Nancy Rynes - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buddha at the gas pump my name is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people we've done well over 600 of them now and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones go to batgap.com b-a-t-g-a-p and look under the past interviews menu this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it would like to help support it there's a donate button on every page of the website and there's also a page for other ways to donate other than using paypal if you prefer that my guest today is nancy rhines hey nancy welcome hi thank you for having me on yeah i feel like i know you pretty well i've read your whole book um awakenings from the light in the past week and you have quite a story so let me just summarize your story very briefly and then you're going to elaborate but um you know some years ago nancy had a very serious accident where a car hit her when she was riding her bicycle and she was dragged under the car and suffered could have easily died or been paralyzed suffered rather severe injuries fortunately she didn't die or get paralyzed then she had surgery to repair her spine and during that surgery she had a profound near-death experience which really transformed her life and a lot of wisdom was absorbed or imparted during that experience which we're going to be talking about today so how's that for a nutshell synopsis of your situation that's awesome well done so let's elaborate so um you know i realize you've told this story a thousand times and uh it's probably in some ways not too pleasant to tell it you know because it was such a difficult experience for you both during the accident and afterwards but people need to know about it for the context of you know this the whole thing what what happened to you and how you are now saying what you're saying yeah i think i i think to kind of as a precursor though to to the accident i think it's important for people to understand kind of where i was coming from before all this happened because i think it gives a different context to what happened if when people know i was a scientist i was a science writer for a long long time i've been in the sciences and and the engineering field for probably close to 20 years or even maybe actually a little bit more by when this accident happened so i was well steeped in the materialist reductionist way of thinking and i was a complete skeptic atheist most of the time not a very kind one sometimes i would say because i didn't i just thought that you know if you believed in anything other than you know this material reality you were kind of delusional um but i think there was a part of me though that really wanted to believe in something else because i had you know as a young child i was very spiritual i wasn't religious but i was very spiritual so i moved away from that in my teens when i got interested in the sciences and then you know going to grad school and in the geosciences really cemented it for me you know that was i was really sucked into that culture and that way of thinking and so that's how it was for me for the for the following you know 20 years or so um just being an atheist agnostic sometimes experiencing some odd things but then i would just shunt them aside out get them out of my mind i didn't want to think about it because it didn't fit into that world view that i had that physical reality was all there is you know it's funny um atheism and science are very often roughly synonymous in many people's minds you know and yet to in my mind if you're really a hardcore atheist you're not very scientific you know because science is supposed to be kind of a little bit open-minded and open to changing their perspective if new evidence presents itself and to just sort of adamantly say no this could not pop not possibly be you're not being scientific well that's a that's an excellent point you're right on you're you're totally right on um to me now after having gone through all of this to me now the quintessential scientist is someone who is open and really curious and is and is open to looking at you know experiences and data and information across the board whether it sounds weird or not because honest to god um and i mean that literally quantum physics is the weirdest thing anybody has ever taught yeah and it's been proven to be right like how weird is that right it's just from our perspective or at least my perspective as someone who had been in the physical sciences quantum physics is just like crazy weird but it's true yeah and it's been proven in multiple multiple multiple hundreds of experiments even probably in the thousands by now so why can't we use that as an example to really truly be scientists and look at what's all of the data no matter what it is no matter what it is so i guess maybe you know obviously very few people really understand quantum physics and uh i've heard some great quotes about from i forget who max planck or somebody about how if you think you understand it you don't or something like that but um i think one thing that happens a lot with new agey people is they they gain us some you know a loose layman's understanding of quantum mechanics and then they kind of extrapolate it to the macro world to the world of everyday living and i think some scientists kind of cringe when they hear people doing that because it doesn't necessarily translate well that actually is not quite true anymore okay so good to know let's talk tell us about it there are several scientists now and and um i'm trying to think like i get i'm like blanking on names but um uh brian greene is one of them he's a string theorist michio kaku there's a couple other ones um thinking about tr i think travis taylor is another but there are there's a there's a lot of movement within quantum physics right now and especially um kind of the younger crowd to to look at those those rules or that stuff that happens at the very micro level and see if it does actually influence the macro and they're starting to find out that you know it doesn't just pertain to electrons or subatomic particles it pertains to molecules which are groups of atoms so we're kind of getting up and up and up in scale as to where they're seeing those quantum effects but i think it's going to be years before they completely make that jump to say well here yeah we can see that it does affect the macro scale and here's how but there's an opening and there's definitely curiosity and there's some investigation and research so that's a good sign because we are all made up of subatomic particles and energy technically all energy so at some level there are quantum effects going on everywhere yeah and i think perhaps an even more fundamental point and we'll get to your story pretty soon but this is fun um is you know the whole argument about whether the brain produces consciousness or consciousness is fundamental and everything arises from that fundamental field and you're in tucson where they have that consciousness conference at the university there or used to have before covent um and you also told me like rupert sheldrake's podcast and he he and some of his colleagues wrestle with this topic but um you know most i'd say still the majority of scientists think that well the brain produces consciousness and therefore when the brain dies that's the end of consciousness and therefore it's the end of you uh but you know there's a flip side where people are saying no you've got it upside down in fact i have a friend who wrote a book called the uh the end of upside down thinking mark gober i've read that book yeah i've interviewed him he's a great guy so why don't you riff on that thought just for a little bit well i i would have been in in that brain producers consciousness camp you know before this accident so seven and a half eight years ago i would have been in that camp that's where i was um even though i had some bizarre experiences that were starting to make me question that just a little bit then i'd shut the door on that questioning again because it was just too it not necessarily i guess in some ways it was too hard to think about that because it was just so different from what we've been taught in the sciences that to think that way means oh my gosh now i'm going to have to really rethink my entire worldview and that's you know that's kind of tough to do especially when you're doing it voluntarily as a scientist it's just a it was a bridge too far for me at that point now after having gone through and and there's a there was a point during the accident when it happened which i'll talk about in a minute but when i when when i had that that incident that happened where i was in multiple places at once i remember thinking and i you know i was conscious through the whole thing i remember thinking after this happened that one point in the accident alone is going to change the way that i think about reality and i knew that because it was so so groundbreaking for me so now yes to me consciousness is fundamental and i would say that the co i go a little bit further than my you know former scientist would any even a scientist who actually is a spiritual scientist i've got a number of people that i know are like that but i will even go so far as to say that that yes our consciousness is actually creating a portion of this reality if not all of it um and and that to me that's kind of where i am right now i'm just trying to figure out how to touch on that and and make that more uh tenable for people to listen to more concrete but but that's where i'm feeling that's where i'm going now it's it's a gut sense that that's the way that that this works um especially with people like leonard suskind and and several others who are talking about this whole simulated reality thing and they're coming at like a simulated reality from the standpoint again of a of a atheist i'm not to me we'll we can talk about this too but this is another thing that occurred during my nde when i realized that this reality that we're all living in right now is a simulation or an illusion or a dream or whatever word you want to use none of those words really are adequate but as soon as i had died and i got my consciousness you know into that what we might call the afterlife which isn't the right word either but i knew that this wasn't what we thought it was that this reality is not um the be all and end-all of existence um and we'll we can talk about that a little bit more so no i'm not i'm not i'm definitely into the uh consciousness is fundamental it's all connected and it may all be one consciousness so the non-duality thing um yeah because if there is an ultimate reality then what is what are the less ultimate realities really made of yeah if you look at them closely and boil them down to their essential constituent it all ends up being the same thing and that's why the you know vedic tradition says things like you know that alone is and all of this is that and and and so on yep yeah and i i finally get that now yeah or at least as much as i can in the moment right i'm not certainly not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination but i'm starting to understand what they were talking about yeah it makes sense totally makes sense well i think we've teased people enough in terms of okay you know alluding to your accident and your experiences you had during it so you did mention that you had a few weird things happen in your life before then which kind of challenged you a bit but you brushed them aside are those worth getting into it all or you want to go straight to the accident uh you know they might be worth getting into afterwards okay because i think that um it almost makes more sense to talk about them either part way through or right after i talk about the nde itself um because they they fit they fit better that way all right so don't don't forget to do that okay i'll i'll keep my fingers crossed don't remember i'll make a note here weird things yeah weird things would be good yeah there's a couple of them i think that are worth mentioning okay um because they're sort of related to all of this but yeah yeah um yeah so in it's been about seven and a half years ago now that this accident happened it was in january of 2014. um at that point i was living in the near boulder colorado so in the kind of the northwest suburbs of denver um and the the climate out there for those who who don't live in that area or don't know the climate in in the winter time it's often the case where we could go out on bike rides during the middle of the day because it wasn't really all that cold yeah and then the next day you could have a foot of snow and