Transcription
Hello everyone. Welcome to Beyond the Veil. Today we hear from Robert Copeki, a three-time near-death experiencer whose encounters with death revealed powerful truths about consciousness, time, and purpose.
Hello, my name is Robert Gopeki and I am a three-time near-death experienced survivor. I'm also a lifelong cartoonist and sort of started out as a kid traveling around a lot and I didn't really realize maybe I was looking for a spiritual life at the time. I got involved in martial arts and stuff and that was a little bit of woo woo some I learned some meditation then when I was a kid but I traveled very widely and I ended up becoming a commercial artist and illustrator and cartoonist and made a career out of that and it was in that context in the course of that the places that I ended up doing that that the three near-death experiences occurred.
I think I could preface it by saying that they didn't really affect me. They didn't really land on me at the time. I kind of tried to ignore them or suppress them as is the case with a lot of near-death experiencers. I think my first one was in the mid-80s. Uh, there was not much support for it. There were not many people who showed much interest in it or even believed in it as a possibility at that time. Of course, now we've learned a lot more and there are a lot more experience or stories coming to light and I've been very involved with the International Association for Near-Death Studies as a presenter and the like and they have a great website and they, you know, [music] they keep all kinds of stories and tell all kinds of stories and have all kinds of opportunities for people to tell stories. So, I've been a part of that.
My first near-death experience happened when I was in my mid-20s, mid to late 20s. And that was in the mid-80s. I was living in Los Angeles and I was an illustrator and an art director. And [music] I was driving home on an unfamiliar road at dusk one evening and I had a I had an equipment failure that led to me glancing off of a parked car and I ended up in a single car accident driving into a light pole like a telephone pole probably about 35 or 40 miles an hour something like that. I broke out the windshield with my head even though I had a harness on. And I broke out the windshield with my head and I bent the steering wheel with my face. That's that's what happened to it wondering.
And the very next instant I found myself at the top of the telephone pole and I was looking down. It was dusk. The light on top of the telephone pole was starting to go on. And [music] I remember as soon as it started to snap on, there was a a bug, a little bug, like a moth or something that started to kind of fly around it. And beneath me, underneath me, there was this car kind of caved in. The front end caved in and the hood popped open and steam coming out of it and fluid running onto the ground and stuff. And then I I noticed [music] that there was an arm hanging out the window. And about that time from where I was, I could look over hedges into this neighborhood I'd never been in, kind of a suburban neighborhood. I could look over hedges into people's backyards and the like. And I started to see lights snap on and people coming out of their back doors and stuff coming out under the street because of the sound of the accident. And I realized at that moment that I was looking at myself and that it was my car and that there was my arm and people started to come out and I heard somebody say call an ambulance. Call for an ambulance. But I was perfectly fine at the time. I was in [music] fact kind of better than fine. I had an experience that I had in all three of the near-death experiences where all the all the sort of constraints were off. I I felt completely free. I I felt liberated of any kind of material confinement or containment. And mentally as well, I felt like my mind was part of a greater mind. So, I just felt kind of wrapped in love and warm and at ease and comfortable. I was concerned because I was trying to communicate with the people on the ground that were taking care of the accident, [music] but nobody could hear me. And at the same time, I had the distinct definite sense of another presence with me that there was somebody up and to my left, so to speak. And they were sort of prompting me. I didn't turn around and, you know, shake their hand or meet them or something. In fact, I didn't have hands. I don't remember having a body. I I remember seeing, but I was witnessing my body below being taken out of the car and put into a an an ambulance. And I continued to try to contact people down below, but I couldn't. And then this this entity behind me, sort of shepherded me off, told me that it was it was time to leave. And I had no problem at all with releasing. I I just I was totally agreeable. Like I said, I didn't have the same sort of serial cascading thoughts and sort of engagement in life with things being overly important or necessary. I was very liberated. I felt very free and very comfortable. And so off I went. And as I recall it, I was kind of flying, [music] so to speak, through kind of [clears throat] clouds, warm gray kind of clouds. And I don't remember exactly how we arrived, but we ended up I ended up and this whoever it was that was shephering me, so to speak, in a very sort of bucolic