Speaker 1: Tell me what you left was like before you died.
Speaker 1: I'm thirty seven years old. I hadn't thought about God
Speaker 1: at all. But I got into this meditation. Hey, let
Speaker 1: me try it. Let me see what it did. Then
Speaker 1: I read it and it, Oh, it very creates peace inside.
Speaker 1: It was very, very peaceful, and I kind of was
Speaker 1: a natural. I felt really really good at it, and
Speaker 1: so I would meditate. And one night I was meditating
Speaker 1: just before going to bed because it calmed me down.
Speaker 1: I had a big day at worked them out, you know.
Speaker 1: The next day and I'm meditating and for some reason,
Speaker 1: when I was sitting on the can looking at a
Speaker 1: candle flame, but I had let all the air out
Speaker 1: of my body. And I don't know why I had
Speaker 1: done that, I just did. And suddenly I was below
Speaker 1: the ceiling looking down at my head and I thought myself,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, if this is me up here, who's
Speaker 1: that down there? Or to me down there? Who is
Speaker 1: this up here? And I took in a breath and
Speaker 1: I went back in my body and I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: that's cool. Yeah, I wasn't afraid at all. And I
Speaker 1: being a scientist, right, you know, having to prove everything.
Speaker 1: I realized you know, I wouldn't be surprised if I
Speaker 1: let my body because I didn't have any air in son.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that bust and meditation is what made me,
Speaker 1: you know, go, you know, on top of my head.
Speaker 1: I gotta do this again, and I have to do it,
Speaker 1: and I'll keep my breath out longer because I'll bet
Speaker 1: if I stayed out longer, I could have looked around
Speaker 1: more and seen more from outside, so there was no
Speaker 1: fear at all. The next weekend, I decided to try
Speaker 1: it again. My wife is downtown shopping with our daughter.
Speaker 1: My nine year old son is playing in his room.
Speaker 1: I decided, hey, it's a good day to do it,
Speaker 1: to beat my body. So I read out and I
Speaker 1: ride on my bed with my hands folded like this.
Speaker 1: I'm on my stomach, leaning on my elbows, read in
Speaker 1: and out three times, let all the air out, and
Speaker 1: I say, I'm not going to breathe again until I'm unconscious.
Speaker 1: Because I knew that the body will normally bring things now,
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything stupid. I put tape on my
Speaker 1: nose or mouth. I mean, you know, I'm not that
Speaker 1: off the all, but I said I'm not going to
Speaker 1: breathe in until I beat my body again like I did,
Speaker 1: you know last week, And the clock goes around once,
Speaker 1: and the second hand goes around again, and I'm beginning
Speaker 1: to get whoa some pain in the body. I begin
Speaker 1: shaking like I'm in an earthquake, and then I feel
Speaker 1: like I am drowning. I get a flood, and I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm burning up in a fire. And I
Speaker 1: later learned that according to the Tibetans in the writing
Speaker 1: the Tibetan Book of the Day, that these are the
Speaker 1: first three steps in leaving your body and dying. You
Speaker 1: lose the earth element, the water element, and then the
Speaker 1: fire element. The next thing is the air element, which
Speaker 1: i'd already left and didn't have inside my lungs. The
Speaker 1: only thing holding me to my body was something called
Speaker 1: the ether element, which sounds pretty nebulous to me. Anyway,
Speaker 1: There I am, and I'm asking myself, Am I conscious? Am? I?