then the next day at 70 degrees exactly so this this particular day um it was a friday i was off from work for that whole week i had taken off work for the holidays and just decided to go on a bike ride in town to do some errands no big deal done it before um and went out the the bizarre thing though before i went out on i got to the garage got my bike out and i had that there was a feeling i had in my gut that told me don't do this don't go out today and i just like brushed it it's like i don't know why i wouldn't go out today i have these errands to run and it seems nice and there's hardly any traffic so i'm gonna go um so i went out on my bike ride and within probably a half a mile i think it's it wasn't that far from my from my house there was a traffic circle that had just been put in and at that at that time the denver area was starting to get a lot of these you know roundabouts or traffic circles put in and like nobody knew how to use them we all hated them nobody knew how to use them and i was on a bike um and there was a bike pat like a bike lane coming into the traffic circle and there was one on the other side going out but they hadn't done anything like put a bike lane in the traffic circle or a way to get around it you know other than go through it and this particular one was very narrow there was not a lot of room to maneuver um it was probably a little bit too tight um just from the design perspective so i get into it there's a guy driving behind me in a like a subaru wagon type of thing and then off to my right there's a a street coming in uh to the traffic circle that's going to intersect it and and they were supposed to stop that that road coming in from the right was supposed to stop at the circle before proceeding so i'm in the circle and all i'm going to do is go around and then out the other side so i was going to go straight basically try to go straight through it and and i get up to where that road comes in from the right and i noticed that there are two vehicles like one a really large suv and then behind that was a truck of like a small truck of some kind that were coming in and it looked like they were slowing down and i i'm kind of watching them and watching where i'm going but at the last minute i could tell that that front vehicle the the big suv which turned out to be like a tahoe-sized vehicle um instead of slowing down she decided to speed up and kind of she ran basically ran through it well i was right there so she you know she hit me like this yeah on my right side uh and i remember putting my hand out like i thought that there was enough room like maybe you know i could push myself away from her this was like beyond thinking at this point but i was trying to push myself like this out of off off of her um somehow i ended up i must have done a flip in the air and landed on the hood of her vehicle just like you know i'm grasping on the hood of her vehicle as she's driving around this traffic circle uh and the bizarre thing is i'm thinking okay she's gonna stop right like and if she would have stopped it wouldn't have been that horrible of a thing but she didn't stop she didn't see me on her hood she was texting and she had her phone up on the steering wheel and she was looking at the phone didn't notice that she had just run over someone's bicycle and there was a bicyclist on her hood looking at her and so she kept weren't there kids in the car like staring at you or something yeah she had two little kids in the back seat there it was like uh i could see them they knew i was there i think they were probably screaming at her yeah is my my guest they're two little boys i believe there were probably i think the police officer said like seven and five years old and i if i remember right the woman's mother-in-law was sitting in the front seat as well in the passenger seat but none of them could get her to stop like this woman was bound and determined to keep driving and um so she kept driving and i just couldn't hang on anymore like i couldn't find any i wasn't far enough up to grab on to anything i could hold on to so i slipped off and slipped down and and it's like every bicyclist nightmare um to be in this situation where somebody is gonna run you over and so i fell off the front of her vehicle you know i'm trying to grab onto stuff uh trying not to get on the ground because i assumed if i if i hit the ground she was gonna run right over me and that was i just assumed that would be it like that was gonna be game over at that point um so i did actually i couldn't grab on anything i did hit the ground with my my left side and i heard i heard you know i heard bones breaking which is very disturbing if you've ever done that before you know how disturbing that sounds um i heard you know i heard my my collarbone go and several other i mean it was just a it was a mess we can talk about that in a little bit but but i hit the pavement and first you know some you know happenstance i was right in between her wheels and i was positioned such that she wasn't going to run over me at first but she was in a turn and so i kind of figured that her back wheels would probably impact me so there was a at this point there was a little instinct that took over i reached up under her i was at this point under her vehicle like where the axle is and i reached up like this and grabbed the axle it's the only thing i could think of to do um and that and then when that happened i had also had a uh like a bicycling backpack on when i was in the accident and there was a chest strap that went across the front well that somehow got stuck on on something on her axle or in that under carriage area so that was dragging as well so that was stuck on something and then i had reached up and grabbed the axle so she was at this point dragging me underneath but the that funky thing that i talked about a little while ago when when my shoulder and head and hip hit the pavement after i came off her vehicle that's when all of a sudden i was in two places at once and that really freaked me out um i was there was a part of my consciousness and i call it my you know my human level of consciousness that was that was in my body and and experiencing the accident and then what what some people might call a soul or the higher self or whatever there was a higher part of my consciousness that was almost propelled out of my body and ended up standing at the side of the road what kind of watching all this unfold and it had a different perspective on everything and that part of me what i noted was more of my true self my truest self it was very calm um very gentle and compassionate and loving and uh accepting of what was happening let me ask you a question here um i've had accidents where you know despite the pain and the trauma of the accident that's taking place um like falling off a bicycle or you know the other a couple months ago i tripped over something and fell on my face on some concrete but there's a kind of a inner silence that witnesses it and it's not perturbed by the trauma but i've never had one i don't think where i was like six feet or ten feet away observing it from the outside it was just what you're describing so do you um how do you what do you make of that after all this time and you've had plenty of time to think about it why did that happen um any idea well that's yeah it gave me some pause really you know what i was laying in the er after after the accident i've thought about that all day and and of course i've been thinking about it a lot over the last seven and some years so the way that i view it um in it i don't know may may not be absolutely right but it feels close for me right now is that you know whatever this human body is it has some level of consciousness on its own you know maybe the brain does produce a little bit of consciousness i don't know but there is there is a a basic level of consciousness make call it personality whatever that's some people call it the ego that's really attached and and stays with the body and that's that was what stayed with me and that that part of me that was in my body was very fearful of course why wouldn't you be um and feeling pain and feeling um absolute terror and it was it was in that flight or fight mode that that part of me that was propelled out it was almost like 50 feet away it was it was quite a ways off from the accident um that is what i would consider now maybe my higher self or a higher state of our of our own awareness or subtle body i mean some traditions would say we have a subtle body which is what carries on when we die or which maybe during an operation we were watching from the ceiling or something like that you know right yeah there's so many different terms for it um and i don't think any one of them are really quite right i don't think we really quite have the full understanding of what that all is at this point but it but it certainly some kind of eternal consciousness part of me or that i was a part of was out there and separate um and just sent me a comment that said it's quite common for people who have severe trauma to you know leave their bodies or witness it like that it's kind of the ultimate coping mechanism i think it's it's a savior mechanism you know it really is it's um but it for me it was definitely two very different states of consciousness one was fearful and tr and traumatized the other one was um very spiritual very aware very connected almost knew the future and um knew that everything was going to be okay kind of reminds me of woody allen saying i don't mind dying i just don't want to be there when it happens so yeah it's kind of like you're not there you've stepped out well i think that's really what happens for a lot of people from my experience of working with people who are in the in the dying process i think that eternal part of their their soul souls which that's what you want to call it moves on well before the body actually physically dies uh i've seen that many many times um and we can talk about that you know a little bit later when we kind of wrap up what i've done since then sure but i think that's to me what it what it represented was showing me these two different levels of of the conscious body um and and that's when i started to really think about and understand that my world view could very easily change just as a result of that alone i remember thinking that to myself a lot that especially over the next few days is that was just so i that wasn't anything they taught me in school you know they didn't teach me that you know consciousness can be outside of the body um and getting details that i couldn't have seen from my physical body you know there were things that i saw from outside that being stuck under the truck i couldn't physically see with my physical eyes yeah isn't that interesting it's like we have set senses in the subtle body which actually don't need physical a physical body to operate in fact i've heard of people who were physically blind you know eyes totally ruined who actually somehow had the ability to see because they were so tuned into that subtle body there's one guy who could ride a bicycle through an obstacle course with his head completely wrapped in a turban and stuff like that yeah well i i can understand a little bit more now how that kind of thing happens yeah um i can't do that myself but don't try this at home yeah i don't all right so we left you under the car and continue yeah so what i didn't like what my my body consciousness didn't know but my my soul consciousness uh from outside is that the guy that had been in the truck behind this woman got up to the the traffic circle and he somehow managed he saw what had happened um and he managed to drive his truck around the traffic circle the wrong way wow to try to head her off amazing which was pretty dangerous maneuver um but but he was bound to determine he was going to stop her and that was really the only thing that stopped her was him yeah blocking the the road with with his truck so you know so grateful for him for doing that um and then when when when she finally did stop it had been i think they had the the cops uh sorry the police officers said that i she had dragged me for at least 60 feet perhaps closer to 75 it was really tough to tell but anyway i was under there a while and um so when they when she finally stopped the vehicle my first thought was i want to get up and run and it was weird how it was almost like i couldn't control that instinct to get up and run i just wanted to get up and get the heck out of there fight or fly so right it was super strong and i so i started to wiggle my way out which i'm surprised that i didn't do severe damage to