Speaker 1: You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best
in paranormal talk radio in the UK and around the world.
Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you
happen to be in this particular timeline, Welcome to trans
dimensional Realities, where we delve into the stranger aspect of
our current reality. I'm your host, Melissa Lee, and I
don't know what it's like in the rest of the country,
but here in the Northeast, we've had two days of summer.
It's eighty two degrees outside. We're not supposed to get
this for another couple of months. Just two weeks ago
we were down in the twenties and below. So mother
Nature is certainly having a time. Makes me wonder what
the rest of the summer of the spring actually is
going to look like. So let's hope keep your fingers crossed.
We don't suddenly get more snow. And I've seen snow
fall in April, so I want to keep the nice
weather anyway, Let's get into the program. Our guest today
is doctor Adam Risby. Now Doctor Risby is a critical
care physician and neurologist whose work bridges medicine and nondual Wisdom,
author of Love does Not Know Death. He draws from
years in the ICU and decades of contemplative study to
show how forgiveness transforms fear into peace. He lives in California,
where he teaches, writes, and co hosts the podcast Letters
to the Sky. So please welcome doctor Adam Risby to
the show. How are you, doctor Risbey?
Speaker 2: Hey, Melissa, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for being here. I'm really fascinated to
talk to you about, not only with your background working
in the hospital as an emergency room position.
Speaker 2: I see you, I see you wait towards here, do
the same thing more or less.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, And then how you got to be writing
this one book and that sets you down this path.
So if you can tell us a little bit about
how that all started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I you know, I was really interested in
spirituality from the get go when I was young. I
think that my mom and my dad sort of instilled
in me a desire to get to the core truth
of it all, why we're here, what we're doing here,
and where we're headed, sort of the perennial questions, And
that was actually so much a part of my life
that right before the year before going into medical school,
I was dead set on being a comparative religion and
philosophy professor. I actually majored in that in college, and
I said, Okay, this is what I want to do.
I want to teach people how to embrace multiple traditions
to find the truth within all. I really valued harmony
and tolerance, something I think the world needs a lot
more of these days. Yeah, and you know, my father
was raised, he was he's he was Pakistani, passed away now,
but he he had this like in many ways he
was he was modern and progressive, but with his children.
He wanted his children to either have either be a doctor,
a lawyer, or an engineer. And and if you if
you're a family from not the United States, you know
that first gen children often you know the weight of
your the future of the of the family is on
your shoulders because you're often the first one to go
to college and the first one to have higher level degrees.
So the expectation was that I would do that, and
he didn't quite like that. I wanted to be a professor.
So I think his words were over my dead.
Speaker 1: Body, Okay, I think that goes a little bit beyond
not liking But.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was a rebellious teenager or twenty something
year old, and so I decided I would not go
to medicine, which he wanted me to do, but instead
be a barista at Starbucks.
Speaker 1: That's rebellious.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I did that for a year, and I'm grateful
because it was my first real exposure to living in
the real world, having to pay my bills, earning my keep,
interacting with people, interacting with a manager, supervisor. And then
I realized, like, oh, do I really want my life
to be this? And it wasn't bad. There's a lot
of people who make you know they're living like that.
But I decided I want to go into medicine, and
I went into medicine, and I became a doctor. But
that part of me that strove for what is the
truth underneath it all? What's what's the purpose? Why are we?
What are we here to do before we die? That
never left me.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a question a lot of us have,
And I've been down my own spiritual path and doing
a lot of research and trying to find out, you know,
what is the purpose of being here? What is the
purpose of this life. And I started off on a
Christian path, but then in my twenties I broke off.
And you know, I've been learning a lot since about
a lot of different points of view. But I do
definitely believe that there's something to this. We are here
temporarily and we're here to learn, and I think that
what we were talking about earlier, love and forgiveness is
something that definitely is on the agenda.
Speaker 2: It's not the syllabus, yes it is. Yeah, yeah, we're
we're taking a course, for sure, And and I don't
think people know what the syllabus is or what the
course is about. But part of what your searching and
my searching did was we just we discover one that yeah,
we're taking a course, we're in a classroom, and we're
here to learn something, and that there is there is
somewhat of a syllabus, but it's not it's not explicit.
You gotta hunt, You gotta hunt for it. You have
to wake up to it and realize that that that is,
in fact what's going on. That's the context. So you're
so right about that, And.
Speaker 1: If you also look at a lot of your experiences
in life, even the negative ones have lessons to teach you. You know,
I can just say right now, everything that I've had
happened in my life, and I've had a lot happen,
especially the last few years. I've even though they just
say it they sucked at the time, I am a
better person for them. I've learned, I've grown, I've become
more empathetic and feel like I'm more on the right
path these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a mentor of mine long ago once say,
life isn't about preventing the fall, because you're going to fall.