place, kind of a pastoral place, like a park or just nature, you know. It seemed like there was a place almost like a cafe out like an outdoor cafe almost like a table or something. Although I don't remember the physicality of it to that degree. I had the sense that there were other entities within this sort of pastoral area that was parklike trees and and meadows and the like. And there this entity I presume it [music] was this same entity was was with me and we engaged in this conversation the details of which I don't really remember distinctly but I do remember that it was important that it was all about important stuff. I'm not sure exactly what we were all figuring out then because I don't remember exactly what it was about. But this went on for some length of time and again time was pretty immediate. I had no sense of a clock ticking at all. And I don't really remember it in distinct detail. So when I say personages, it may be just my imposition of what I would like it to have been. You know, I don't I'm I'm not my memory is not so solid that I could tell you that this was a person that I was talking to or that we talked about this or that. But about it turns out as the clock went about 20 hours later or so I I regained consciousness in a hospital and my head was all bandaged up. And at the time I didn't have any health insurance. And so I think it was the next day or so they basically wheeled me down to the loading dock kind of in the back of the of the hospital and put me in a cab. And the cab took me home. And that was my that was my first my first near-death experience. And I tell these experiences as they were. So I'm not I don't go back into things that I might have further realizations I might have made about them because I know that that human memory is very unreliable and that we have a tendency to add on things that may not have actually been the case. And it's miraculous enough as it as it was. But the thing that I took away from that, I call it the gift of of perspective, of spiritual perspective.
My second near-death experience happened about five or six years later. I had had a marriage end and I had moved to New York City and I was doing my career rather successfully there. At the time, I was very busy, but I also lived a a riotous lifestyle, so to speak, where I was pretty no holds barred and kind of self-destructive. And it ended up in this particular circumstance where I had this kind of this kind of series of physical breakdowns that happened in a fairly short period of time. I I basically just kind of started to I'd been just pushing myself too hard and I started to break down to to kind of fall out and I realized that I was at a party of course and I didn't live far away. I made it back to my apartment, but as soon as I walked in the door, I really started shutting down. And I fell onto the floor with my head propped against against the wall. And I was with my girlfriend at the time. And she was very upset because I seemed to to to be in bad shape. And her [clears throat] voice started to elevate and she started kind of crying and stuff. And as I was laying there, unable to really move from the neck down, unable to really feel my body at all, the room started to fill in with this brilliant sort of [music] white cloud, as it were, this this very radiant white, like being inside of a bright white cloud. And once again, I did not feel alone. I felt like I had this entity behind me again. And once again I was delivered to this place that had sort of no limitations. I was freed from the constraints of my body. And also I had that sense it maybe a little less this time but I had that sense of my mind being part of a larger mind [music] of being rather limitless but it it was kind of a more constrained or more defined uh in this experience [music] because of the nature of it. This entity sort of directed me to look in a certain direction within this cloud and something like a screen opened up as I looked into this white brilliance and I started to witness these scenes from my life. Not like a movie but more like a box of time that I sort of re-entered. And so I was experiencing these in the moment in in real time. And I had maybe four, five, six of these. I can't tell you the exact details of them, although I have had recollections more as time has gone on about what I think happened in them, but I don't really include them too much in in retelling the story because like I said, I [music] don't I tell you the story that I remember like the next day. And the way that I remember it the next day is that each one of these life circumstances that I witnessed, each one of these scenes from my life were of something important happening that I hadn't really been present for. So, me injuring somebody and not realizing I was injuring them. Me being offered a great opportunity and being too fearful to take it or being too arrogant or for some reason just overlooking it. Each one of these were these circumstances where had I been present, they may have been life-changing experiences, but I wasn't there for [music] them. I was into my own stuff. I was worrying about myself and thought that I had things figured out a certain way and this wasn't it, etc., etc. So, after a little while of this, and I don't know how many of these scenes I've witnessed, but enough to recognize [music] that time is a much more theoretical thing than as we experience in this biological sense here in this world in these bodies. It doesn't it doesn't necessarily progress from beginning to end. It could be happening all at the same time. I'm seeing different parts of my life and this is this is a life review and it's another sort of a classic motif for near-death experiences. I came back from it by just starting to have the outside world enter into the cloud again. I started hearing the voice of my girlfriend and she was really panicking and I think it had been just a matter of maybe I don't know 10 minutes or something kind of total. This was the only near-death experience I had where I wasn't hospitalized or given medical treatment. So, this has been totally anecdotal, although all spiritual experience is totally anecdotal really. But, but the outside world started to penetrate in again and the the cloud that I was in started to kind of fade out and the reality of the room, the sort of harshness and and starkness of it and the sharpness started to come back in, penetrate again. And I started to feel my body a little bit and come back into it. [music] And the next thing I knew, I was just in the room again. My girlfriend was sobbing and I was starting to feel my body from the neck down, starting to move. And it took me about a half an hour or so to get so that I could stand back up and stuff like that. And that was my my second near-death experience. And that one in retrospect and after years of meditation really these stories all came back to me after I suppressed them rather. I realized that this was the gift gave me the gift of presence. [music] This realization that everything we do is right now that right now is the time that all of life happens.
The third and hopefully last one, you know, it's like how many does it take? Because neither of those two really changed my life. I went back to the life I had been living more or less with not a lot of changes. I mean, I dialed it back after my second near-death experience, but nonetheless, I lived a world of of material concerns and expectations and and fears and resentments and judgments and comparisons and all of that kind of stuff. And it didn't work very well for me. I continued to be successful and by a lot of standards, but I I left my life in New York City and I moved to the desert southwest to Arizona and I was going to get married and I it was a Super Bowl Sunday. It [clears throat] was in a college town and I went and watched the Super Bowl with some friends of mine [music] and afterwards I went out and this will [clears throat] tell you how long ago this was. There was a a pay phone. I called my fiance on a pay phone and she was baking at home. And as I was talking to her on the phone, a big call them skin heads, kind of a neo-Nazi kind of a kid, like a big guy who was drunk came up and started to assault me. I had been going back and forth to New York and I was dressed in kind of a city fashion compared to a lot of the people around me. And so he kind of picked me out, I think, that way. And he started to assault me while I was on the phone. and he reached in and hung up the phone on me, the pay phone on me while I was talking to my fiance. And so I I [clears throat] hung up the phone and I calmed him down. I kind of talked him down and he eased him away and he seemed to go away and I called my fiance back and he came back and he came back. He was much more aggressive and he was really assaulting me. And having had some of the of the martial arts training that I had as a childhood, I made a terrible mistake that I will never do again. I planted my back foot and when he pushed me, I punched him right on the chin. Just boom. And he fell backwards, I knocked him out. He fell backwards. And there were people around and they applauded actually because they had witnessed this whole thing. And so they I guess they thought it was great. I immediately felt a little sick, you know, a little worried. And so I got out of there. And I had ridden a bicycle. So I jumped on the bike and I was taking off. And I didn't realize that this guy was not alone. that there was a van full of these kind of guys who had watched the whole thing and they followed me for a while. I didn't know they were there and they pulled up alongside of me and hit me in the back of the head as I was riding my bicycle with a tire iron or a crowbar, something like that, and knocked me head first into the street into the gutter. And [music] then apparently, according to the police report, which I didn't see for almost 2 years after that, uh they stomped and kicked me while I was unconscious, sort of back and forth from their van for a while. For me, this was sort of the most temporal of the of the near-death experiences I had. There was nothing sort of classically heavenly about it. The experience was of being maybe kind of underground or in sort of a womblike chamber and I was laying on my back and I had entities around me standing around me. Again, I felt safe and warm, cared for. I was I was even more I think within myself still sort of like relating to it as a as a human, not as a disembodied ethereal spirit, but kind of [music] as a a guy who was in this situation. And I had this sensation that just outside the room there was some kind of terrible