my spine at that point but i was like wait trying to wiggle my way out and i was able to get like my head and the upper part of my shoulders out from underneath of her of her front end of the of her suv and um and then a woman ran up and put her hands on my shoulders and said don't move um i'm a nurse i'm a trauma nurse and um you need to stay you need to stay still you need to stay safe and if and if she hadn't done that um i might not have survived because my my spine was really bad shape especially my neck um it was in tough shape i think they the doctor later told me that if i would have just even turned like that i would have been a goner because my my spine was just cr almost crushed up by my where the neck meets the skull so it was it was pretty dicey there for a while um but she kept me you know she kept me in one place until the paramedics arrived and then once they started working on me they they prodded just a little bit like very gently trying to figure out what what hurt which was basically everything and i remember screaming and when i screamed that's when that part of me that was that higher self that sold part of me that was outside came back in it was like boom the two came back together um when the pain flooded back in and you know from there on i mean they got me to the er and uh which wasn't too far away luckily it was only about not even a half a mile away from the accident and it turned out that i had at least so they basically kind of stopped counting bone breaks because there were just too many um they thought it was probably at least 24 different bro bones that were broken and they were broken in multiple places uh and so my spine was the worst as you can imagine it was the worst hit um the my l1 vertebrae which is your lower back was basically blown apart there wasn't really much left of it and my neck was in that much better shape so they wanted to you know they were thinking well you've got a couple of choices here um luckily i could still feel my legs even though one was just a little bit numb on one side i could still move i could still feel my legs um so they thought well uh we'll do we can do surgery to stabilize all that so that it will heal properly and if we do that you know your chances of being able to walk again are pretty good the other option was to lay flat on my back in a hospital room for at least six months and that was not an option for me i just couldn't imagine like i don't like to be a patient in a hospital at all um even for an outpatient procedure let alone for six months so that wasn't gonna work even that seems improbable because you you know you have all these bone splinters and everything and and how could just lying there prevent those from eventually you know poking into your spine i mean into your spinal cord yeah that was my big that was actually my biggest concern because that you know that l1 vertebrae was shattered and those little shards were just all over the place um i mean i think they knew what i was going to choose yeah i don't think there was really it wasn't it wasn't rocket science to figure out which what option nancy was going to choose um so the juicy part is yet to come because you had you had this operation in a few days and uh had this amazing experience during it yeah i uh so they real wheeled me into the or again fully conscious and gave me the anus the general anesthetic and it's it's important to note that i've that i've had surgeries before i've had this exact same general anesthetic before no problems ever maybe just a little bit of you know queasy stomach or something but nothing like what we're going to talk about next but so i'd ha i've had this before granted i hadn't had a physical trauma like that before but i have had that anesthesia before but they gave it to me and i started to drift off and i noticed that all of a sudden everything didn't go black i was i was standing up like you know like looking around and i thought what's going on this isn't right and i was standing up and it was i was outside which of course you know i wasn't but i remembered that i was in surgery so i had this concept of huh i was just in surgery what am i doing right now standing up and why am i outside and that's really pretty though it was a beautiful meadow up in the mountains and and i was thinking to myself well this isn't bad i could be here while they do surgery on me i could this is okay um and and then i started noticing weird like what i would call weird things um i started feeling very peaceful but it wasn't like it was me it was like peace was an energy that was coming into me from the outside then i started feeling love coming in like that's the only word i have to describe it is love or compassion or something it was like it was coming into me from the outside like like if you're going to stand in front of a fire or fireplace on a cold day and you feel that warmth from the fire kind of radiating through you that's what this was like it was like it was like that warmth from a fire but it wasn't warmth it was compassion and love and acceptance and that's when i started to think well this isn't normal i don't remember anybody talking about this during surgery and i've never had this happen during surgery i wonder if i died and i'm going through this whole like trying to tick off things of what could be happening and i and there was that moment i thought well wait wait a minute if i did die what's this i don't believe that anything you know it happens after death what what am i what is this place what am i doing here and i and then i went back to my programming that i had like as a little kid because i grew up in a catholic family uh irish catholic family for the most part and um i went back to my you know the schooling that you had in catholic grade school which i went to which would which always told me that you know if you don't believe in god when you die you're going to go to hell and so i pulled back on that and went wait just this isn't making any sense because that my training teaches me that i shouldn't be experiencing anything other than hell at this point why am i being accepted into this place of love and and i was just struggling with what to do with all of this when there was like a it was a voice but it wasn't like a physical voice there was a voice that that came through and it was just kind of generically saying this is your home welcome home and i and i thought about that for a while and then i kind of started to remember oh wait and i was almost like i was looking down now there wasn't anything to see down below me i was just like looking down thinking wait that's right that life that i just came from that wasn't real that was the dream this is my home it was like starting to come back oh [Music] yeah now i get it this is this is real and i and i really started to weep it was just so beautiful i was so accepted but but just remembering that i was finally home it was just so beautiful i couldn't i just was so happy to be back and and it was about at that point that i started to see what i would call it i just call it a spiritual being some a a being just of general in a very general vaguely human form um kind of vaguely a woman but you know she said you know that's not really who i am it's just a cl a cloak i'm wearing to make it easier for you to communicate with me um but so some kind of a spiritual entity or spiritual being came up to me and and said that she was my teacher or my guide um i prefer the term teacher now but she's my she was my teacher and she would help me learn what i needed to learn did you get the impression she was saying that she was your teacher for that moment or had been your teacher for a long time or something had been my teacher for a long time okay that was the that was the the sense that i got and i kind of remembered her it was more like oh yeah i kind of know who you are like there was a there was a vague memory there do you think everybody has a teacher like that that's assigned to them or perhaps each teacher such as her has a dozen people that they look out for or anything any thoughts on that yeah probably multiple i know i i mean i i've asked i asked her about that a little bit and she definitely said it's not it's not a one-to-one thing so she has a lot of different people that she helps um not just me and um and and it makes it that makes total sense um given that time doesn't really exist in that state of of being the way that it does here so there's not a sense of linear time it's just now and and there's no sense of time flowing and oh my gosh i can't get it back because now that's the past and i can't go there so so the fact that she may have i don't know 50 or 100 students doesn't really matter that she can you know handle all of that um so she she told me that you know she was going to help me remember and learn what i needed to learn and i got stuck on that and you're going to go back thing i did not want to go back to that life um not only was i was i was scared you know i was scared of what my body would be like um i was afraid that maybe i'd be a paraplegic when they got done with the surgery i had no idea what was going to happen um or you know just having a mobility impairment i i just couldn't wrap my brain around coming back into that um after having been to this amazing place that i was in and and she said well you've already agreed to go back so you're gonna go back at the end of this and i'm like i don't remember agreeing to that and i actually said that i'm like i don't remember agreeing to do that and so it's if anybody's seen the movie the shack um which came out after my experience but the the movie there there's a set a couple of scenes in that movie where the protagonist is shown like a vision of his life kind of in the air in front of him and he gets to do what we call a life review um well i was kind of in that moment showing something very similar it was like almost like a video screen in the air um and my my teacher showed me me before my birth kind of in like in general terms agreeing to do certain things or agreeing to experience certain things or agreeing to learn certain things so you know i was i wanted to learn some stuff i wanted to do some stuff and i had made a commitment that if i hadn't led a spiritual path or taken a spiritual path by the time i was in like my mid-30s then this event would happen the one that was causing this wow now that's interesting so so first of all if people want to delve into this notion you can read michael newton's books or i've interviewed a guy named rob schwartz who talks about you know between life yep situations where we decide what's going into our life but what you just said you know this it sound there's a verse in the yoga sutras which goes um heyam dukkha monogatam which means avert the danger which has not yet come and the implication is that by doing enough spiritual practice making enough spiritual progress you can avert calamitous situations which you will otherwise have to undergo because whatever you will have sort of made the transition or learned what you needed to learn in order not to have get smacked over the head to learn it you know so so what you just said it's very interesting that you had you somehow or other you know gotten on a spiritual path earlier this accident wouldn't have had to happen at all it wouldn't have been necessary yeah wow on the other hand you know you've come up with so much interesting stuff which we haven't even gotten into yet that you learned in that between life or that near-death experience and maybe you would never have been able to convey such knowledge to people if you hadn't gone through something like this it's hard to say it yeah it is and i i i don't i don't waste a lot of my energy considering that because i'm here yeah you know i haven't figured out a way at least in this life to go back in time and change things so and actually what i just said doesn't make sense because there are plenty of spiritual teachers who are saying the kinds of things you say without having had a car accident or yeah near-death experience yeah yeah and who i mean who knows it maybe i would have learned it maybe not i i don't know yeah um but you know i went through it and and here i am um so let that be a warning to everybody better get on the spiritual path you're gonna get hit by a car well i think that's a real it was that's an interesting point to bring up because i i think that if i look back if i would have really delved into my spirituality in my 20s actually when when i first had my first inkling to do so i just because of the kind of personality i have i would have dived in headfirst and just glommed onto