Speaker 1: If I were unconscious, I'd be breathing. And I'm not
Speaker 1: breathing now, so I won't. And I held it out,
Speaker 1: and I held it out, and the pain got worse,
Speaker 1: and I thought to myself. I suddenly realized I was dying,
Speaker 1: and I said to myself, no, God won't let me
Speaker 1: die while I'm looking for him. And I what, you know,
Speaker 1: what did I just say? But and then I saw
Speaker 1: a little light on the top of my head, and
Speaker 1: it got bigger and bigger, and I thought, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that must be the tunnel of going through into the
Speaker 1: light that Raymond Mubidgee wrote about in his book Life
Speaker 1: After Life. And there was another sad thing. My wife's
Speaker 1: sister's husband, a young man, died from childhood diabetes at
Speaker 1: you at a young age. And so she had read
Speaker 1: Life After Life and gave that to me, and I
Speaker 1: had compared it was gee, what if body and mind
Speaker 1: really are separate? That was, you know, the only in
Speaker 1: any event, there I am this tunnel, this light you know,
Speaker 1: gets bigger and bigger, bigger, and I suddenly went through.
Speaker 1: I have not breathed because it's been over three minutes
Speaker 1: and no air in the lungs, and I was in
Speaker 1: a space of brightness, unbelievable, greater, brighter, more incredible than
Speaker 1: anything I could ever believe existed. And further, there were
Speaker 1: a feeling of greater number of dimensions. How do you
Speaker 1: describe but three dimensions pera that was nothing. There are
Speaker 1: so many more, and it was incredible. At this point,
Speaker 1: my body is in such pain. I took a breath
Speaker 1: and I fall off the bed. I start moving, my
Speaker 1: body going around rockets in an epileptic fit. But inside
Speaker 1: I was at such peace has I can't tell you
Speaker 1: the peace, the comfort, the joy, one of the feel inside. Well,
Speaker 1: my body has going crazy on the floor. At this point,
Speaker 1: my wife comes in the room. She is driven home
Speaker 1: from shopping. Our son, who had looked in the room,
Speaker 1: has gone out to meet her at the driveway and
Speaker 1: to put her mind. That's he says, Daddy's not dead.
Speaker 1: Daddy's not dead. Then I'm rolling around. While I'm rolling
Speaker 1: on the floor, you know, in this peaceful thing, I
Speaker 1: can't look. I feel wires pulled out of my head
Speaker 1: like the old telephone switchboard. And then at some point
Speaker 1: they get put back in, but I feel them being
Speaker 1: put back in in a different place. I can't understand
Speaker 1: any of it at the time. And then when I
Speaker 1: can finally control my body, the first thing that happens
Speaker 1: is I am on my knees on the ground. My
Speaker 1: hands are folded like this in front of my face,
Speaker 1: and my birth words are I am reborn. I am
Speaker 1: reborn in God. And I was so embarrassed to hear
Speaker 1: me say that, But my life made a complete right
Speaker 1: turn at that point, and I knew that everything that
Speaker 1: people have said about God it was true. There is
Speaker 1: a greater reality. It may not be out there where
Speaker 1: we can physically prove it by Newton's laws, but it
Speaker 1: does exist. And that's how it happened. That's where my
Speaker 1: life changed. And from that point on everything is different.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
Speaker 1: and now back to the show. And I know what
Speaker 1: I experienced and that's true. And all of this makes
Speaker 1: me feel that I'm on this path that has led
Speaker 1: to the writing of this book. How did I get here?
Speaker 1: The idea that when I was in college, I had
Speaker 1: an experience which seemed like it was meaningless except now
Speaker 1: looking back, and maybe the most important thing that happened
Speaker 1: there was a I was walking across campus and the
Speaker 1: design psychological testing going on five dollars, And in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties, five dollars was a lot of money, man,
Speaker 1: so I had nothing else to do. I went in,
Speaker 1: I'll sign up. I went into all the tests and
Speaker 1: the very last room I went into. These were you know,
Speaker 1: grad students who had a thesis and the needed you know,
Speaker 1: some documentations, you know, for their for their pisis. And
Speaker 1: the very last room I went into there were five
Speaker 1: desks panels with lights on them and red light and
Speaker 1: green light and the buttons underneath. And there were four
Speaker 1: other students who were in there and they said, oh,
Speaker 1: here comes another one. We can do it now, we
Speaker 1: can we hang to do the test, and the professor said, okay,
Speaker 1: he said professor standing in the corner of the room,
Speaker 1: he said, I'm going to push a button. This is
Speaker 1: a test how fast you can go, you know, and
Speaker 1: rer reactions. I'm going to push on. It's going to
Speaker 1: be the same for every panel, and each of you
Speaker 1: pushed the button. If you see green, pushed the button
Speaker 1: under green. You see red pushed the button under red.