It's about learning to stand back up every single time
and building that resilience. And part of standing back up
for me is learning what that was all about, what
the fall was all about. And then with that sort
of resilient mindset, the growth mindset, I know I've become
a better person. I become a kinder person, a more
compassionate person. Oftentimes, especially after big mistake that I make,
I become way more compassionate to other people who make
mistakes because I know what it feels like.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, absolutely so. With your history working in the ICU,
how long have you been doing that.
Speaker 2: Let's see, I finished Critical Care Fellowship in twenty eighteen.
So I think I've been doing icy work if you
count the years of fellowship, maybe for about ten.
Speaker 1: Years now, Okay, okay, and.
Speaker 2: I'm still kind of young in the whole journey of
being a.
Speaker 1: Doctor, okay. And what prompted you to write your book
Love Does Not Know Death?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, when I was in fellowship, it was my
first time working day and day out in an ICU.
I had done ICU work in residency and even in
medical school, but this was pure critical care. This was
the whole point of the fellowship was to get critical
care down, and so being in the ICU, I ended
up being present with death quite often. And I remember
my first few deaths. They were so intense, emotionally charged,
from dealing with the emotions of the family member to
the patient themselves not wanting to die, but then dying anyway.
I remember that there was one case early on. It
was a woman who was going to get I think
her gallbladder taken out or something, I forget, some abdominal surgery.
And I was walking with her, lovely old lady, and
she looked up at me and she had this look
of doom in her eyes, like it's like abject terror,
and she was holding my hands, say I'm going to die,
I know it, and she just looked right at me
with utter convey I know I'm going to die. I
don't want to die. And she held my hand super tight,
and me thinking, like, you know, you're just going for
a small procedure. This happens every day. I told her,
you're going to be fine. It's a simple procedure. You're
going to be fine. She went into the procedure room
and she never made it out. She had a heart
attack on the table and she came out, and I
was devastated. I thought. I looked at her in the
eyes and I told her she was going to be fine.
I wish I wish I had maybe helped her to
embrace that possibility. I don't know. I really don't know
if I could have said anything differently because of where
she was at. But my first encounters with death were
very rough. So what I wanted to do was I
wanted to honor these patients. I wanted to honor her.
I wanted to honor the surprise death that I mean.
I guess she kind of knew it was happening. But
so what I did is I started writing a journal
and I called it my I still call it my
death journal. And with every death that I was that
was my criteria. If I was physically present in the
moments leading up to or at their death, then I
would write about the patient. I would write what led
up to their death, everything that I did during the
death to support them or otherwise, and then the lessons
I learned that the insights that came to me, that
just the raw emotion of the experience, and I would capture.
And I would also use that journal entry as a
means to pray for them. I would often write, like,
you know, I'm offering prayers to them, well wishes and
in my own word and language, and I would I
would often close the journal entry with just closing my
eyes and connecting with the with the that person, with
that soul, and giving them love. And oftentimes it would
be a conversation in my head with them and letting
them know that thanking them for being in my life
when they came, and letting them know that they're free.
They're free to go and and and do the next
thing in their journey. And I have I now have
well over five hundred journal entries in my death journal,
and then I shared that with a group of friends
of mine and they said, Adam, you got to just
publish this. Publish your death journal so people know all
the different ways that people die and and and what
you learn, and that there's so much beauty that happens,
and there's so much terror and anger and grief and
anguish and liberation and release. So much happens in the
moments before and after death that I thought, Okay, let me,
let me capture this, and and then it it led
to the book Love Does Not Know Death.
Speaker 1: Fantastic. With some of the cases that you talk about
in the book, or maybe some of the others that
didn't make this book, it sounds like you have enough
for a couple of volumes. There's a lot of times
when people are close to death, they start seeing and
hearing things that we don't and a lot of times
people are chalking that up to dementia or drugs that
they're on or whatnot. My own father, who passed eighteen
years ago, the last couple of days, he was seeing
people that he knew in the room. He had severe
Parkinson's and dementia, but he was seeing these things before
he passed the congestive heart failure. So was he really
seeing people? That's up for debate, but it happens with
a lot of people. Is it those neurons firing just
before death or is it something else?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, that's a great question. And this is probably
where I might get in the most trouble but most physicians,
and that is changing now. But I'd say that the
default worldview of Western medicine is that who you are
is a complex biochemical machine, this thing, and consciousness or
awareness is a byproduct of your neurons talking to each
other and firing, and that if the brain dies or
shuts down, then consciousness itself disappears. That never rang true
to me. And after having been practicing for several years
now in the ICU, I've seen stories and heard stories
that make me more convinced than ever that consciousness does
in fact continue on after the death of the physical body.