it um i probably wouldn't have needed this accident but yeah and that that's just one more point i'll throw in and you can keep telling the story but you know some people would see an accident like that as either an accident then there's no meaning to it it just stuff like that happens or they might see it as some kind of punishment from god or some such thing it can be interpreted in negative ways but what you're implying is that a obviously negat unpleasant and traumatic thing can be in the bigger picture in service to our spiritual growth right yeah perhaps that's true entire societies as well as individuals we can learn and it's unfortunate that at least me and i think a lot of people a lot of humans learn best um through the school of hard knocks and this was a real hard night yeah um but but we you know we do and i and i did and i honestly it's as painful as it was i will say that i wouldn't i wouldn't trade it for anything you couldn't you couldn't take that away from me right now like there's no way that i would give it up even with all of the pain and the recovery and you know the the anxiety once in a while that came with all of this um i still wouldn't trade it for the world and it was that transformative for me true but if you could if you could really play with time and say all right i'll get into spirituality in my 20s and get really into it then you'd probably prefer that to having had this happen it would have been a lot less painful yeah so um yeah so she showed me this this view of me agreeing to certain things and saying you know what i wanted to experience and learn and do and then i remember then i was like oh yeah i remember that now shoot okay and i and i just sort of played along with it honestly i really um i was still hoping that i could pull one over on her at the very end and just stay there but i i just played along and and learned and whatever she decided she wanted to teach me i just went along with it and learned as much as i could um not that i had much of a choice by the way because i was there with her and i didn't know you know what else to do with myself i guess i could have just stood around and enjoyed the scenery but um but i just let her teach me and um yes a lot of the stuff made sense but a lot of it hadn't i hadn't ever really thought about before um you know it depending on the day people ask me like a lot of people ask well what's the most profound part of it for the most part on most days i will say it was my life review and that's not what i just told you about i had a real life review um which happened you know kind of a little bit later in the process where i was shown like on a sort of they used she used the surface of the of a pond a virtual pond but the surface of a pond as kind of a movie screen and where there were a lot of little different they look like a little youtube i call them little youtube videos of different parts of my life where i could if i looked at one of those little uh scenes from my life i could dive right into it and be right there again um and and she showed me this first specific reason um she wanted me to see the impact that my my thoughts my feelings my words and my actions had on not just me but people around me and the world around me and so i i kind of examined a point in my life where i had said something intentionally to hurt my sister it was just a you know one of those spiteful sibling comments that was awful and it was when i was in my late teens and she was really hurt by that but i didn't know it at the time it actually happened but in this review not only could i see it like it was a video but then i dove into it and i was back in it again and i wasn't back in it only from my viewpoint i could experience her viewpoint at the same time so i was experiencing her hurt and her feelings of betrayal at the same time and this is this always gets me at the same time that i was spewing this garbage out at her i could feel like it was me like i was being just hit with the stuff that i was spewing out and i could just feel how horrible she was she was just devastated by what i said and to me it wasn't it wasn't that bad but to her it was and i had done it intentionally and you never realized that until you had this during an nde yeah and part of that teaching was just how connected we all are you know there i can't say or do anything without it impacting someone else even if you don't want to think about it it still impacts other people and so today that whole lesson around that i learned during that life review really really truly does impact the way that i deal with other people just on a day-to-day basis sometimes i slip up and you know get a little bit out of that conscious state but but i'm hyper aware of how what i say and do impacts other people it doesn't mean i'm a doormat or anything like that but you know you can certainly take an extra couple of seconds to be kind to someone um and not you know rip them apart so it's a it's a more conscious way of communicating than i have these days as a result of that one experience did you go through a lot of little vignettes like that in your nde or was that just like i mean were there dozens of them and you went into this one and this one and this one yeah okay yeah i i usually just talk about two because it doesn't really do any good to talk about each individual one but so that wasn't like a negative where i just said or did something negative and saw how that impacted other people um and then there was a there was always a balance so that so i was that was always balanced out with something good something positive something loving and um that was so that one was balanced out with a time that i was at the grocery store and um it was during the christmas rush it was just like a few days before christmas one year and this was in the boulder area and um the the teller the checkout person was having a really bad day i could tell there was screaming kids and the woman that was in the checkout line ahead of me was honestly she was being really nasty i think she was having a bad day so she was just taking it out on the on the checkout woman um so when i got up to you know to have my stuff checked out i just looked at her and gave her a big smile and said you know thank you so much for doing such a good job and for being so patient with everybody i know i really appreciate it and a lot of other people do too so just giving that little bit of love as much as i could to help her feel better i was able to feel how much that lifted her up just in that moment it really helped her it lifted her spirits enough that she could go home on a positive note and and not take that negativity with her home to her family yeah in your book you explain nicely how the influences of our actions spread out like ripples on a pond and how they can you know cancel out through con destructive interference they can cancel out the ripples of negativity that others might be emanating um and there's no limit to their i mean i think that every influence we generate goes ripples out through the whole universe actually um it does and it might be hard to understand the mechanics of that since we're you know separated from things by light years but i think they do yeah they do and it's and that was a that was another piece of this teaching is you know your words and actions go out and influence the physical world yes but they also have a spiritual energy a spiritual echo that goes out as well it isn't just on the physical level it's on all levels and it goes out just across the universe so you know you can do medita i still do meditations pretty much every day um i guess i don't know if they're considered meditations but i do send out energy loving energy to at least my neighborhood you know as much as i can because that stuff really does make a difference um it really does have an impact um yeah so that was i think that for for the most part that that life review overall was probably the most transformational aspect of this because it was just so obvious and visceral and and i could experience other people's thoughts and feelings like how does that work well it works because we're all connected we're all one especially at that spiritual level it's interesting how people who have ndes often report having life reviews even though they're not going to die and the guide that has met them knows they're not going to die but they it's time for a life review you know yeah well i think it's uh it's a good way to get yourself set back on a good path when you come back yeah it's like a tune-up or something right do you remember you gotta remember this lesson like this is an important one if you don't if you don't learn anything else learn this just how connected we all are that was my biggest lesson um and and how much you can't you know there's no separation really there's no there is no distance it's all one it's all love it's all compassion um yeah it's it is a lot of us have to have that i think to get ourselves back on a a healthy good conscious path when we get back and those every nd well i'm not going to say every endy ear i've talked to i would probably say 90 of the ones that i've spoken with personally will say that their life review absolutely was the trip most transformative thing if they had one um some but yeah it's it's profound i i sort of wish i could you know there's a part of me that wishes i could figure out how to to allow people here in the physical to have one of those without dying first well i don't know about having life reviews but you you know i think that people who do a deep spiritual practice for a long time end up processing a lot of stuff you know um and even in my own experience meditating for 53 years but um i often have gone through things where i'll i'll flash on something that happened when i was 7 years old or 17 or something like that and kind of work through it you know and and learn something from it it'll just hap it'll just bubble up spontaneously and then dissipate so i you know i don't think we have to have a near-death experience to undergo the kind of learning that you had there are other ways well i think that's probably the gentler way to experience those things and to and to process them um let them let them happen on their own and come out on their own and of course there are therapies and that people do and there are things like ayahuasca and various other things that people do to explore this stuff um and everything has different effects but yeah yeah yeah so that that was the i was again say that was probably the most transformative one the one thing um but but you know the train the teaching was all interconnected stuff you know it was about love not just loving other people but being love giving that love energy out on a daily basis loving yourself because that's important too a lot of people are good with the loving others and they're not so good at loving themselves can you can you really be good at loving others if you don't love yourself i mean well they think they can uh they think they can and i think to some extent people can feel maybe kindness or compassion toward other people uh without loving themselves but i think that deep love is probably not accessible until you really fully embrace who you are and love yourself um and that was hard for me you know it was i went into this experience not really liking myself very much so i i mean that was directed at me i understood what people meant like i i just didn't have that that view of me um as a worthwhile person so there was you know that was another one um a big one was you know loving this the earth now even even if this is some kind of a simulated reality or a dream like state we still have to take care of this place that we're in whatever this is and um and that was a big part too of what what i was taught was not that i wasn't loving the earth or loving the planet or whatever but but one of those messages was really for us as a society as a humanity to learn how to get back to that place where we saw the earth as a part of us we took care of the earth as if it was us um so that was a big deal for me yeah you know some people misinterpret vedanta to say that um you know the world is an illusion and we shouldn't really take it very seriously but really the traditional vedanta they they have a term called vyava harika which means transactional reality and it refers to the world that we live in which you know is not ultimately real but it's relatively real and it needs to be dealt with seriously on its own level you know render under caesar what is caesar's so um yeah i think it's a misinterpretation of some of these spiritual teachings to just