Transcription
Hi everybody, and I'm really excited to be here today because I get an opportunity to kind of talk about a thing that happened to me and a thing that's brought some some interesting joy and peace into my life, despite it being at the time a a relatively chaotic event that I guess would have scared the pants off of a lot of people. But in my case, it was life-altering in a positive way, in that it took away a whole lot of fear, a whole lot of uncertainty. It gave me some perspective. Frankly, I find solace in knowing that I'm a very small piece or a molecule of water in a very large river. It just dawned on me the symbolism of that statement, but that's literally how it feels to me.
So when I was, you know, I can't even say for sure if I was 14 or if I was 15 at the time, but I lived in Germany. My stepfather was in the Army. Where I lived in Germany was very rural. The post where my stepfather was stationed was relatively small. There were only a few kids my own age that their parents were likewise stationed at that base. And, you know, the end result of that is most of my friends were German, and I had a couple of American friends. In this particular night, I was hanging out with one of my American friends at a local bar and his neighboring the little town that he lived in. We had gone to the local bar. I know a lot of people think that, you know, in Germany, if you can see over the bar, you can order a beer, and that's pretty accurate. You can't. I think there's supplies around it, but nobody enforces them as long as you're not acting like a fool. But it's that particular night, we'd been just shooting pool and, you know, we had a beer. I might have had two beers, I don't know. But we were walking back from the bar back to his house, and we had gone over, we were walking across a wide open field that had a good blanket of snow on it. This was the dead of winter in Germany, which could be rather cold and uh, very obscuring, apparently. Because what we did not know at the time is that as we were walking across this expansive of snow-covered ground, that at one point we were standing directly on top of a rather large, rather quick moving, I guess you can't call it a river, but it was a creek, and a pretty substantial one. And it had been a pretty sunny day, despite the snow being on the ground. And as anybody who knows will tell you, when you have a blanket of snow that sits on top of ice, it functions as an insulator, and it will actually start to melt the ice beneath. And I remember, you know, as I was walking, I heard this crack. And when I felt that, there was just a surge of adrenaline that kind of went through me, and I stopped dead in my tracks. And I started thinking about, you know, trying to distribute my body weight over over as large a percentage of this as I could, because I knew I was standing on really thin ice, literally. So as I was kind of trying to sink down a little bit, you know, bend my knees a little bit, and maybe think about laying flat so I could distribute my weight a little bit, no, it was done. Cracked right directly through the ice. And it was scary. I remember all of it. A lot of people will tell you that they don't remember the couple of, you know, the few minutes leading up to this stuff, but I remember it vividly because it was shocking, and I was hyper-aware because of the adrenaline kind of course and through my system.
Next thing I know, I'm under the ice. And it's dark outside, and there is no ambient light to come in from anywhere. And I just sat there for a second trying to compose myself from the shock of being just almost flash frozen. It was so cold. And uh, I'm looking for anything, you know, any kind of purchase. And I'm punching at the ice, and it's, it's not budging. Apparently, it was thick enough to uh, take a solid punch from a 14-year-old, but not enough to carry my at that time, probably 180 pounds of weight. So I struggled, and I could feel myself being carried a little bit by the stream of the, by the flow of the water. And it didn't take long because I hadn't taken a deep breath right before I went under. I had no time to kind of prepare for what what was about to happen. But it couldn't have been more than 30 seconds that I was kind of clawing at the ice. And I could hear my friend, you know, kicking at the ice, and it just wasn't doing anything. I was stuck. And I didn't know where I was. I couldn't tell how far I'd gone down, how much I'd moved. There was no visual purchase of this. Is there this? No, it was black because it was so dark outside. It just wasn't any light. And I remember my body at one point just kind of went, well, we gotta attempt to breathe. If nothing else. And I did. And I remember taking in, I remember the cold, or feeling all of this water kind of rushed into my lungs. But and then I just felt myself kind of drift off and lose consciousness.