I would there's so many resources now that are being built,
the books that are being talked about. The near death
literature is exploding, just the anecdotes, the stories, hundreds of
thousands of stories indicating something in fact does continue on.
And I think if you if you pull the average
American or the average human being around the world. I
would say most people believe that consciousness does in fact
go on, that there is some form of afterlife. Now
we have different beliefs about what that might look like,
but I would say most people feel that there is
an afterlife. But in the western scientific world, that's not
the case. In my experience, I've had paid I've had
a gentleman have a heart attack, pronounced dead by me
with EG that means brainwave of electrical brain of activity.
That that was isoelectric, meaning flat, no brain we of
activity come back. His heart starts up again, only to
tell me and describe a story of meeting many many
people that have since passed on and then and then
have to come back to his body. And the interesting
thing is, and this is not an isolated incidence. There's
many cases of this. If you if you're visually seeing things,
at least when you're in a body, your occipital lobes,
the part of your brain that processes visual input, will
light up. It will show that it's it's processing information.
And he saw a whole bunch of things in this
period of being dead, and yet nothing showed up on
his EEG. I know there are other doctors who are
talking about this. I think we're on the early early
stages of a shift in worldview within the sciences where
we're going to start to acknowledge there is something else
happening that we haven't been able to quantify. But I
will say if you had asked me twenty thirty years
ago what the general perspective of other physicians is, I
would say almost everyone believes that we're just the meat suit.
But more and more physicians that I talked to actually
are starting to consider that consciousness does in fact exist
independent of the physical body.
Speaker 1: And that's great because before now you're right, it's just
science with science, and they didn't want to hear anything
that contradicted what they thought of with science, as if
we even though we're in the twenty first century, we
think that, oh, we are on the edge, cutting edge.
We have sciences just progress so much, and we know
so much, and I personally don't think we know nearly
as much as we think we do, and there's more
out there, especially when you start looking at religion is religion,
but spiritual experiences are very unique, and people could have
a spiritual experience like a near death experience, and it
could be along religious lines and others. It's totally unexpected
what the experience. And lately I've been really listening to
a lot of podcasts with near death experiencers because the
subject fascinates me. I do definitely believe in that, but
I want to hear other people's stories. I mean, I've
gone through surgeries, I've been you know, under anesthesia. I
never saw anything, so of course I didn't die on
the table either, but it's it's really fascinating what's there.
And I think we're reaching that stage, as you mentioned,
where it's starting to be more acceptable to accept that
the two are can exist at the same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And if you really look at the near
death literature and the stories even on just YouTube, what
I notice whenever I do that is I feel touched.
I feel transformed. I feel greater love for myself for
those around me. I start to appreciate life more. There's
a sense of meaning and purpose that I start I have,
and the vast majority of near death experiencers they report
feeling transformed, like deeply, deeply transformed. They feel held and
cared for, they feel like there's there is some presence
watching out for them, guiding them, guiding their life, and
and generally they I feel they become kinder people, nicer people,
compassionate people. That and I think that's what happens when
you shift your identity from just being the body to
recognizing that you're something so much more that life and
love don't know death, They keep they keep going it.
It helps you become a kinder person. And and that's
as I really started to dive into this literature and
doing my studies and my research, I realized that's what's happening.
We become kinder people. It doesn't if you have beliefs
in the afterlife. I mean, many people have beliefs in
the actual life, but it doesn't make them good human beings.
It doesn't make them kind people. But when you when
you have that sense of love, when you have that
sense of oh, this is this is what I'm here
to learn. This is the classroom, which a lot a
lot of near death experiences report. And if and if
you realize we're all in the same classroom, we're all learning.
Why not help each other, Why not help everyone get
a's so to speak. You know, there's no there's no
curve in this classroom, we don't we don't have to
segregate ourselves. We can help each other. So I actually
end my book with a chapter I think. I think
the chapter title is be Kind, because that's it. It
ultimately boils down to that if you're if you consider
yourself a spiritual person, but you're not kind, you're not
doing it right. There's there's spirituality will bring you to
kindness and compassion.