sort of brush off you know human concerns and earthly concerns as being illusory and you know it's kind of a spiritual bypassing kind of thing sometimes yeah i would agree with that i like that i like that term transactional reality because i think that really that hits home um you know if you're if you're on you know like if say for example you get on an airline flight from general phoenix to new york city what are you gonna do everybody gonna trash the place while they're on the airplane because they know they're gonna get off in a couple of hours like no that's not what you do these days some people actually do that but i know like that still breaks my heart but um but that's how i look at it like it doesn't it doesn't matter what this what this reality is ultimately we're in it now and we're in it for kind of a long time um and our kids are gonna be in it and our grandkids so let's you know let's take care of it let's see it for what it is it's a it's a part of us we're all one it's not separate from us we're a part of it also i think it's not an accident or a fallen state or something that we're here it's it's a school it's a learning yep it's a learning opportunity and actually a precious one at that um it's people might want to watch an interview i did a couple weeks ago with a guy named christian sunberg i won't go on into it in great detail but we we did in that interview about how it's a rare opportunity to have this human life and there's tremendous potential of what one can actually achieve in one spiritual evolution and so you know take take advantage of it yep yep it is it's an awesome opportunity um yeah so that's you know those were the first three ones i'm going to open up my book because i'll pull them out in the order that that i wrote them on wrote them in here on um you know another one and a lot of these lessons or teachings were just um they're woven through my whole experience so it's not like okay now we're gonna learn about the earth now we're gonna learn about love you know it it was just all woven together and and i pulled them out as separate topics just to make it easier for people to understand in a book form but so when i talk about this stuff realize that that these concepts were just littered through or woven through the entire experience and i'm doing my best here to kind of pull each one out as an individual lesson yeah and i got the impression that when you're having your nde it wasn't like the guide was speaking english to you or something it was more of a psychic transmission or just a non-verbal heart to heart or soul-to-soul resonant resonance or something that was right you know yeah yeah that's a good point um it was a little bit amusing there were times when i just couldn't understand that that communication you just talked about it was i call it now it was like beyond telepathic it wasn't telepathic it was it was soul to soul it was it was concepts and vision visuals and feelings and ideas from who knows when and who knows who all coming together almost like into my heart region that's kind of where it felt like it was coming into and sometimes that information was coming in so quickly that i couldn't process it um it was just overwhelming and and i sometimes i stumbled sometimes i took a step back and so my teacher said okay well i'll just tell you so then she tried to vocalize it in english and it was just like i can't believe i have to do this i could just see her like doing this like oh they but i will so um so it was that we had a little bit of an immediate i we kind of had a joking relationship we very um it was very fun and very um very friendly like we'd known each other for a very long time and we could joke around but but she would get frustrated sometimes and like sometimes would just like cross your arms and frustration like oh my god i can't believe that i have to tell you this but um but that's the way it happened and there were times when i could hear or feel communication coming from someone else other than her like she was a filter or a funnel for other voices that were there and i asked her about that i said well i only see you why am i getting the feeling that there are other people here in the background and she said well there are you know there's i don't know it was like a thousand or something it was a lot wow and um and they and they want to talk to you but because i was in an in-between state i wasn't fully dead and i wasn't really alive i couldn't handle that level of communication i could barely handle handle the one-on-one with her um so she acted as kind of the filter or the relay for a lot of that so that i wouldn't be completely blasted by it um i sometimes get the feeling that um someone having an nde like yours is a kind of a special event on the other side like it doesn't happen every day that you're going to have somebody like that that you're going to be who's going to go back and so they kind of like say oh boy we have this opportunity to kind of prime this representative of higher knowledge and let's let's imbue her with as much wisdom as we can in this short space and you know before she goes back and so i don't know that's the idea that came to mind when you spoke of this possibly thousand other beings and she's just the representative or the conduit for them yeah that's an interesting way to look at i hadn't thought of that but it makes a lot of sense yeah um let's let's give let's give her as much as she can handle yeah because i really do think and you i'm sure you would agree with me that whoever they are whatever they are they they really have our best interests in mind and they and it must be a little frustrating if they're if they can experience frustration to see all the trials and tribulations we go through when they know that it could be so much better and yeah and the veil that shrouds us when we're born can be so thick and uh and then when we have an experience like you had and the veil is gone temporarily oh yes this is my true home but then boom the veil can come back again so an opportunity to catch someone when the veil has lifted and send them back with some higher knowledge must be kind of special yeah well and and i i had the i was lucky well maybe not lucky maybe that was the whole or maybe it was planned this way but i was lucky in that i remembered everything yeah um you know i remembered the accident all of the accident i remembered all of this and then when you were there or after you came back uh after i came back right right yeah i remembered all of it and and it was a lot i at first tried to block some of it out because it was just too crazy weird like when i when i came back into my body but then i just let it roll and when i let it roll i wrote it down and it was it was just all there you know and i we can talk about that later but but i did tell people right away what had happened and it got real detailed with it so it was all right there when i came back um and i did what i didn't know this at the time but evan alexander when he had after he had his and woke up from it the first thing he asked for was a notebook and a pen or a pencil so that he could start writing stuff down and i did the same thing you know i'm like i asked one of my friends can you please bring me a sketchbook and a and some pencils or something so that i can start writing this stuff down and drawing sketches um so he did and it it was hard at first because i was still i had a hard time you know lifting my arm enough to to write but i did the best i could and and wrote it all down um right as soon as i could so i have all that which is awesome i came back with with all those memories just right there which i shouldn't have had because i was under anesthesia and i had they had given me an amnesia drug to boot while i was in surgery so i shouldn't have remembered anything um so anyway that's that's another story but but yeah i came back with all that information and and did as best as i could to put it all in a book um mostly for myself because i knew i was gonna have to reread this stuff every once in a while that's helping a lot of other people too it does you know it helps me i've always liked these andy ebooks i've been reading them for several decades just um even though i've never had one and don't particularly want to have one because but um you know it's just it it kind of thin that thins that veil that i was just talking about you just get a visceral sense that this deeper reality is not that far away um and you know and that this life is not so short as you might think that there's a much kind of more long-term reality to our existence and all that stuff it's it's handy to have that perspective as we go through life yeah that we're more eternal than we give ourselves credit for you know that we're more powerful than we think um even in this life even as human beings we're more powerful the biggest thing that gets in the way of that is our own thoughts and beliefs um you know that's that was another one and um i've talked about you know how we're all connected and not just connected to each other as humans this is a hard one for a lot of uh westerners to really understand but but connected to other what we would call other animals the rocks the trees the the landscape the er everything is all part of this spiritual consciousness all of it um you know whenever i give it i've given talks uh in the midwest in midwestern u.s um and have had people from the the sioux nations in my audience and and then after we'll we'll compare notes and it's like well that's what they've been taught you know for many many many many generations yeah and it's just part of their culture and it's part of the culture of a lot of indigenous people um it's something that we've forgotten for a lot of you know western caucasian european-centric people um that we are connected to everything around us yeah interesting that you know we europeans came barging over here and regarded them as heathens and tried to convert them to our way of thinking and all and didn't even recognize the wisdom that they had yeah yeah it's a shame it really it's it's one of those heartbreaking things for me yeah here's a a comment from someone that um pertains to something you were talking about a few minutes ago uh this is from helena in montreal she says i remember paramahansa yogananda said if one is following the spiritual path even if there's past karma creating an event which is supposed to happen the impact or outcome would be annihilated to a minimum instead of serious injuries only a scratch [Music] yeah back to that same point yeah now i wish i would have read all that before my accident oh well all is well and wisely put you know we learn it in different ways right we do and you know if you hadn't had well anyway we've already gone through that but yeah you've you've been given a certain assignment and here it is yeah here i am mostly you know it's mostly just being the main message for me was to come back here and get your life back on track and and live a really good life learn how to live a good life learn how to be love uh learn how to you know show others love show yourself love be compassionate you know while at the same time not being a doormat just how to do all of this stuff if if all i did was spend the rest of my life putting into practice what's you know in this one book then that for me is a life well lived um it's hard because it's a when i came back it really did it bothered some of my friends and family um and i lost friends because of this and they could they just couldn't follow along um because you were saying this stuff you mean i went over to the woo side of the house but but the funky thing is that now that i've been it's been seven and a half years i've had a lot of time to think especially the last year and a half with you know covid it's not that it really there shouldn't be this separation or this gulf that we have between the spiritual people and the scientific people there shouldn't be this gulf that we have right now um and and i know that viscerally that should not be there and i think it's healing you know it there wasn't a gulf up until you know probably the maybe the end of the renaissance or even into the enlightenment but at least in the western in the western world now that gulf never really existed i'm guessing in india uh maybe not even in china and other parts of the world but i'm talking about like the you know the european cultures um there was that gulf between you know proper science and people who believed in a spiritual view and never the twain shall meet well to me that needs to heal that absolutely needs to heal there's a lot of things that need to