violence going on, which I imagine was me being unconscious and them continuing to stomp and kick me and stuff. [music] And I I had a bad feeling that this was not going to last, that I wasn't going to remain safe. And I didn't uh really engage directly with any of these entities, but they were all kind of talking amongst them amongst themselves and then came to me telling me that I had not gotten here when I was supposed to or the right way and that I needed to go back and I did not want to go back. I started struggling against it. You know, I'd had it with all that. It was enough. But the way that I remember it, they they lifted me up and it was almost as though a whole bunch of hands pushed [music] me through [snorts] a kind of like a membrane through a little wall kind of and I kind of popped out on the other side of it. And when that happened, I opened my eyes. I was laying on my back in the street and there was an e emergency medical worker over me and he looked down at me and then looked up to the guy that he was with and said, "He's [clears throat] back." When I came back, I had no choice but to consider the fact that I was forced back into this life for some reason. Likewise with as with my other two, I I tried to suppress that and I went on with life after that and lived fairly, you know, continued success. I moved back to to New York and I just really had a hard time sort of coming to terms with being a regular person anymore. Then I was present at 911 [music] and I was in downtown Manhattan when it happened and I had this intense sense of being surrounded by disembodied spirits. And I start I remember standing on the street and thinking, well, this isn't normal. I don't think that most people are having this experience. They certainly didn't seem to be. I didn't put it together with the near-death experiences, the three that I'd had. But shortly after that, I got a small cabin on the upper Delaware River, which was really out in the middle of nowhere, and I essentially sat on a rock by the upper Delaware River for years. I developed a a meditation practice and I I got heavily into reading about spirituality, into reading scripture and physics and and uh religion and [music] all kinds of subject matter that I had not been interested in at all up to that point. And as I sat on this rock and meditated about these things, this need to to relate these experiences arose in me. And I was kind of called on to start writing and I did I had a I was doing animation design at the time and I had a blog that I was posting animation art on and I started putting up these essays about spirituality. And I started getting contacted by spiritual websites and publications and the like. And the next thing I knew I was writing for a number of I was on beliefnet or on gaia.com things like that where you can find my stuff still. And I kind of channeled my first book which was which is called how to survive life and death. And [music] I almost immediately got a publisher without having any experience. And it was published and I found myself suddenly part of the near-death experience community and speaking at conferences and the like, being invited to speak at conferences. And that led to to my second book, which is how to get to heaven without really dying. And [music] I find myself talking to a lot of people, helping a lot of people. I'm always mentoring a few people and trying to pass on these three lessons that I learned. The lesson of spiritual perspective, the lesson of spiritual presence and the third lesson that I got from that final painful I hope final painful NDE which was the spiritual purpose that each of us is here for a reason. We are these packages of karma and we have circles that we need to connect in our lives. And while I might have imagined my life to be like a movie where maybe I was James Bond or something, I've discovered it's really much more like a low-budget indie documentary kind of with, you know, where I'm more like a character actor. And I'm not doing anything that's that's all that fabulous lots of times, [music] but just the things that I can do for people, the service that I can be of to my family, to friends, to people that have concerns or interests in life and death issues that [snorts and music] that I by one way or another, by one means or another, I happen to know a little bit more about. We don't die. We are packages of karma that we are creating and that we will carry with us into our next existences after this. I was alive before I was born. I'm sure I don't remember that. And uh if there's a takeaway um it is to remove the obstacles to love in your life because love is a field of being that we are all part of that there is a divine consciousness that we are all expressions of and that all of this is an expression of and um that if you focus on the idea that you're a spirit having a physical existence You can have that kind of spiritual perspective. Um, [music] if you realize that now is always now in any life you'll ever have. Now is when you can do what you need to do, then you'll have that spiritual presence. And if you know that um I can't tell you why or what it is all about, but it is about something and it's about our something. So, you're here for a reason. You do something that nobody else can do or you can do something that nobody else can do.