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot of that, I think is
it's the nature versus nurture argument, where depending on a
person's home life, how they grew up, whether it was
let's say, in a religious family or you know, instilled
with certain cultural beliefs, and they can they a person
can act on those, or a person could be a
little bit more aware and start realizing and seeing the
lessons and become that kind of person. I think too
many people fall into the trap of physical, physical pleasures,
physical power, physical sensations, and thinking that even if they're religious,
even if they have beliefs, they still are not nice
people because in some way they're either lashing out or
they're holding on to that low vibrational negative trauma or
outlook that again might have been impressed on them when
they were younger, growing up. There's a lot of factors
that can come into it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Actually, what you just said is one of
the avenues that I think we can use to practice
a really deep level of forgiveness. I talk a lot
about it in the book because I feel like when
people are facing death their own or a loved one,
inevitably what happens is a lot from the past comes up,
a lot of unhealed hurt and pain. Families that were
distanced from each other, estranged, they're often forced to see
each other again when the father or the mother is dying,
and when they come together, anything that hasn't been healed
just comes right up to the surface. And I feel
like forgiveness is such a huge gift to yourself if
you know how to do it. And so one of
the first ways in is well, I should talk a
little bit about the deeper meaning of true forgiveness. But
what I want to share first is if someone did
something wrong to you and you can see through the
negative action and see them as a child, see them
in see all the trauma that they went through, all
the pain, the abuse, all of the belief systems and
potential brainwashing and cultural indoctrination that they got from the media,
from their family, from friends. Who knows that has turned
them into who they are now, and recognize that their
behavior is a product of that, and then you don't
take it as personally. Then you realize, oh, what they're
telling me, what they're saying, the way they're behaving, it's
not personal, a reflection of everything that they've been through.
Now we'll say something. Forgiving someone doesn't mean you're saying
what they did was right. It doesn't mean what you're
saying what they did to you is okay. You can
forgive someone and never talk to them again. You can
place those boundaries. You can tell them what they did
was absolutely inappropriate, wrong, if it's necessary to take legal action.
I'm saying, like, the actions that you take in the
world is distinct from what's happening inside, in the mind
and in the heart. And the reason why I like
to say that forgiveness is a gift that you give
yourself is because there's such a burden when you are
resentful towards someone, when you hate someone, when you judge them,
when you hold grievances, and you carry that with you
for years. It is such a burden. And if you forgive,
if you can see through to the innocence of the
other person, and if you can somehow recognize a similarity.
Maybe it's that we're all human beings. Maybe it's that
we all face struggle when we grow up some way
to connect at a deep level to the other person.
Then you're able to drop that burden. You're able to
let it go. And for me, part of what drove
me to write this book is I would see some
families do this unconsciously, maybe they did it consciously. They
would use the opportunity of impending death their own or
their loved one to resolve those grievances, to let things go,
to finally decide to forgive and give themselves the permission
of living life without the burden of judgment. And then
I've seen family members who don't do that, and they
fight to the bitter end. There's terror and shame and
betrayal and anger and rage to the very very bitter
end and then beyond. And then I thought, you know
what allows some families to turn death into a moment
of healing and others not. Let me share the stories,
let me capture it and then allow the reader to
learn from that.
Speaker 1: Sure, sure what people don't realize unless they've experienced it.
Holding on the negativity and negative thoughts, it just drags
you down. It drags you down, makes you miserable or
at least have a negative outlook towards life and not
trusting people. And I'll tell a little story. I had
someone in my life about twenty five years ago who
really did a lot to me, and I didn't realize
how bad it was until years later. And I held
such resentment towards this person. I didn't even want to
speak their name. I wanted nothing to do with them.
Some mutual friends were still friends with this person, and
I would run into them once in a while and
I was just I wanted nothing to do with them.
And this person wound up passing away about six years ago,
and even at that time, I still had negative feelings
towards them. But as I've been going on my own
spiritual journey, I realized I had to let it go.
I had to there's no sense in continuing to be angry.
What happened happened, and I had to admit to myself
it was a learning experience I did learn so much
out of that, and even though this person passed, I
still forgave them. And does that mean, you know, if
they were still here, i'd allow it to happen again.
Absolutely not, and I probably wouldn't have any contact with them.
But I had to let that go in my heart
to just say I forgive you. You did what you did,
but I'm not going to hold it against you anymore
and move on with my life. And I have felt
so much lighter since then.
Speaker 2: Wow, you nailed it. That's exactly it. That's so thank you.
You could have I could have said it better. We
all go through moments like that, and maybe that's something
we should all consider that as human beings, no matter
what country you're in, no matter what religion you practice,
we are human beings that suffer. We suffer in very
unique ways that it's so diverse, but in the end,
like the pain is the same, the struggle is the same.
Now some people it's worse than others, but you're right,
we can learn from it, we can grow from it.
We become who we are now, resilient and strong and
powerful because of those traumas in the past. And it
takes a willingness. Sometimes the teeniest amount of willingness will
start the ball rolling. Maybe it's just a consideration of
maybe at some point later in my life, I will
be at a place where I could forgive that person.