heal on this planet but that's definitely one of them that that i feel very strongly because i had been in that camp on the science side before so i felt that very strongly especially in the last couple of years just thinking about all the stuff that i learned and it isn't there's nothing in it that precludes science also having uh an impact in this world i mean they're they're not they don't cancel each other out um they can actually enhance each other at least that's how i and some other people are thinking but oh absolutely i'll send you a link later of a talk i gave on this about six seven years ago but um i feel like spirituality explores realms that science should be interested in if science really wants to understand how the universe works but doesn't have the tools to explore and you know science on the other hand offers a an empirical rigorous way of thinking methodical way of thinking that can prevent that can save spiritual people from getting lost in imaginative fanciful realms that are not what they are actually looking for so i think that a you know a marriage of the of a scientific way of thinking with um deep spirituality can enrich both and that perhaps 50 100 200 years from now we it'll be sort of we'll look back and think why did we ever think of them as separate we really just have this one unified approach to gaining knowledge which includes both subjective and objective technologies yeah i like that yeah and that's absolutely how i see it too you're you're better at uh explaining that than i would have been well thank you i've been pondering it myself for a while sending a link to that talk you might enjoy it so yeah we can go into some of these a little i mean sure anything that comes to mind yeah yeah and another another one that was really strong for me was um well let's just say what's coming to me right now is intuitive abilities so listening to your heart listening to that that intuitive sense that we all have and i really do believe that we all have it but some of us listen to it and others don't um and i've had like we've alluded to before i've had that all my life i just didn't want to listen to it right um and if we ignore it we tend to numb it and if we listen to it we tend to enhance it right yep yep i've i saw that myself you know some of those we talked a little bit earlier about there were a couple of incidents where earlier on in my life i had stuff that happened that i just shunted aside because they didn't fit into my world view at the time and i didn't want to deal with them one of them was well actually two two happened around during the last year of my father's life he was he had been dealing with cancer for like seven years before he finally passed away and um a buddy about a year before he died i had this really bizarre incidence and this was back when i was still an atheist and i was meditating because you know you can meditate and be an atheist as long as you tell yourself it's you're just you know helping your brain think better right that's what i was telling myself so i would meditate pretty much every day and it did help with you know stress and anxiety and that kind of thing so i did it but there was i went out to visit him and he and my mom they lived about a six-hour drive away from me um and so i went to visit them for a long weekend in uh november about a year before he was he finally passed away and uh he was a he was a big outdoors guy he loved to go fishing he loved to go hunting even if he never got anything he just liked to be out there so he would like he always wanted to be outdoors um and so he was bound and determined you know he's pretty frail at this point um the cancer's you know beating him pretty hard he wanted to go deer hunting i'm like what are you nuts you're crazy you know you can barely walk and i just i said no if you want to go i will take you and i will walk out there with you and i'll make sure you're safe because i wanted him to just to be out there out in the woods experiencing just being out there in the woods and i wanted him to be safe so i was going to go out with them on a saturday morning well i got there friday afternoon and got settled in and did a little quick meditation and while i was meditating something really weird happened and i normally didn't have weird things happen during my meditation but this was bizarre i i experienced like memories of my dad from the standpoint of him as a young kid um from somebody named sydney who was a friend of his and they were both in their teens and this vision was of the two of them with a couple of their other buddies out they were gonna go deer hunting and they were gathered together you know around this campfire they had a um they had it like a camp up in the north woods their parents had this camp where they would just go out there and hang out and go hunting and fishing so they were up there and um i was seeing this whole thing happen from the standpoint of this young boy name or young man named sydney and they had this back and forth conversation and i didn't know i mean me i didn't know a sydney i'd never heard of my dad's friends i i knew a couple of his friends from when he was a kid but certainly not a sydney and um and then there was a that flashed from there to sydney was in korea he had been drafted drafted he had volunteered and gotten uh tour of duty over in the korean war and was killed in action in korea and i saw the whole thing i mean i was there experiencing it like right there with them and i came out of this and went what was that i had no i thought maybe i was making it up uh that was the first thing i thought i've never heard of this sydney what what is all that so next morning my dad and i go out to the woods get out of the truck and i knew i couldn't talk about this in front of my mom it just she would have freaked out um so i'm i said you know there's something really weird that happened to me last night i really need to just ask you about this and he said okay because i because i knew he he had some bizarre beliefs that he wouldn't talk about a lot but i thought maybe he'd be open to listening so i said did you ever know a kid named sydney and he just like did this shocking look he said how do you know about sydney and i said well i think he came to me yesterday when i was meditating and he said he used to call you willy because my dad's name was bill um and he and i could just see the blood drain out of his face wow and he said i've never told anybody about sydney how did you know about him i said well he came to me yesterday um i said and and so then i relayed the conversation that they had had over this campfire at their camp you know and they were going deer hunting he just was like a ghost he was just so white his eyes were like saucers and um and i said well i think he just wanted me to let you know that he was okay you know he wanted to say that he he also he had actually told me tell willy my dad tell willy that i'm sorry that i wasn't able to get back from korea oh he died in korea yeah he died i died in a fire fight in korea wow um and he felt apparently he felt bad about that because they were best friends yeah but no he never told my mom about sydney uh he never told anybody else so the fact that i knew about this kid was crazy and this happened before your accident yeah this happened oh boy i was only 34 so 12 years before my accident so yeah you really had something going on yeah you were destined for some kind of spiritual breakthrough so i yeah and i had that happen and then i thought i didn't know what to do with that i didn't know who to ask um you know my my husband at the time wouldn't have he was an atheist too and it just would not have been something i could talk to him about um and so my dad and i just shared that and i said i don't know what to make of that but he came to me and he said he's okay he's sorry i i don't know what to do with it and so i just dropped it i it's not that i forgot about it i just didn't know what to do with it so i just set it aside and let it go i was just so consumed with you know where my dad was and his illness that i i didn't have much of a emotional space to really think about the implications of of stuff like that yeah yeah and then you know that and then the morning that he died again i was i was six hours away at my home and kind of knew that it was coming at some point soon but i woke up at four in the morning and i saw him standing at the foot of my bed and then i just saw him kind of dis like disappear behind a a curtain almost it was like he was walking behind a curtain and then was gone and then i'm like oh that was him he just died and then just as i said that to myself the phone rang and it was my brother calling us and saying dad just died so when i went over there it took us a while obviously to get over there but when i walked in the front door and this was again it was one of those things that was just like challenging my view of the material world uh i could hear music and it wasn't coming from the house nobody else could hear it either um which those i was thinking well i must be hallucinating but it was this ethereal beautiful coral music that was just everywhere it was it was joyful it was so welcoming and joy-filled and peaceful and i and i heard it for about i don't know 20 minutes a half an hour and then it kind of faded um but but that i heard that again i heard that again when i died and i experienced that music again during during your nde yeah yeah and and it was explained that that wasn't really music as we hear music it was uh so hard to sometimes put into words it was like soul soul energy love energy that was coming from us it was like the it was a almost a an embodiment of gratitude and love that we could hear but that was coming from each individual soul that was a part of this whole and it was just this beautiful like almost circular not circular but there was a give and take chorus of this love and gratitude from all of us throughout the universe to the universe and then back you know from the universe to us it was this it was a it was the sound of our energy of interconnectedness i guess um but what but we experience it oftentimes as a sound as a chorus um a lot of people hear that i didn't know what it was until i died myself and heard it again and went i remember that when my dad died yeah there's there's a phrase uh self-interacting dynamics of consciousness you know we talked we talked earlier about how everything is consciousness and um but there's all this sort of it's like if we think of consciousness as an ocean then there's all these currents the kach is the ocean is in motion there are all these currents interacting and flowing this way and that and somehow what you just said reminded me of that phrase yeah is that true go ahead no it's okay go ahead i was just going to say there's also a verse in the bhagavad-gita which in which lord krishna who is supposed to be god says curving back on myself i create again and again so there's this sort of self-referential thing where you know consciousness interacts with itself and that gives rise to all the diversification and all the universe but anyway i mean i don't know how i got that from what you said but it reminded me of it because you you're mentioning that there's this sort of you know interactive flow between all the different levels of creation or something that you interpreted it as music yeah yeah that's how i think that's how our you know that's the only way that we can process it if we're still kind of in that human state yeah we have to interpret it in a way that fits our understanding of things yeah so it makes sense that it would come across kind of as a musical musical note because it is energy it is it is a it's a vibratory type of energy yeah so it makes sense that it would be experienced as sound um but it's unearthly and it's it's it's one of those things that i kind of that's one of the things that i wish didn't happen is that i wish i hadn't heard that um it's to some level because i can't listen to music now because it's so crude by comparison or what it is it is i i listened to it maybe for 10 minutes at most once in a while and i mean once in a great while i'll get the the hankering to listen to um something unusual but it doesn't last for very long and and i i just it's it gets to the point after maybe a few minutes where it's like human music is like nails on a chalkboard yeah even some beautiful mozart or eric satie or you know one of these yep once in a while i can get into um listening to some of that like on pandora they call it spa music where it's just this floating sound in the background yeah um that's okay as