it was conscious of me, I was conscious of it, it knew I was conscious of it, and it was like, hello, and then I just kind of went on with my lecture.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, that's how it is. It'll show up in rooms with me. Sometimes it gives me a message. Sometimes it just wants me to see it. I oftentimes say the experience is the message, right? We always like, well, I saw it, what's the message? And I'm like, no, the experience was the message. It's showing you that there's more. It's showing you that there's a lot more here than you understand. It's kind of, can you open up to that?

speaker-1: Do you think it's worth people's while to try to see them? I had another friend who used to see angels and we were in an elevator in the San Francisco airport and he had just told me about this. And I said, hey, are there any in the elevator here? And he was like, smiled. And we got out of the elevator and he said, they just said to me, don't tell people about us. If they're to see us, they'll see us. And then he said, by the way, there were three.

speaker-0: That's great. I don't tell people to go looking for them. I know that they show up when you were ready. It's more about estate again. Are you in the state to be able to see them? Because the part of you that really wants to go see them is not in the state to receive them.

speaker-1: Like he said, so if they're meant to see us, they'll see us. Okay, next question. ⁓ You say that there's a split happening in the world today between spiritual and non-spiritual people. ⁓ How do you see the change in society unfolding in the coming years?

speaker-0: ⁓ I'm not going to get too much into what I've seen. ⁓ I'll tell you this, you're watching it manifest now. You're watching the separation of two groups of people. You're watching spiritual people become more spiritual and you're watching those who seek more, just seeking more. Right. Where that ends up in society. I've seen a couple of things. I've seen a glorious new beginning, but I've also seen the absolute opposite, which is a really rough time ahead of us.

speaker-1: You think it could be both or either? Could we go through a rough time in order to get to the glorious beginning or could it be a fork in the road where it's one or the other for a thousand years or something?

speaker-0: It's appearing more and more like it'll be a fork in the road.

speaker-1: Okay. Now, you know, certain fundamentalist Christian groups say, okay, we're going to heaven. Everybody else is going to stay on earth and get tortured for a long time. Which is a rather simplistic way of interpreting what we're saying here. What would your take on it be?

speaker-0: ⁓ I would say there's a possible version of that, right? Like if you're, let's take today. If you're today worried about everything in the world, you're causing your own hell. Right. But if you're sitting in the space of love right now, realizing that that's found within and is not found within an external circumstances, then you're almost freeing yourself of it. ⁓ I don't see people want to think of it backwards. They'll think external to internal, and I will say it's internal to external. So your internal state is projected out into the world versus, that's happening and that affects me. So it really depends on what's happening out there. And I will say flip that quickly, flip it, get to the point where you can walk into any room in your house and just feel love. Just feel love, just for the sake of feeling it.

speaker-1: Would you say that the overall condition of the world is an expression or a manifestation of the internal state of all eight billion of us taken collectively?

speaker-0: I was shown that it is based on that stage that I talked about on free will. So if everybody wakes up to the love that they are right now, the world changes. We could say instantly, but I was also shown that if everybody did wake up, the whole exercise stops. It's over. Yep. This only exists for contrast. So it's kind of like, if there are no school texts, right? Your school book, your math book, they even use books in school anymore, but your math book.

speaker-1: whole world is going to dissolve or something.

speaker-0: Your math book is the contrast to go, hate math, but if there's no books, there's no school, you're out, there's no reason to be there. So it's about your state, individually your state, knowing that your state affects the whole.

speaker-1: Yeah, but this whole thing of everybody in the world waking up all of a sudden is a bit of a moot point because everybody never does everything all of a sudden. There's always that kind of a, it's too big of an ocean liner to turn suddenly like that. Okay, here's a question from Tanya Craig in New South Wales, ⁓ Australia. I've listened to many of your talks and resonate with them. The question is, if you know whether the knowledge you were given or have access to is right or true for everyone in all situations, given that NDEs do differ and different truths on the same subject are provided, is there ultimate truth that can be imparted? I guess she's saying different NDEs might have different spins on knowledge and, you know, Go ahead.

speaker-0: Yeah, for me, it's less about knowledge. mean, people will call what I come back with as knowledge and I'll say, I just come back with an understanding that the basis of everything here is love. And so if you want to break that up into more manageable pieces, right? The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. If you want to go about it from every different angle until you find something that allows you to experience the love of what you are and experience. Everything around you as the loving gift that it is that I would say it is for everyone But I was told on the other side that it is not for everyone. You know, that was one of the warnings I was giving That's for the one not the 99 and that was a multi-dimensional message that I didn't realize until I returned Which is it's for the one the one the one the one the one which means it's customized for each person But I also know that it is not for the 99

speaker-1: Oh, the one in the 99 thing. Yeah.