And I like that you use the word let go
because forgiveness can be can trigger people that the word forgiveness,
but you can replace it with letting go. And the key,
as you said, is it doesn't mean you do anything different.
At the level of form and action. You can still
place those boundaries, but it's about going inside. Can you
let go in here?
Speaker 1: Well, one other thing what taught me in that situation
is I know of people throughout my life I have
wronged and I always felt guilty about it. And then
just a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity
to reconnect with a lot of people in my past
where I realized I was a jerk. I did not
handle things the way I should have, and I really
felt bad for what I did. So when I reached
out to these people, I would apologize to them to
make amends, and I would say ninety percent of the time,
none of them ever remembered it, but I did, and
because I did, it was still me letting go, apologizing,
getting it out there in the open air. And you know,
whether you know, I didn't really need to receive forgiveness
for it. I just needed to say I'm sorry. And
I think that the people appreciated that, even if they
didn't remember. But I just reached this point my life
where I just wanted to make amends with everyone and
try to move forward with the rest of my life.
Speaker 2: Uh, to not do that, Yeah, that's great. Forgiving oneself
is a is a whole other ballgame, and it's it
can be a lot harder. It's because we're harder on
ourselves most of the time. We because we see everything
on the inside. We know what we intended, we know
what we were feeling. So but it sounds like you
were able to do that. There was one thing I
was going to share, just to dive a little bit
deeper into forgiveness or letting go, however you want to
use that term. One. There's one level of forgiveness that
is I would say the world's description of forgiveness and
and it's it's not what I'm talking about. The world's
forgiveness says you did something wrong. I'm the better person.
I'm better than you, and because I'm better than you spiritually,
I'm gonna I'm gonna let this slide. I'm gonna I'm
gonna forgive you. And that's sort of like a false charity,
you know, That's not the forgiveness I'm talking about. There's
a deeper level of forgiveness that cuts through, or sees
through the appearance of wrongness. Someone does something wrong, or
you do something wrong. That's the surface level. Deep forgiveness
goes through that and goes to the core of who
that person was, and then you see the story everything
that led to that behavior, and then it goes even
deeper and further to the nature of who they are.
And this is where what you and I talked about
at the beginning comes to play. If who our nature
is is consciousness and even deeper you could say, pure awareness,
It's not like there are little buckets of consciousness. There's
only one consciousness. There's only one ground of awareness. And
the deeper you go, the more you realize separation is
an illusion. There's just oneness, this raw pure awareness that
we are. And I would add to that the word innocence.
There is no sin in pure awareness. There's no guilt
in pure awareness. It's the ground of being. And if
we can go to the core of someone that we
think has wronged us and see that innocence and recognize
that it's the same innocence in us, there's this instant
sense of deep, profound connection with the other person. So
you forgive the other person not because they've done something
wrong and you're the better person. You forgive them because
you see at the core of their being they are innocent,
and at the core of your being your innocent, and
so really there's nothing to forgive because all there is
is innocence. That's a very deep level of forgiveness that
is I think most but it's something we can strive towards.
Speaker 1: When you mentioned about those people who could they forgive,
but they're kind of lording it over the person that
I'm a better person than you, No, they're not, because
to have that kind of mindset is negative. You're putting
yourself over somebody else. You're not really forgiving them, You're
patting yourself on the back for something that you've done.
There's also the people who can't forgive themselves and can't
love themselves, And I'm one of those people. For the
longest time, since I was a child, I beat myself
up constantly, and it's only been in the last couple
of years that I've been able to accept myself, love myself,
and move forward. And it's so freeing. But people who
hold onto the past, hold onto the negativity, and it
just it's a cycle that just continues over and over
and over again because they can't learn to forgive themselves.
They can't learn to let it go, like letting it
go when somebody else has wronged you. So they beat
themselves up, They get into drugs or alcohol abuse, they
get into these really self destructive patterns because they can't
love themselves and forgive themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, gosh, I'm so happy we're talking about this, because oftentimes,
because the book is about death, we end up talking
about after life things. But this is the core, this
is the main message of the book, which is our
life is meant to be a life of healing. It's
it's as you said, it's a classroom where we're learning
the course that these lessons. The interesting thing about self forgiveness,
I'll say, no one can punish you better than yourself.