long as it's soft and melodic but even after about a half an hour of that i've had enough and i i just gotta turn it off um so that's the that's the only thing out of all of this that i wish had been different but at the same time hearing that music was just unearthly i mean obviously unearthly but it was just so beautiful and to know that that's we're part of that you know it's not just that it was music coming from somewhere else it was all of us that's a part of who each one of us is we're contributing to that that beautiful energy you know and the more we go into that space of love of of being aware like and conscious in our lives like being in the now moment um and just being love as much as possible or being grateful or helping other people every time we do that we're contributing to that love energy that comes out as to a lot of us as music it's we're just contributing to that energy flow of that of that love and compassion in the universe so we're we're a part of it it's not some separate chorus we it is part of us and we can all contribute to that um some people can actually hear that that vibration in deep meditation i've not been able to achieve that state since i've gotten back but some people have been able to do that yeah people might want to check my interview with suzanne stryker she reported having that hearing that kind of stuff all the time and harry alto too perhaps but it's interesting because traditionally people all talk about you know all the different traditions talk about angels singing and you know celestial choirs and you know playing harps and all that stuff um but i think that you know that's probably an interpretation of experiences people had but i bet you a lot of people throughout history have experienced what you're referring to in fact just to add to it um it's said that there is this you know and you've actually alluded to it you've experienced it there's a celestial level of life there's a really subtle dimension of life which isn't commonly experienced by people but can be even even in a regular you know while they're alive and functioning now it doesn't have to be an nde and um you know i've spoken with people who have had visual and auditory and other sensory experiences of that field some of them quite commonly because they they've refined their capacity to have them those experiences to such a degree it's well within the human field of possibilities yeah totally it totally is i and i can see once in a while um it's easier for me sometimes to see that energy than it is to hear it now um there are many times when i'll be going and it usually happens when i'm out hiking out in the boonies um i'll be able to see that energy rather than hear it oh yeah um and that's a lot can you describe what you see is it like a glowing kind of a thing it's like a glowing it's almost like it's usually glowing like diffused tendrils of energy connecting stuff yeah it isn't like a big fog there's a little bit more cohesiveness to it and that it's more like um but not like ropes it's it's a diffused tendrils of energy flowing everywhere and through everything it's a little bit it's a more um kind of toned down version of what i experienced during my nde because when you know during my nde what i saw you know i you saw quotes like experienced around me as a visual was just like these energy fields all through everything so there'd be a tree but that tree would have multiple layers of energy flowing up and down it in all different colors and i could interact with that tree and interact with its energy and then the colors would all change so when i'm here now i can see that but it's it's not that vivid it's it's usually like one color so there's also um there's another photo i don't remember how long ago it was taken but it was um it was actually a visualization i think of radio radio energy of the early part of the big bang where they're showing like as the stars were forming into galaxies there were these like tendrils very much like that um it and at a different scale it also very much looks like how um electrical energy gets transmitted in your brain to cause well to as a thought not that the brain is causing the thought but the brain is experiencing the thought but when they when they map that and when they when they kind of visualize that it looks like these little you know tendrils of glowing energy so that's what this looks like to me it's very much like that that's really cool and and i think that's a very genuine experience i think you're actually um and it's again within the everyone's capacity to experience if it gets awakened but um you're actually experiencing the sort of subtler reality of the world yeah and subtler mechanics of what's actually going on in in the world and it's probably easier to see when you're out in nature than it would be walking down city street or something like that although even there one can see stuff like that i bet yeah i bet people who are more attuned to it in the city could see it i i grew up in the country so i'm i don't you know i i'm not really as attuned to living in the city as some people are so cities make me feel a little bit claustrophobic and i always feel like i want to protect myself um so i i'm able to let go enough when i'm out in the in nature but if you're you know for people out there who are more attuned to living in the city you could probably see it in the city too yeah and you know we should probably sad that it's not like a big important thing that people can see this stuff and you're really missing out on life if you can't but right it's just it's just a interesting because it's it suggests what some human capacities are that are not common but that could be right and we and we just don't our our view of our day-to-day life right now for the most part is pretty limited yeah but it's like it can't it can be expanded we can expand on that and experience this reality this life in a more expansive way yeah probably everybody's heard the the notion that maybe we're only using five percent of our full mental potential or perceptual potential and so on so um just a matter of unfolding the full potential yeah which is not that difficult it just takes some dedication yeah and persistence um this here's another nice point among your points that you listed you are never alone you want to dwell on that for a minute yeah that was one thing that i had been struggling with in the months before my accident um i just had always maybe even most of my life i had just felt like i was an alien on this planet like i was somehow alone um and i didn't really ever feel like i fit fit in um i just didn't know how to relate to most people uh i don't know maybe that's and maybe that speaks to somebody out there who's a psychologist or something i don't know but but i just never felt comfortable um on this planet even even from the time i was a little kid and i always and but by the i dealt with it okay for the most part until i was you know in those months before my accident and i was really starting to feel it then um you know i had my marriage had broken up and i was living alone um and i don't know i just i was getting into kind of a funky uh i don't know mindset i don't mindset yeah um and and i just didn't i just didn't feel connected to anyone and anything and i just felt like i had been abandoned on this planet like i was some alien abandoned on this planet so and one of the one of the things that i was taught during my nde was just what you said were never alone and it isn't just the human contact that i'm talking about it's that there is no separation between what we experience as reality here what we call the physical realm or what i tend to call the physical realm and what a lot of people would call the afterlife or what i call the spiritual realm it it's not the afterlife by the way don't if if you ever around me don't use that word because that's like a that's a a button for me i just don't i don't that's not that's not the right word because it isn't the afterlife it's our life this is life too there's no difference it's all connected there's no separation what we are surrounded constantly by those in spirit who are in that spiritual phase some will never have an incarnation in in this human form never they may never want to they may never need to they may never have the opportunity to but we can still interact with them because we're all part of the same space the same spirit spirituality the same spiritual energy so there is no separation and when i finally like after i got back and really started thinking about that that has really allowed me to open up that communication not not that i want to be a medium or anything but just so that i can continue to get intuitive guidance so i can continue to access my own intuitive space but also maintain that connection with those beings who are what i call my spirit friends or my my spirit peeps um they are they're always with me and i know they're here and doing that is allowed actually and it's i don't want to get into like ghost stories or anything like that but it's allowed my sister who who died a long time ago to come visit me every once in a while not like we have a conversation or anything but i know when she's here and she just drops in i think she just checked she's in my older sister so i think she's just checking up on me like an older sister does and wants to see if everything's okay and then she you know then she's gone well even willie check or sydney checked in on you you know yep exactly so we're connected to all those people whether they're physically here with us or not um and and just being open to that in in a healthy way can at least for me has allowed me to just maintain those those avenues of communication um and just given them the opportunity to show up every once in a while and i've had you know friends of mine who have who have passed away in the last couple years um one who came in i i actually didn't know that she had passed until she i was in the kitchen one day and and somebody was flipping my light switch on and off and i was the only one in the house i mean literally flipping the switch on and off and i looked over there and saw it go on and off and i said could you actually see the physical switch moving up and down yeah it was going up and down wow that's spooky the lights were flickering on and off well at first it wasn't then i thought well i wonder i knew my i knew one of my friends was ill was seriously ill um and that's when i decided i needed to check up and i i checked in with her daughter and she had um she had just passed away so i'm thinking that's who it was because this friend of mine was kind of a jokester she liked to you know play practical jokes and fool around a little bit with with people she was the sweetest person but she just liked to have fun too so i think that was her that's interesting that she could physically flip it up and down you know even though she's just in her spirit body or whatever yeah i was surprised at that um but i think it does happen occasionally yeah i think that was the only time i've ever had you know a spirit visitor interact with something physical you know there are stories of that and obviously movies have been made about it and everything speaking of movies i mean we love movies of like e.t and close encounters and things like that and uh you know imagine what big news it would be if aliens landed on the white house lawn you know it would be earth-shaking but you know ironically there is the the world is teeming with life that we don't even know exists because it's subtle and we don't perceive it uh and the vast majority of people don't realize it's even there so it's it's kind of funny in a way that you know there's all this stuff going on and we're just going to waltz through our lives oblivious to it kind of like you know i had a weird horses when i was growing up and we once in a while they'd have to have blinders on when they wrote when we wrote them and it's like most of us go through life like that little blinders on and we're focused down on what we can see right in front of us yeah and that's how i was it's not that it's a you know that's not a um a dang against anybody really it's just how we tend to be yeah and i was certainly there and maybe it's how we need to be in order to live life um yeah i mean like you said um you it was almost more than you could handle they were giving you so much information it's like oh so cool it so i think in fact with psychedelics they say that people who study psychedelics and talk about them a lot say the brain is kind of like a filter which actually limits the amount of experience we can have and