speaker-0: So you have to be in the state to receive it or to wake up. It's the reason why I'm not out there writing 10 books to try and educate people on how to become more spiritual. I know it's not for everybody. So I will say the timer has been set. ⁓ You have a limited amount of time here and your only purpose would be to wake up to the love that you are. there are people here that will never do that. Just like, you said earlier, the whole world can't wake up. I can't. Which means there are people that it is not for. No.

speaker-1: They're not ready, right? Maybe sometime they will. Yeah. I mean, it's like Jesus's parable of the sower where seeds are thrown on different kinds of ground and some of it dies and some of it sprouts up. Or the, know, Prills before swine quote that he said that, you this is not for everybody necessarily. It has to be receptive. Okay. ⁓ A somewhat related question. Do you ever look back on something you said a year or two ago and think, well, I have a more mature understanding of that now. I might've said that differently or in a more nuanced fashion. ⁓ You described coming back with divine knowledge that was not learned gradually, but simply given almost baked into you. How do you distinguish that kind of certainty from dogmatism? So there are kind of two questions in here. Can you be too certain and thereby dogmatic? And second question is, do you find your understanding and expression of it? more nuanced as time goes on, more refined, more subtle or something. ⁓

speaker-0: Yeah, I think I, I would say if there's an evolution, it's in the words that I use. Maybe the practice of speaking with thousands of people now, I would say has changed me. But, ⁓ no, I am, I am certain because I know it's not me being certain. It's, it's, I'm guided to it. Half the time the words aren't mine. You know, it's something comes through me. Like I've healed a number of people. But I also know it's not me doing the healing. I'm just a conduit. I oftentimes tell people, ignore my words, feel the message between them. Because I know that's where you become the one of the 99. That's where the message is catered to you. It's not catered to you in the words that I use. It's catered to you in the feeling you get between the words.

speaker-1: Right.

speaker-0: And that's hard for some people to understand. Is it dogmatic? Well, some people will say it's dogmatic. Other people will say it's healing. Other people will say it's horrible. I mean, I get the route, the entire range.

speaker-1: Yeah, I've heard you, you're telling me privately that you get some real flack from people sometimes. Which seemed weird to me because everything you're saying seems so positive and uplifting. It's like, who could have a problem?

speaker-0: Gosh, I get. I get the you effing mother effer. get those pretty much every week. get, I got one guy who wrote me seven days, seven days in a row, a full page of emails every day cursing me out because when he asked me if I would ask Jesus to fix his debt problems, I said, please understand that you don't need me. You can contact him directly. And he got mad at me. I get people saying they want to take me down, take me out. I'm a cult leader. ⁓ it's across the board. But for every one of those, I get a thousand that are, helped me so much. I've been trying to unlock myself for 30 years and I feel loved for the first time in 30 years, or I just lost somebody and you've helped me. Like I know it's just part of it. That was one of the warnings I received on the other side. I always laugh about it because every time I experience it, I'm just. I'm almost thankful. like, you're just fulfilling the prophecy of which I was told I will be persecuted for the words. That's how it was given to me.

speaker-1: Well, it's like Jesus' pearls before swine thing. He said, don't cast your pearls before swine unless they turn again and rend you. But unfortunately, YouTube is not so selective. You put it out there, everybody's going to see it.

speaker-0: That's right.

speaker-1: ⁓ Okay, so another thing, and I'll get back to some audience questions. ⁓ I heard you say, well, I heard one lecture you gave in which you kept saying yes and no, yes and no at the beginning of every answer. And I really liked that actually. ⁓ There was an Indian teacher named Nisargadatta whom you may have heard of who said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity. you very often it's true that there's a yes and a no to the very same point. So, but I did hear you say at one point that everything is equally conscious, a rock is as conscious as a human being. And in fact, I saw a video of Ramana Maharshi the other day saying the very same thing. then ⁓ there, I've also heard you and he and others saying that There are gradations and degrees of unfoldment of consciousness. It's not black and white. And there's a 12th century ⁓ Spanish Sufi mystic and philosopher named Ibn al-Arabi who said, sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man. ⁓ So I like that. It gives the impression that yes, the rock is consciousness just as we are, but as a reflector of consciousness, there are gradations.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. It's that original circle that I was shown that first piece of information, which was truth. And that circle, the rock is both awake and asleep. And that circle, the rock is both a rock and not a rock. It's all possibilities all at once. There's a reality right now where every rock can talk to you as you walk by it. So what's a rock? It's, it's really, it's understanding everything is both a yes and no. Everything is all possibilities right now.