We are so good at punishing ourselves and we do
it for so long years are are, you know, for
a whole life sometimes and it's because there's this deep,
deep belief. We believe we have sinned, We believe we've
done something wrong, and we don't deserve forgiveness. We deserve punishment,
and it will go as far as it can or
needs to for the the ego, that part of us
that believes that we're alone and separate and unworthy to
feel justified. Now, you said earlier that you know that
that type of worldly forgiveness lording it over over someone
is negative. I would say it's also negative to punish
yourself because you believe that you are inherently a guilty,
sinful person. People will do it, like you said, with
drugs or alcohol or depriving themselves of things. Sometimes it's
a silent suffering, a silent punishment. But the gateway out
of it. First, I always start with there needs to
be a willingness, a willingness to see differently, a willingness
to shift your perspective. All you got to do is
tell yourself I'm willing And generally what happens is the
suffering gets so bad that you realize something's got to change,
and then the willingness comes, and then after the willingness
comes the tools and the path to healing. And that
part of what is in my book, but it's not
just in my book. There's many other books that talk
about this is the willingness to see that there is
a part of you that is innocent. That's the part
you got to see, that part of you that did
its best with what you knew well, and that's all
we're ever doing. We're always doing the best that we
can with what we know. And if we can get
to the core of that and see even if it's
the sliver of it, sliver of innocence, that's the beginning
of healing.
Speaker 1: And with that, in going back to forgiveness, can you
really forgive somebody else if you won't forgive yourself, You
need to be able to forgive yourself and then be
able to forgive others so that you're coming more from
a place of positivity and that your load is lightened
and you feel better. And then you talk to that
person or even silently in your head. You know you
may not need to confront them, but you let it go.
You say, I forgive you, and I don't think that
could really happen until you've reached a point where you
can forgive yourself.
Speaker 2: You are naming something that I think is not talked
about enough. But it's like, there's a mirror like quality
to the world, to the to the universe. The way
you see someone else deeply is mirrors how you see yourself,
and then the way you see yourself mirrors how you
see others. There's an interesting story that happened, and I
allude to it in the in the book, but the
longer story behind it is there was a surgeon that
was very, very difficult to deal with early on in
my career, and he was very antagonistic, very angry most
of the time. Whenever he would do a surgery and
the patient would come up to his ICU, he would
bark orders and tell the nurses and other physicians exactly
what they need to do and how, and if anything
went wrong it was our fault and not his. Very intense,
hard to work with, and I remember I was so
triggered by him, and I just thought like, gosh, what
what what a rough person to be with, you know,
and I would, uh, yeah, it was. It was those
were rough days when he was in the ICU and
then later on uh not related to him, but I
had a patient come in beautiful young woman who had
a respiratory disorder of her lungs ended up dying, and
I felt so much guilt around her death because I
thought I had done maybe there was something I could
have done differently to save her life. And I was
able to get to a point in the days after
her death to really deeply forgive myself and realize, no,
adam you you really did everything you could with what
you knew about her at the time, and I could
get to that innocence of who I was to see
that I really was an innocent boy who did what
he the best he could with what he knew, and
that she died because it was her time and I
was honest. I was a first person. I would be
the first person to catch if I had made a mistake,
and maybe there were things I could have done differently,
but in the moment, I did what I could do.
Speaker 1: Best.
Speaker 2: Now how it relates to the surgeon is days after
I had forgiven myself and I could see the innocence
underneath the mistake. I started to recognize that I wasn't
triggered by the surgeon anymore. It was a very interesting phenomenon.
He would still behave the same way, still bark orders,
still be angry, but it's like they would just washed
through me. I didn't take anything personally, and I realized, Oh, yeah,
he's just being who he is because that's what he knows,
that's how he was raised, that's how he was taught.
Nothing was taken personally. And my intuition was that it
was deeply connected to my own self forgiveness. Because I
could forgive myself, I was able to see through what
he was doing and how he was behaving. It wasn't
even a one to one connection. I just started to
see others more likely. And I feel like the more
we are able to figure forgive ourselves, the less the
world triggers us, the less others will bother us. And
it's vice versa. There's that mirror like quality.
Speaker 1: I'm smiling because that's absolutely right, especially in my case.
I totally agree one thousand percent. It's you forgive yourself,
things become a lot easier. Even when more problems come up,
or if you screw up and do something, you take
it more as a learning experience. Okay, this is how
I handled it. I did not handle it well. I'm
learning from this and I'm moving forward and I won't
do it again. And I think that's also part of
the purpose of this life, is to learn and grow
and become the best version of yourself you can be.
I don't want to say a better person, because that's
very subjective, but being the best version of yourself in
this lifetime and learning from those mistakes, and it makes
moving forward a lot easier. Even when things are crazy,
you don't like things that are going on, you just
just let it, let it roll off you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I I have a friend who's retired marine,
and he was sharing with me that he after after
he finished his time at the Marine Corps, it was
so much he had guilt over and he made a
decision to himself that he the the intensity that he
applied in the Marines of getting things done, like when
they had a job, nothing mattered, they would get it
done at every resource emotional, mental, physical, would be marshaled
to ensure that this mission was accomplished, He said, he
applied the same intensity to what he called radical self forgiveness.