psychedelics seem to you know thin or you know shut off the filter for a while so we get flooded but we couldn't function that way or all the time but i would say that spiritual development cultures the ability to be more open and all-inclusive and perceptive in a natural way which can be stabilized so that you can you know drive a car and do whatever you need to do well yet in a very perceptive open condition yeah yeah that's the to me that's the good balance to achieve um is expanding your awareness just a bit but yet still remaining grounded enough to to function and do what you need to do here and learn what you need to learn because you're here we're all here for a reason at least that's the way that i look at it um and and i think yeah it is i know there's a i have a friend who sometimes i think she thinks sees it a blessing or sometimes it's a curse but her filters are kind of gone they always have been she was born with this a different set of abilities like she's you know she has a lot of memories of her other in her belief system their other lives so she came in with like these tons and tons and tons of other memories in her life um and it's hard for her sometimes to um kind of focus in on the on the now moment i think and get done what needs to get done because there's all this other stuff that she now has to just consciously set aside and and focus in on what's going on right now yeah i interviewed a guy named jim tucker a couple of months ago who studies children who remember past lives and sometimes incredibly vivid detail you know naming the name of the battleship that their plane took off from and the names of the buddies who were with them on the battleship and all that gets you know verified and so on but we we had a quite a bit of a discussion about how you know we do need to sort of have that turn off at a certain point in life in order to live this life yeah yeah because you can get you can get kind of get wrapped up in that stuff and and i've never you know since this happened i've never really been all that interested in in you know trying to figure out past lives or i call them other lives because past present future doesn't really hold any meaning but but those other if i've experienced other lives which i think i have unless they have a direct bearing on what i need to do and learn now i don't really it doesn't really make any difference to me i don't i don't really care to dive into that stuff right i had a pen i had a spiritual teacher who used to say the past is always a lesser developed state and there's really not a lot of point in trying to figure out what your past lives were and all that no yeah i would agree with parts of that anyway um a question came in from helena again in montreal who asked a question earlier she's wondering could you describe the pitch of the music we were talking about that music was it very high frequency she said i did hear thousands of angels sing at an extremely high pitch when my mom passed away on the third day i guess she means the third day after her mom passed away i knew her soul had entered heaven at that point yeah yeah i think uh it was more high pitched a higher frequency although there were it was more complex than just you know a higher pitch the complexity is really difficult i'm not a musician anyway um but it was a lot more complex than that although i would say that i would agree that it tended to be more on the high pitch side of of the sound what we call the sound spectrum so i think i think what you heard was kind of the same thing that i heard you know that's fairly common it's called the shared death experience where people somehow have experiences surrounding the death of a loved one it doesn't have to be right when the loved one dies it can be days afterward so you know humans always have to have names for stuff and that's the name that we've chosen to to put on all that but um yeah so in effect in my friend who flipped the light switch on and off that would have been i guess a shared death experience too according to the definition but i just say she visited me before she moved on so that's a great that's a great thing to experience though it's beautiful when when you can hear that helena and um it's it can be life-altering for people just to hear that um so to me that's a blessing so i'm glad you shared that thank you great um perhaps um before we run out of time you want to say a little bit about gratitude yeah so gratitude is again it's another form of energy but it's just it's a form of love really it's it's a it's an energy of loving appreciation uh i i remember that when i was you know in that spiritual place whatever you want to call it um the the the teaching was really that that we're sort of misunderstanding what gratitude is it's it's it's love it's pure and simple gratitude in its highest form is love it's compassion um it's appreciation all that's all that's part of love um but in some teachings now in the modern era there are some people out there who are teaching people how to you try to use that um what would you want to call it lip service gratitude to try to like somehow trick the universe into giving them stuff um and to use gratitude as a tool or as a manipulative tool i should say a manipulative tool um it it that's defeating the purpose it's it's not it's not what gratitude is it's not the highest form of of that concept of of love so you know i was being encouraged to just be grateful to as a form of love and appreciation and that's it just don't try to use it for anything don't try to manipulate someone with it or try to manipulate the universe with it it's just love and to share that from your heart because that is again it puts you gratitude it puts you into that heart space faster than almost anything else if you if you're really needing like a quick way to get into the present and to get into a really positive vibe i guess for some people called that but a positive mindset or a positive spiritual state go through a gratitude exercise you know really dive into five things in your life that you're grateful for right now and just really consider them not just you know off the top of your head and just let them go like really feel it um get into the feeling of that and it can be you know gr being super grateful for having a house uh that you know you're living in having food on the table um having a loving family around you um being it like this is the one i wake up with still every morning every morning i am so grateful every morning that i can walk because it was not looking good for a while there so every morning before i even get up out of bed i just go into that space of deep gratitude for being able to get up and walk around and that i don't have a lot of physical left over challenges for my accident because that's surprising to me still like you know no pain really and and so just be grateful for what you do have because that will put you into what i call that state of present moment awareness and that state of love and that's that's all it is it's just love speaking of love and gratitude i guess another quality that's somewhat related to those would be forgiveness and catherine from san jose costa rica was wondering whether that driver faced any consequences for what she did or did she ever even apologize to you actually she did not apologize um not that i ever asked for it um she she'd had a history she was in her i think she was 29 she had had a his bad history with vehicles like she was constantly in accidents and injuring other drivers um i think i i want to say that she had like 30 days i may i may be getting this wrong she had a short time in jail and then she had like six months probation um as far as like you know you know our justice systems go but but um i learned very quickly that i had to let go of that and i had to just not that i was you know necessarily grateful to her for hitting me but i had to let go of any negativity that was carrying around toward her because she did what she did i couldn't change it i did the best i could to avoid the accident i know that in my heart um and she was gonna be and i know she's probably at least for a while probably lived with it i'm i'm guessing um but that's that was up to her to live with so i knew i had to just release myself from the attachment to feeling any bad feelings toward her so if you want to call that forgiveness that's what i would call forgiveness is just a disconnecting myself from any of those negative feelings because i couldn't change anything in a way you know she helped me she didn't know it but she helped me become more aware and awake in my life um sometimes the people who talk about planning our life before we are born you know say that we actually work out arrangements with people like oh i really need to experience being abused by an alcoholic or something would you be that person please and and the guy says i don't really want to do that but please you know all right i love you so much i'll be the alcoholic and i'll come in and i don't know if it really works that way but you hear people offer those kinds of explanations so maybe you had some pre-life arrangement with this woman i don't i don't think so yeah maybe not and yeah i don't think so i think the way that i've seen it and kind of come to understand at least at least for this one instance now that the prearranged stuff may happen i'm not going to discount that but in for this instance for me i think we were both guided to be at that place by our own teachers our own spiritual teachers she had a lot of learning that she needed to do and so did i in different ways and you know coming together excuse me in that way um gave us both opportunities so you know what i was hoping hopeful for is that it would help her kind of get her life back on track i suppose in the big picture everything everybody experiences helps them you know it's either this it's either the school of hard knocks or maybe it's a pleasant thing but i think ultimately there's an evolutionary agenda to everything that happens yeah i think so and i hope that you know i hope that she took the opportunity um as a result of this to kind of examine where she was in her life and change some stuff because it was i i mean i could tell just by talking to i did talk to her attorney um for a little while and then i talked to the police officers who um worked with her a little bit after after the accident and i and i and i know she was in a bad space so my my hope always was that she was able to do something with this positive with her life and to take an opportunity to sit back and say you know what i think i need to do something different here and then make some changes because that was the opportunity yeah i hope so presented to her yeah we received a nice comment from jeannie sparks in california she said just want to say thank you and that i needed to hear this oh you're welcome genie thanks for listening in today yeah and and thanks to everybody for listening in we've had a nice crowd on today like 325 people or so at the moment awesome yeah and and thanks so much to to you um nancy i've really uh i really enjoyed this i was feeling a little sleepy this afternoon i thought i was thinking oh i hope i'm up for doing a good job with this interview but you kind of woke me right up well thank you it's been fun it's been a great it's been a great two hours i couldn't believe it's been two hours already i know it's awesome um what was it groucho marx said he said time flies like an arrow fruit flies like a banana yeah i i don't have a very big repertoire of jokes but that's one of them irene says that's for sure i have about three three more than i am anyway thanks a lot and thanks to those who've been listening or watching and next week um actually it'll be next tuesday because her schedule's a little weird i'll be interviewing lynn twist and then lynn has written a book called the soul of money which is not about what you might think when you first hear the word money and she's a remarkable person i saw her speak at the sand conference many years ago she's really a force of nature she's also involved in something called the panchamama alliance which has to do with indigenous tribes in south america and saving the environment and all that so that'll be next week so thanks again nancy it's been great spending time with you and uh we'll be in touch thank you i really loved every minute of it thank you so much me too and thanks to those who've been listening or watching and we'll see you next time [Music] you

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Length: 126min 38sec (7598 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021