speaker-1: This is from ⁓ a woman in the UK named Debbie. She says, I am a 72 year old woman who has struggled living in a body since I was 40. ⁓ I guess she's been having difficulty since she was 40. My desire to go home increases as I age. How can I reconcile living here when longing to return? I live a full life sharing in God's love through volunteering in my church and have a family, but I am exhausted. struggling with physically living in an aging body. I feel like I'm done and I'm ready to take the return ticket home.

speaker-0: That's tough. mean, there's multiple things there. The first thing is recognizing that you serve the whole with your next breath. That doesn't matter if you're a newborn or you're 99, you're still serving. You may not be able to leave the house as much, but you still serve the whole because we're connected to something that's invisible to network, an invisible network that runs throughout this entire place. So you feeling love alone in your favorite chair still serves the whole. The other part of that is understanding that, you're not alone and there's a gift that comes with age. And I like to say it's your last chance, right? Like we're all so virile in our younger years. We want to go out and play tennis every day. And when we're playing tennis every day, we're not really spiritual. We don't think about it. But Lord knows when you can't leave a chair for six hours, you have no choice, but to reflect on something. You have nothing but opportunity to find who you really are. in those moments. call it the age is the greatest gift because the ego hates it and the heart loves it. The heart says we can now be true love. We can't be distracted as much. So I would say recognize the time as an opportunity to find the love, which you are and know that when you find it, even if you're alone, you're affecting the world positively because love has no boundaries. It's not stuck in the room with you.

speaker-1: I've heard you say that you're not going to be damned for committing suicide when you get to the other side, but it's also not the best option. I'll have you comment on that and also on euthanasia, which is legal in some places.

speaker-0: shown to me that we can find what we are in our last breath. All right. When you recognize that you are a grain of sand in the sand castle and you matter, you matter more than you could possibly understand here. And it was shown to me that to choose to leave is like saying, I don't matter. And I am not serving anybody with my next breath. And I don't think that I am love itself. I am the suffering that I identify with. So. No, you will not be damned. No, you will not be judged. You will go and have your life review. However, you could say there was a karmic understanding that you were here to experience something and somebody else or others or many were here to experience things through you. And you leaving early means you will probably have to come back and re-experience some of those things. But no, you're not damned for suicide.

speaker-1: Now, when your dog ⁓ got too old and you probably had him put down, he probably just didn't die in his bed, you had to have him put down. What do you think about euthanasia? mean, with today's modern medicine, people are kept alive way longer than they would naturally, which is often a good thing. I mean, you used to be able to die from a toothache, you know, because you'd get an infection, would go to your brain, you'd be done. right. But I think maybe we Do you think maybe we have taken it too far in the other direction, keeping people on life support and all that? Yeah, think that's based.

speaker-0: You know, it's hard because I have the experience and I know this isn't as real as we want it to be. It's, we take this very seriously and it's hellish in a way because we're just here to experience contrast. And you could say that contrast is suffering. And when people tell me I want to live to be 107, I look at them and say, why? The better side is on the other side. Like, why do you want to stay? This is kindergarten. Don't you want to go to first grade? So. The part of us that wants to go on forever, that lives forever, right? That ego is like, I just want more time. That's the very thing that we're here to say, yeah, but that's not why we're here. We're here to experience what we need to experience. I do think it's gone too far when the desire to live another hundred years, you know, you have Elon and everybody else trying to put chips into everybody. The desire to live an extra hundred years. surpasses the idea that I'm here to remember that I am love itself, right? So now it's about the animal and it's not about the spiritual heart that you are. ⁓ so yeah, I think it's gone too far in a way, but most people, you know, the woman who's 72 years old, who's struggling, ask her if she wants to live a hundred more years as she is, and she'll say no. So it's individual, but yeah, I think we've gone a little bit.