Speaker 1: And we're going to keep going faster and faster until
Speaker 1: somebody misses and that'll be the end of the test.
Speaker 1: So we start doing it. Push red, I pushed Green,
Speaker 1: I pushed and then suddenly beat. The professor says, oh,
Speaker 1: somebody made a mistake. And the guy at the end,
Speaker 1: he says, who pushed red. I said, I did. He
Speaker 1: says it was green, you miss. I said, no, it
Speaker 1: wasn't it was red. He said, no, mine was green,
Speaker 1: and the professor said they'd both be the same. I did,
Speaker 1: but mine was red. And the woman over on the
Speaker 1: next side said, well, mine was green, and I don't
Speaker 1: care what yours was. Mine was red. And he said, well,
Speaker 1: you're you're wrong. All of us had green. You had read.
Speaker 1: Are you calling me a liar? I know what I experienced.
Speaker 1: And we started, you know, raised this and went at
Speaker 1: each other, and I suddenly felt my hand, my arms
Speaker 1: held back behind me. It was the professor. He said, easy, son,
Speaker 1: it was red. You were correct. This is not a
Speaker 1: test for how fast you can react. It's a test
Speaker 1: to how you handle peer pressure. You did very well.
Speaker 1: You stood up for what you experience. Now here, take
Speaker 1: this chick, go get your five dollars, and you know
Speaker 1: that's it. Boy. I was sold so upset, and I
Speaker 1: pushed that out of my memory until I had this experience.
Speaker 1: And I even remember sitting, you know, on the couch, crying, why,
Speaker 1: why are or did I have to wait so long
Speaker 1: to learn that you existed? And I heard this little
Speaker 1: voice in my head. We've said, if you knew this
Speaker 1: from the beginning, how could you have shared it with
Speaker 1: people who didn't know it. You've stood on both sides
Speaker 1: of the river. Now you can share that experience. Feeling
Speaker 1: of being of a living, of existing is the same
Speaker 1: when you get rid of all the adjectives that make
Speaker 1: you and me different. When anyone says I am and
Speaker 1: then they said adjective rich, poor, black, white, old, young,
Speaker 1: you know, bah blah blah, whatever it is, male, female,
Speaker 1: They're just adjectives. Get rid of them all. In meditation
Speaker 1: we do this, We get down to the feeling of
Speaker 1: pure existence. It's the same for us all. Why would
Speaker 1: I hurt you if I knew that you were me?
Speaker 1: And that's the decision humanity has to make right now.
Speaker 1: Now are we going to survive? Who knows? Does the creator?
Speaker 1: We're here so that we are you know, can you
Speaker 1: know survive? But I'm sure there are other planets somewhere
Speaker 1: in the galaxies where other living beings. So if this
Speaker 1: one doesn't make it, check that one off. Okay, that
Speaker 1: one didn't work well, but another one will. As each
Speaker 1: level of consciousness has grown, you know, rocks to plants
Speaker 1: to animals to humans. What if one of the reasons
Speaker 1: humans were here was so that we could build a
Speaker 1: housing or consciousness that could survive longer than humans can.
Speaker 1: Who says that consciousness, the feeling of I am, has
Speaker 1: to exist in a piece of meat, in flesh and blood.
Speaker 1: Maybe it could exist in metal and silicon and other things.
Speaker 1: Imagine when the sun gets hotter, right, we know that
Speaker 1: it's going to turn into a red giant at some point.
Speaker 1: Creation that we are putting together now I am, you are,
Speaker 1: and we are one. That's the way it should be,
Speaker 1: and we should know that