He basically put the intensity of his work into making
sure he forgave himself, and every time a guilt would
come up in the years after, he would he would
like get laser focused and he would just go to
the core of the issue and he would forgive himself.
And I was so impressed. I don't think I approached
my forgiveness with that level of intensity, but I probably
should if we all did just a percentage of that
and treated it as as important as getting up and
going to work each day, because that's how we get paid,
that's how we put food on the table. If we
treated self forgiveness with that level of intensity, we would
see great, great healing.
Speaker 1: That is so profound. I absolutely agree with that. I
was wondering if we could go over We've got about
fifteen minutes left in the show, if we could talk
a couple about a couple of stories that you mentioned
in the book or otherwise about these experiences with people dying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well, one that comes to mind has
to do well. I'll share the story a young It
was a young boy. I was in Tucson at the time.
I was working in Arizona and we had a multi
vehicle pile up. It was a lot of a huge
crash and he was the only survivor. Initially of the crash,
paramedics called told us that they were coming in hot
with the trauma. I was in the trauma bay anticipating
the The young kid comes in. He's on a stretcher.
There's a female paramedic straddled over him like doing chest compressions.
Nurses are coming. They're immediately trying to get ivy lines in.
Another paramedic is just ripping his jeans and his clothes
off with scissors. All of it is part for the
course for a trauma. They welam into the trauma bay
and the er physician and I tag team to run
the code. Running a code a code blue is when
someone's heart has stopped. Running a code essentially means you're
at the foot of the bed and you help assign
roles to everyone and you ensure that the process goes
very smoothly. So the first few minutes it was the
er doc, but because we were so busy, the er
doc stepped away and I took over. So I was
at the foot of the bed. Here's this kid in
front of me. I have a respiratory therapist placing a
breathing tube through his throat. He had a massive gash
through his chest where his chest. This might be TMI
for your listeners.
Speaker 1: That's okay, it's fine.
Speaker 2: I'll minimize the gore then. Suffice it to say the
scene was very, very bloody and chaotic. And what was
interesting though, was after we had assigned roles and we
were pausing every two minutes checking for a pulse, doing
chest compressions, giving medications, we got into a rhythm and
a flow and the chaos of the room sort of
died down. It was a little bit quieter, and everyone
was just doing their duty, you know, pushing medications, doing
chest compressions, checking for a pulse, pausing like we would
just go through our cycles. While that was happening, we
were maybe twenty minutes in. I got this sense of
someone behind me into my right and I thought it
was the ed physician. At first, I kind of looked
over to assuming he was like walking up to tell
me something, but there was no one there, and I
looked back and I really felt the presence, and this
sort of interesting thing happened. I got the intuitive knowing
that it was the boy standing next to me.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say that yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's funny, like I could feel like it was
a masculine presence. I could even see his face in
my mind's eye. It was weird. And I should preface
this by saying, I'm not psychic. I've never been trained.
I don't have any exposure to that. This is just
These are the stories of what I felt when I
was there. There's this kid next to me who's you know,
his body is there. I feel him right next to me,
and there's a weird thing. I could hear him asking
a question, but it wasn't audible. It was in my head,
but it didn't feel like my voice. It felt like his.
It's hard to describe. I don't even know if I'm
doing this justice, but I hear him tell me, is
that me? And he was looking at the body, and
I'm looking at the body too, and I sort of
tell him in my head, that's your body. It's not you,
that's your body. So I wanted to make the distinction
for him. And the interesting thing was he wasn't worried
or afraid. The emotional feeling that I got from him
was amusement, like, oh, how interesting, interesting that that's my body,
you know, like sort of uh, like you're like you're
watching something and like a movie or something. And what
happened after was was really interesting. As soon as I said, yeah,
that's your body, it felt like the scene, the entire
scene of his body and the nurses and the therapists
became like a thin film, like like the film that
you that a projector will shine light through, you know,
like a movie film. And I felt like I was
diving through the film and I was entering an ocean.
The mental image that I had that that appeared to
me was that beneath the film was a vast ocean,
and I could see the rippling waves and it's almost
like you know how when you go out to the
beach on a on a beautiful sunny day and you
see the sun sort of like reflect and it creates
like sparkles on the on the ripples of the waves.
That's what I felt like. I was seeing this like
sparkly ocean vastness, and and I got the intuition of like, oh,
that's this boy's soul. That was the intuition like this
this boy, this is his brilliant, beautiful, vast nature underneath
the film of the body. It's like the body was
the most superficial layer of who he was, but here
he was in his in his you know, awesomeness, And
then I felt like he was watching what I was watching.