speaker-1: No thanks. Yeah, and these tech bros who want to upload their mind to the cloud and things like that or like you say, you know Become bionic replace all your body parts so you can stick around forever I think it's a it's a misunderstanding of the way the universe works and the whole notion of reincarnation or there being life after death and all that stuff that they think that this You know meat puppet is all is where it's at. Yeah

speaker-0: Yeah, unfortunately, yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah. Okay. Jumping right along. ⁓ So you have been gifted with what you call the Clares, Clare audience, Clare audience, Clare cognizance, and so on since your NDE. And you've made some predictions that came true, such as the LA wildfires a few days before they happened. Yeah. And ⁓ some earthquakes and things like that here and there. So. I think I heard you say that, what could I do with it? know, because who would believe me? ⁓ But how vivid was that knowledge? How sure were you that those things were going to happen? Or was it just a vague thing? And do you still have ⁓ precognitions like that? And if you do, I'm suggesting you start putting them on your website with a way of certifying the date. so that people can be assured that you didn't put them up after the event. And then if you develop a good track record and keep predicting things, people can start taking your prediction seriously and it might save some lives.

speaker-0: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. The first big one that I received was the LA wildfires. I mean, I had received so many small ones or precognition of conversations with others or things while sitting with others. But the really big one that was shocking to me was the LA wildfires because I saw it. I smelled it. I felt it. All of it.

speaker-1: And you knew it was LA, knew it was... Palisades and Alta Dena, you had it all nailed.

speaker-0: You know, the whole... And I knew that it wasn't for me because when I got the message, I was sitting in a meditation and I came out and I was doing a round table discussion with, think it was like five or six people. And there was a woman there whose daughter was in California and I knew it was for her. So I told her, said, LA is going to burn. And, ⁓ she informed her daughter. So it's like, when I get these things, I know they're not for me. I received them, you know, not too long after that was I was in a. meditation with somebody who was questioning, questioning the ability. And that day I'm in that meditation. see, I think it was a Swiss flag. see a mountain top. see snow, like there's a Swiss flag on top of the mountain top. And I see this gust of wind come, and the whole mountain, the face of this mountain just slides off in this giant avalanche. And a week later. Yep. And a week later, it swallowed an entire village. Now, what's that for? I told the woman who was skeptical about it, but what's it really for? You know, it's like sometimes I receive these things just as an affirmation. Like I said before, sometimes the experience is the message, right? So it's not like I'm going to pick up the phone and 911, you know, dial Sweden and say, Hey everybody, there's going to be an avalanche. didn't know where, what part of Sweden, I mean, Swedes, a lot of Switzerland, sorry.

speaker-1: Resolute

speaker-0: He's going to have all this, these mountains in him. Like, where am I going to point them? And it's just this understanding that sometimes I received the message. Sometimes it's for an affirmation. Sometimes it's directed at somebody, but I rarely receive something that's for a group. Like, okay, Hey everybody, here it is. It's more very for something very specific. ⁓ so yeah, there are some coming up that I know aren't supposed to be released. ⁓ that I received a year ago that will happen. And it's kind of like,

speaker-1: As you get on, get on Polymarket, start betting, man.

speaker-0: If I had any desire for money, think, you know, I probably would do it. yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah. That's interesting. mean, as you say, it's not as specific as it would need to be for you to warn a specific village in Twitsiland that, yeah, you're correct. You better watch out. You better evacuate. But if it were, if it did become that specific, it would be kind of cool. You could, you know, be a really help people out. Okay. Jumping right along. This is from someone named Christina. What is the best way to practice being still? and able to understand how God is directing our lives versus just believing what we want to be true or believing that God directs our lives. How to make it more of a visceral real experience and not just a belief.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's, it's difficult because wanting to know the how is the very thing that will block you from understanding the bigger picture. ⁓ there's the part of us that wants to know how things work versus let that part of you go. Just know that there's something there guiding you and you will see through its language and its language as circumstance. So we think that it communicates like. We do, right? The clouds parts and a big voice, booming voice comes out and says, turn left. It's more along the lines of surrendering in a moment and saying, I don't know where I'm going, but you do point me to the right, right place. You can't mess it up because wherever it's pointing you is the place that you were supposed to go. That's hard to start that process. If you've never been there before, it takes surrender. It takes an understanding that. And if you want to call it science and you want to get quantum and saying to the quantum field, you can call it manifestation. can use all the scientific scientific words you want and it will do the same thing. But it's an understanding that there's a force that will direct you when you're in the state to receive the direction. Otherwise the how is always asking, well, how did that happen? Why did that happen? Where did it go? Like that's the human that gets in the way of the state, which is reception.