This is where I had the life-altering experience of having seen what I believe to be, what I'm certain is, the other side of this equation. And it's difficult for me to explain this kind of in visual terms, but I'll take a stab at it because there was this sense of oneness with everything that was around me and everything that was happening at that time. And it was almost like I was kind of like blossoming out a little bit while maintaining my individuality, my individual consciousness. I felt connected to an indescribable and almost impossible number of things all at once. It was almost as if, and again, I have to express this, I refer to this completely metaphorically because this is not what manifested visually, but it was as if I had been sitting in a completely dark, endless expanse of nothing. And that a light came on. And when that light came on, it was illuminating. But there was so much going on that I wasn't yet capable, and I say not yet capable because I think I was about to figure out how it all worked. But it felt to me as if everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen had convinced itself into one singular point. And I think that that's what I experienced was the concept of eternity. Eternity being the absence of time, and therefore the absence of space, and therefore the ability to interact with, move through, experience things, everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen and everything that has ever existed or will ever exist. In the absence of time, there being no struggle of distance between anything. Because most people will tell you that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But no, that's actually not correct in my opinion, after what I've seen and what I've kind of experienced here. The shortest distance between two points in the absence of time is that straight line is only the amount of time that it takes to get there. So in the absence of time, everything does kind of exist in a singular point. As I experienced this massive, unbelievably kind of overwhelming orchestra, symphony, whatever you want to call it, of voices and ideas and thoughts and feelings and emotions. The one thing I didn't have was any sense of fear. And I think for most people, and and myself up until that point, the the scariest thing about the concept of dying is not knowing. Not knowing what happens when you get there. Not knowing that there's something positive that comes after. And it's my opinion, and a lot of people disagree with me, and I've gotten a little bit of several comments having explained this on a couple of other places. You know, it's a good thing I didn't end up in hell. My experience indicates to me, me that no such place exists. But it felt like everyone was there. And I mean everyone, simultaneously. I felt connected to and one with everything. And it was overwhelming because I feel like I was still very much attached to, associated with the physical body that hadn't quite entirely expired, even though I hadn't breathed and I had not my heart had not beaten for at least five minutes, and probably longer than that. But it felt like I was in this place for hours. Long time. My experience was I was being reintegrated into that singular oneness that connects everything to everything else. And I was being eased into it as I was separated from the physical body. But there was no fear. In fact, I found myself almost excited about what was coming because I had this tremendous sense, the entire several hours it felt like, that I was about to fully understand it. I knew that I was going to get a grip on everything immediately. That there was nothing to be concerned about. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was nothing to be fearful of. It was just a different state of existence where knowledge, where wisdom, where a full understanding, not confined within this, you know, ultimately relatively small organ that helps us animate a body. You know, I think the only thing that people are really afraid of is things that can hurt them. And I didn't feel like anything could hurt me there. I was just there, still interested, still myself, and still who I am, still an individual. But I felt like a little bit of my individuality was even about to be deconstructed, still maintaining myself, but not, you know, no eyes, no hands, no mouth. So all of this feels to me, looking back, you know, very ethereal, very difficult to explain with the five main senses that human beings have. But the interesting thing for all of about all of this entire experience for me was the absolute sense of contempt that I experienced after having just experienced probably the scariest thing I've ever experienced, which was taking in a a wave of freezing cold, disgusting creek water into my lungs, knowing that that had just happened and knowing that I was dead and being perfectly content with that. No sense of sadness. Again, that sense of time having ceased to exist made me realize that everybody I love, they were going to be there with me in the grand scheme of eternity, rather quickly. As I was really feeling that true and, you know, meaningful integration into this new existence, this new state of being, I started to feel myself almost as if I was going backwards. And I heard this voice, "Not yet." And then I woke up vomiting creek water in every direction, gallons. It was, it was a rough moment, I can tell you that. And I remember that moment of coming out of that experience and kind of being reconnected with the physical world and looking around and feeling the cold and feeling this kind of burning ice burn sensation in my lungs. But taking a deep breath. And there was almost a moment of disappointment. Well, that was something to look forward to. And then it was quickly kind of whisked away by something that I can't even attempt to describe. But effectively, it took that sense of disappointment and said, "Not yet."