We were both going through this together, and I told him,
I think that's I think that's your soul. I think
that's who you are. And then what happened is I
felt like I dived through this ocean of light, and
underneath it was an absolutely profound, vast expanse of pure light,
like no ripples, no wave, no ocean, just an endless
expanse of light. And then my intuition was, Oh, that's
who we both really are. That's the that's the depth
of all humanity, that's where we're all won. And I
remember telling him I was equally surprised because all of
this was happening in my field of vision. And I
told him, I think that's who we are, you and me,
both all of us, and he sort of smiled and
like sort of nodded and acknowledged, and we both sat
there or stood there watching this. It was mesmerizing. It
was endless and so bright. I felt like it was
overlaid on what I was witnessing, and then I kind
of rested there for a while, and by then we
were maybe forty minutes in something like that, and he
had been progressing. His heart rate went from For those
who are listening and you have medical background, he transitioned
from pea to v fib, course of v fib, then
fine v fib ventricular fibrillation. We shocked him a couple
of times no effect to asis, which is flat line,
and he basically was in flatline for the past ten
minutes every time we checked his pulse, and by forty
minutes we just well over forty minutes. We decided we
were not getting him back, and so I asked everyone
if there was anyone that disagreed with calling it. Everyone
said no, and so then we called it, and that
was his time of death, and I still felt him
next to me. And after his time of death, I
asked for a moment of silence, and I could see
him watching this with me, and he didn't say this,
but the emotional feeling that I got was he was like, hmm, cool,
and then he was gone. He just disappeared like that,
and there was no one next to me anymore. He
just vanished. It was such a surreal experience for me.
But what I got most, which is very I shared
because it was very healing for me, is this feeling
of diving into who he really was and then discovering
who I really was Through all of that.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I am stunned and astounded. That
is one of the most incredible stories that I've ever
heard of what I would call a shared death experience.
And the fact that you picked up on him and
you don't have to be psychic or think yourself. Everybody
has an ability to at some point to sense these things,
and it was probably one of those things that you
were meant to experience. The fact that, again I've been
doing a lot of research into near death experiences, the
dispassion that a person feels seeing their own body. They
just look at it like, oh yeah, they have no
emotional connection to it while they're out of it. The
fact that he wasn't going back probably even added to
And there's no fear and but the rest of it.
I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time.
That has really struck a chord with me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what, I Melissa, I had never heard
the term shared death experience until after I started doing
interviews for the book. I didn't know that that was
a thing, but you're right. I think he was seeing
that and I was seeing what he was seeing.
Speaker 1: Wow. Well we're going to end on that note that.
I mean, it's phenomenal, But thank you so much for
sharing that. Now for your book, Love does Not Know Death,
Stories of Death, Dying and the Miracles of true Forgiveness.
Now where can people find that?
Speaker 2: That is on Amazon. I have a website Love does
Not Know Death dot com where you can sign up
for a newsletter newsletter. But the best way to stay
up to date with everything I'm doing is my sub
stack adamz feed dot substack dot com. I call it
Adventures and Kindness and I basically write articles several times
a month sharing what I learned in the hospital and
what I learn in life.
Speaker 1: Fantastic. Now you have a podcast, right.
Speaker 2: Oh that's right. Yes, it's a it's called Letters to
the Sky that I do with my best friend Stephen Downs.
It is for those who are really deep in the
spiritual path. Steven and I talk a lot about the
ins and outs of the spiritual path, almost very similar
to what you and I did today, Melissa, and and
it's like, once you realize that that's the classroom you're in,
you want to learn the lessons you want and you
want to do it well. And that's what we talk
about in the podcast.
Speaker 1: Fantastic Well, Adam, this has been rivening. This is one
of the most eye opening interviews I've done in a while.
So thank you so much for coming on the show
and hopefully people will be picking up your book and
read some more.
Speaker 2: Thank you all right, well, thank you for.
Speaker 1: Being on the show. Wow, I'm gonna be very honest
with you. I'm stunned and just overwhelmed with the entire interview.
Probably people wanted to hear more about the death experiences
that Adam had to share, but I think we covered
so much that is so important for people to realize
without being preachy. And but that last story I had
to wipe my eyes afterwards. I'm tearing up. It's so
for profound and I hope you as the audience feel
the same way that I did listening to it. So
I want to thank you Adam for coming on the show.
A wonderful interview. I'm very pleased and if he ever,
if he writes another book, I'll have him back on Definitely.
We'll talk a little bit more about some more of
his stories next time. So until then, everyone, you have
a wonderful week, and you all be good humans and
we will talk with you soon.
Speaker 2: See you