speaker-1: Okay. Another question. You say that you don't have an intellect or an ego, or maybe I'm taking this out of context, ⁓ but I think we might have a semantic or a definition issue here. Most people are dominated or gripped by their intellects or egos. But those are just natural human faculties. And in fact, in the Vedic understanding, they are aspects of the subtle body called buddhi and ahamkara. They don't get utterly eradicated in the state of enlightenment. They just take their proper place. They're no longer in the driver's seat of the car, but they're still in the car. ⁓ So there's a saying in that tradition that Brahman is the charioteer, Brahman meaning God or the wholeness. And ⁓ you, the individual ego, are no longer trying to control the steering wheel, but you're still in the car. So in light of what I just said, would you perhaps... agree that intellect and ego are faculties, but they shouldn't be dominant. There's something that's deeper, more profound, more cosmic that if it becomes our primary reality, our vantage point, ⁓ life will flow much more beautifully than if we allow these individual faculties to ignore that greater intelligence and try to run the show.

speaker-0: Yeah, was shown to me in many ways. You could say two paths, right? Let's make it super simple. Two lines. One line is where you are completely surrendered and you realize that that's the best path because you're no longer driving the car. And the other path is you, you're driving and you run into every, you side swipe every car out there because you're one driving, right? Yeah. So it oversimplified. Yeah. The difference is I think, I sit in the place where I no longer drive anything. I no longer do anything without any guidance. That includes when I eat during the day. Like even this morning before that, should I eat now? No. Okay. I'll eat later. It's just sitting in the place of going, I no longer choose to have any involvement in my life period. I just don't. I am just guided. I, including your podcast, everybody I get podcast invites all the time. I won't do them unless it's a yes. It's not whether I want to do them. ask. So I know that whatever I do, wherever I talk, wherever I'm supposed to go is based on that response. It's not like, well, I think I should do Rick's podcast because somebody told me Rick is a nice guy. Like there's none of that for me. However, I, I have an experience that provided that for me. The rest of the people who don't have the experience have to trudge through. I'm sorry you do, but I didn't. You'll have to trudge through the back and forth. I'm driving now. I'm not driving. I find it easier to drive in this circumstance where I'm a little bit nervous than to just, you know, Jesus take the wheel kind of thing and let go of the wheel. So there's the back and forth between the two lines, the zig and the zag. I just am fortunate enough or unfortunate depending on how you look at it. I don't have the self that makes any decisions anymore. just go there. Okay. That's where I'm going. I don't ask anymore.

speaker-1: For me, seem to go from totally thinking I was driving the car to an intermittent thing for years where I would feel like it's all on automatic, to, I'm holding the, I'm doing this, and then it's automatic again. And then finally it just kind of mellowed out into, yeah, cruise control, right? ⁓ Maybe a Tesla on autopilot or something. Okay, let's get another guest question in here.

speaker-0: cruise control.

speaker-1: from Christina Ross in Rancho Palos Verdes in California. In light of the wars going on in the world currently, and for all of history, what if anything did you learn from the other side about wars?

speaker-0: Yeah, this is going to be a tough one. Um, this is going to be a big pill for a lot of people listening. Uh, I'll use more than just war. will use violence, starvation. I will use all of it. It was shown to me that everything here happens for a reason, everything. And I know it sounds crazy, but, um, I'll go back to the war. If, if in an example, a parent is supposed to lose a child, And that is part of what they're supposed to experience here. How will they lose that child? Something has to happen to the child. Well, in this case, you would say it's a war. Two fighters point guns at each other. One shoots the other and the parent experiences the loss that they were supposed to experience. We don't see it that way because we're not all in the knowing of how it works. We see the violence. see the end result. We don't see the dominoes that had to follow the lead up or the agreement of what somebody came to experience. And that's difficult, but it was shown to me that everything here is meant to happen for a reason. And you could say, well, I want to solve all violence. And in order to do that, as it was shown to me, we would all have to live forever. We would have to make the choice consciously right now, all of us everywhere in the world to say, you know what? No more violence. And then none of us could have children ever again, because the child will come in and we'll pick up a stick or pick up a stone because it's supposed to. So it's understanding that everything happens for a reason. You could say the greater reason is can you find love for the people who are interacting in the war? Can you find love for the person who lost their life? Can you find love for their family? Can you love the fighter who fired the bullet? When you understand that you are unconditional love, which means there's no condition or exception to being the love that you are, then you're there. But until then, try not to judge everything you see. There's a greater hand at work.