So as I looked around me, and I looked at my friend who is now kneeling next to me with a paramedic that apparently had found on the side of the road while he was trying to weigh people down because he couldn't get to me. They had stomped through the ice in an effort to to get to me. And according to that paramedic, you know, I'd been under the ice for quite a while, five, ten minutes, he wasn't sure. That they had been performing CPR and he was about to give up for several minutes. So an ambulance came shortly thereafter. As soon as I'd, I woke up and I sat up and I immediately warmed up, which was fascinating. I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and I was there for an hour. They couldn't see any signs of, you know, loss of brain function or any other physical impairments that had come about as a result of this experience. And I know, a big long pause there because it's mind-blowing to think about that I literally stopped breathing, I filled my lungs with dirty creek water. I had a a little bout of pneumonia for a couple of days because of the water I had taken onto my lungs. But otherwise, I was like perfectly fine. The most interesting thing about this entire experience for me is what I brought back with me. I found myself immediately with this fascinating capacity to walk into a room, interact with any human being, and pretty much know where they stand, pretty much know who they are as a person. Some people just, you know, you're an empath. Well, okay. But you know, my kids can't get away with anything because I I know as soon as they start lying. And I don't tell the truth. Yeah, most powerfully for me is the number of people that I've encountered over the course of the last, I guess it's been 30 years since that happened, almost 30 years, which is crazy. The synchronicity of things is mind-blowing because I interact with people on Twitter consistently that don't even know about this experience because they seem to know that somehow I'm going to provide some kind of meaningful counsel, something that I can say or something that I can do that's going to help them get through a difficult moment. And for anybody that's out there, I just want to tell you this: if you are petrified by the concept of parting this world, I implore you to stop. It's not a scary experience. And I know there's been some horror stories out there from people that claim that they've gone to the other side and they've seen hell. And I don't know how those people are living their lives, but I had zero of that experience myself. If there's any indication that the dying brain does things in an effort to keep itself alive, I would say that attempting to scare somebody with the concept of hell to reignite the endocrine system, to fire up the adrenal glands and get you scared and hopefully start your heart again, would be a good way to do that. But I literally had a voice tell me, "Not yet." And it was caring, but it was almost as if the decision was just made. No, no, not yet. But I did give you a glimpse. And on the other side of that glimpse is an opportunity for me to interact with all of you, to provide some peace and solace, I hope, for anybody that's concerned about what's coming on the other side of this crazy place that we live. And that the physical body that you currently possess is just that, it's a possession, it's not you. That's a big one for me. So what I beg for in my interactions with people that I talk to about this life-altering experience is compassion. Compassion is powerful. Looking for people's true motivations is powerful. Understanding the motivations and and the fears and the the excitement of other human beings will lead you to a path of reason and common sense and love. And I think love is more important than anything. I think it's the purest thing that you can experience because I was enveloped by it for that period of time that I was not present here on whatever this plane is. I guess I'll wrap up just by kind of saying this on my own YouTube channel, one of my catchphrases, and I mean it, is "I love you, I respect you, and if I have to, I will protect you." And it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what your political beliefs are, even if they're completely opposite of mine. It certainly has nothing to do with what race anybody is or what religion somebody is or who they worship or whatever. I say that emphatically because of this experience that I had, leading me to the conclusion that well, I'm part of you and you're part of me, period. So even if we disagree, we're all going to the same place, and we all have the same fate in store. And that fate is to be part of one another again, in a very real sense. There's a lot of music and a lot of art and a lot of crazy things that everybody puts out there. We're all one. Well, the reality of the situation is, yes, we are. We are all at one. That we need to love each other, and we need to respect each other, and we need to protect one another. And compassion is key. So as I always say on my own channel, I love you, I respect you, and if I have to, I will protect you. I really enjoyed being here, so thanks for the invitation. We all, we all fall when the love's in our eyes, staring lost. [Music]