speaker-1: Yeah, I agree with that. And I understand how it can be, it can seem rather harsh and insensitive to see it that way. if, this kind of leads into the question of karma actually. I've heard you say karma is judgment, throw it out. And I think very often the way the word is used or the way the concept is used, it is judgment. And, but I don't think that's necessarily the... original or deepest understanding of the principle. Often people with an incomplete understanding of all kinds of things ⁓ bastardize those things and turn a beautiful thing into a harsh or senseless thing. In terms of what you just said, I should ask you what your understanding of the law of karma is. Let me take a shot at it and see if you agree with it. which is just that divine intelligence permeates and orchestrates everything. And it has the omniscience, as you have alluded to, to actually be able to ⁓ orchestrate with such perfection that, as you said, no speck of dust is out of place. And in fact, I heard someone say if there's one molecule in the universe that's out of place, then God doesn't exist. But there isn't, you know? And so my understanding of karma is not like, ⁓ you have cancer, it must be your karma. It's more that there's just this infinitely omniscient orchestration of the entire universe. Every flap of a bird's wing, every little thing that happens is part of this cosmic dance ⁓ that is, there's nothing arbitrary. Nothing capricious, nothing meaningless, nothing accidental. The whole thing is orchestrated to facilitate ⁓ spiritual evolution on both an individual and a cosmic scale.

speaker-0: Yeah, I would agree with that completely. think the part of the little karmic understanding that I have is you act a certain way, therefore it dictates you're coming back to be the street sweeper.

speaker-1: That's too simplistic to make that judgment. Yeah. Okay. Another random question. I wanted to get all the ones in from the listeners. From Kelly in Rhode Island, if I fully embody divine love of source, does that mean I should be able to stay in a marriage that is currently broken? Would unconditional love heal it?

speaker-0: Yeah, it's possible. Unconditional love can heal it. However, that I would say that you're trying to apply a salve, an external salve. I would say be unconditional love, but that also includes the unconditional love that you need to have for yourself. That's self love, which means having a healthy boundary. So is the marriage supposed to work? It's less about that and more about understanding your love unconditionally for the other has nothing to do with the marriage working or not. unconditional love has no condition. And that same love needs to be pointed at you. You have no condition to love yourself. I love myself more if I leave or I love myself less if I stay. You have to set the boundary of unconditional love for you, which allows you to unconditionally love another. And then you will be able to make that decision.

speaker-1: And so how does one culture unconditional love? I mean, it's like saying, I don't know. mean, do we all have the capacity to just snap our fingers and be unconditionally loving? It's like, do I have the capacity to join a major league baseball team and start hitting a 500 average or something? No, I don't.

speaker-0: The truth is you can, but it would take an extreme example, right? It would take something extreme for you to have no condition to love another. And usually we see that happen in states of emergency, right? You see some car crash on the side of the road and you see a toddler in the middle of the road and you run out and risk getting run over by a truck, right? You unconditionally love that child and you want to rescue that child. So it is possible. think more or less it's where does it start? And I tell everybody to start with yourself. You're right. If you can look in the mirror and look at all the ugly thoughts you've ever had, you can look at that one time you stole that whatever you stole when you were 15. Yeah.

speaker-1: Bubblegum. Old Field Road, I remember the store.

speaker-0: If you can, if you can look in the mirror and love that kid, right? You love that person. You don't say call up the store and resolve it. You just love the person, right? Because we're, we're creatures of perfection and we're constantly judging ourselves. We're constantly walking through life with some kind of grading system and how we are without us knowing it. And when you could look in the mirror and say, I love myself no matter what it's like from the life review. I was loved no matter what. And if you can give that to yourself here, then that's starting that understanding that, if I have no condition to love me, it's not whether I have a good day or a bad day, that's irrelevant. I love myself no matter what. Then I certainly can stretch that to somebody else. Maybe I can stretch that to my spouse. I'll start there. Maybe that turns into the neighbors as well. But it's just knowing that deep down under all the layers of the ego, you are love itself. It does exist. For others, it's good, you for some it's going to be very hard to get there. I hear it all the time. I just don't feel love. I love myself, but I don't feel it. To me, that's loving yourself through the ego. I'm supposed to love myself, right? I'd say get bypass that because you're just calculating love. Love is felt. Go hug somebody, go feed somebody, you know, walk the earth in a state of giving. And then you will realize you don't have to calculate love. You're just in the state of it. So yeah, it's difficult for some, comes easy. I see others who just find it in a week and they're just in bliss and I've seen all versions of it. And I think it's an individual process. You could say it's why we are here. Some of you are here to find it easily. Some of you might not find it at all. You might not be here to find it, but the opportunity is there to find it.

speaker-1: Yeah. you know, somebody used an analogy one time of a man standing in the middle of a great big mud puddle and there's somebody way out on the edge and he says, Hey, how do I get out of this mud puddle? And the guy says, take a step. And he said, you're asking me to step in the mud again. Yeah, but just take that step and then take another one. And you know, sooner or later, you're going to be out of the mud puddle. Yeah. So.

speaker-0: I use that, I use that in a talk. I use something along those lines. Like we're all dropped into mud in white clothes and some of us don't want to get dirty. So we don't move. And others are like, well, who cares about the white clothes? I'm getting out of the mud. Right. And you just trudge through it and you're filthy by the time you get out of here, but you've made it out.

speaker-1: Yeah, and you go to the dry cleaners.

speaker-0: You don't worry about it.

speaker-1: Yeah. Okay. So two more questions. One is, ⁓ and you've kind of given some suggestions along these lines, but maybe there's something more you have to say. Personally, I've had a meditation practice for the last 58 years. It's been really helpful for me. But I realized that that particular thing is not universal, different strokes for different folks. So, you know, what do you recommend when people say, well, what could I do on a daily basis? And how long should I do it for? that kind of thing to kind of move me along.

speaker-0: Yeah. My big thing is the recognition of beauty, natural beauty. mean, beauty can be found in anything. You can find it in a fork if you look hard enough, but, you know, it's, it's natural beauty. Take a walk in a park, go visit a tree, find a flower, look at the grass and recognize it's, it's very much alive. It's very conscious and just accept it into yourself. For me, it's a beautiful sunset. I'm a sucker for a beautiful sunset. If I see it, I feel that connection to divinity in that moment because I'm no longer me in the moment. am no longer my problems or thoughts or whatever that might've led up to me seeing that sunset, but find what works for you. And in that moment, bottle it up. Bottle up the feeling. There are many times where I will get off a difficult call with somebody and just shut my eyes and I'm back somewhere where I'm revisiting the last sunset I experienced. And in that moment, I'm just breathing it, just a full conscious breath. I'm breathing the space. I'm breathing the feeling, the warmth of it. I'm breathing the site. I'm feeling the breeze. am just there. I'm not even here. And it's important to understand that your connection goes beyond physical. You may be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, but you can think back on a time that you witnessed something like that and be there again. So for me, meditation is just the recognition of beauty and it leads into something greater when that intention and attention is focused.

speaker-1: You kind of answered this with the wheelchair example, but let's say for some weird reason you were arrested and thrown in prison and put in solitary confinement with no stimulation or entertainment or anything else. How do you think you would pass your time? Would you be sitting visualizing sunsets or what would you do?

speaker-0: I think I would probably levitate myself out of there. would just be in so much, ⁓ so deep in meditation. I don't know much about the Hindu gurus or the Buddhists, the guys who meditate and then they leave. They don't come back, right? They find their bodies in a meditative state, but ⁓ I do know it's possible. I think I would probably attempt something along those lines where you just... I come back knowing I'm not attached to the body. I'm not the body. The greatest thing about the experience, I think, is just realizing that you're not this. You're not the meat suit. You're something greater.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah. Do you think this will be your last lifetime or do you think that you'll be like a bodhisattva and come back to help people? And if you don't come back as a human, do you think you and others will continue to exist on higher planes serving some function?

speaker-0: The interesting thing is I was shown that I've done this before. I have chosen to come back for what I'm doing now before. ⁓ Which is funny to me because it's like, well, what did I do in the first half of my life? Did I just take a vacation from it and just party or, you know, it's, it's funny. But I also know the type of sense of humor it has. I was told that this, it could be my last existence. but I'm in that same situation where I understand my connection to all others. So, so would I say I'm free or would I say, of course I'll go back and help. So I may be stuck in a permanent loop of coming back here and helping every hundred lifetimes or whatever it's been. Or I finally do something, say something, get enough people to find their hearts that I don't have to, right? I don't have to come back. So I know it's a divine joke. It's a cosmic joke that, by the way, you've done this many times. You've been here doing this many times. And this could be your last time. like, well, what happened to all the other times? Like you probably said the same thing. It sounds like a tough sell. know, it's like, did you say the same thing last time? So I don't know. I think in my current state, people ask would I return again? And I would say yes. I just based off the number of people that have sent me beautiful emails about how their lives have changed. I I would do the same thing. I give it all up again.

speaker-1: I know, isn't that nice when you get that? I got that just today. Someone said you saved my life, you know, with your back gap. I thought, great. Wonderful. Wonderful. I know I went through years where I think I just wasn't that happy. And I had this ardent desire to sort of be done with this life, to check out and never come back. And now my attitude is, whatever. know, it's like, however I can be most useful, never come back, come back a thousand times. I don't care. This is I'm not running the show.

speaker-0: You're free. That's the best way to be.

speaker-1: Yeah. Well, Jonathan, it's been such a delightful conversation. We could go for another two hours. I know you're famous for marathon five hour Zoom calls. Yeah. So, but I won't hold you to that. And I think you haven't eaten yet, you said. So, and I'm going to let you go, but I really appreciate having had this opportunity to spend this time with you.

speaker-0: Thank you, Rick. It's been a pleasure.

speaker-1: Yeah. So I have a page on Batgap, which will have a link to your website, ⁓ JonathanAshford.com. And there people can, if they go to your website, they can sign up for a little email thing that'll notify them of Zoom calls and in-person events that you might be doing here and there ⁓ and that kind of thing. And you're working on a book, you're looking for a publisher, ⁓ hasn't come out yet, but. Are you sure you stopped looking for a publisher?

speaker-0: I went through one round of editing and I was like, I'm in no rush to sell a book. To me, the book is, it'll come out when it's supposed to come out. I haven't sought publishers out. People keep sending me like, here, they'll publish the book. I'm like, I'm not concerned with that yet. I think maybe someday I'll spend a little bit more time on it, but right now I'm just helping as many people as I can.

speaker-1: Yeah, I've had a couple of people, a couple of publishers say, you write a book, we'll publish it. But it's like, when am going to write a book? don't have time. Too much going on.

speaker-0: Yeah, I know the feeling.

speaker-1: Yeah, plus these days, I mean, how many people actually buy a book compared to the number of people who would see your YouTube videos and, you know, things like that.

speaker-0: I just don't know enough about it. I wrote what I would call a very vanilla book on purpose. I left like 50 percent of this stuff out that I experienced and I figured, well, this will be an entry-level book for somebody who just wants to know a little more. Then I got a psychic message one day that said, no, add it all. I went back and I started adding more to it. I still have more to add, but then I feel no rush to put something out. to anything for a transaction. for me, it's kind of like, if it happens, it'll happen when it's supposed to.

speaker-1: Yeah. And ⁓ just on a personal note, you are very giving. You sometimes do like 10 sessions a day with people and, you know, five hours Zoom calls. And I just want to say, I hope you're still like getting out and taking hikes and getting a little exercise and, you know, taking care your body because, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint. you you'll, you may be burn out or get unhealthy if you just don't take care of the vessel.

speaker-0: Yeah, I am not doing those things. uh, the only, really the only thing I do is this. I do it all day, every day. I speak to others. try to help as much as I can. I do not take any time for myself.

speaker-1: Yeah, but time for yourself, if it makes you more healthy and increases your life, is time for others. Like they say, sitting is the new smoking. know, if you're just sitting in a chair all day, it's gonna take a toll by the time you're my age.

speaker-0: I know. There have been some recent messages about, know, maybe it's time to get some blood work and do some other things. So it's pointing me in that direction. The unfortunate part about it is if I take more time for myself, I have less time for others, which means the waiting list gets that much longer. But I'm sure I will find a balance as we move forward.

speaker-1: You know what you can do? I've actually done this. You can do zoom calls on your phone while you're hiking in the woods. You can be talking to a thousand people or whatever on zoom and answering questions and the whole deal. Meanwhile, you're getting. ⁓

speaker-0: your steps. That's good. Try that. I might try that.

speaker-1: Try that. Alrighty, well thank you so much and thanks to those who've been listening or watching. If Back Gap is new to you, check it out. If you want, there's a link to get on the email list at the bottom of all the pages and that way you'd be notified of each new interview as I post it. Alrighty, parting is such sweet sorrow, it's hard to say goodbye, but we gotta do it.