From the time that they pronounced me that was a good 45 minutes They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart my heart stopped and I could see people screaming and crying But I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else The only thing that I could feel if you can imagine Absolute love and peace there wasn't anything else to be felt.

I was greeted by people I'd known in the past I'm back home again.

Incredibly safe and felt at home.

Welcome, welcome everybody to Round Trip Death and I'd like to welcome Marilyn Hughes who's with us for the first time today.

Good morning Marilyn.

Good morning Eric.

I'm so glad you reached out and we've chatted before about what happened to you and people are going to find this Absolutely fascinating.

Before we jump into it, I want everybody to get to know you.

Who's Marilyn?

I'm just an old grandma with you.

I have three adult children.

I have two grandchildren.

You know, I was raised in mostly Ohio, although I was born in California.

I migrated to Colorado and I raised my kids there for 25 years.

I live now in Arizona.

I've been a writer.

most of my life because in the beginning of my early 20s I started having out of body experiences which I began to journal.

Loved the outdoors, loved the mountains of Colorado and now we have the deserts where I'm at now.

I am now Catholic but I wasn't Catholic.

before these things happened to me, the experiences that I've had have led me to become Catholic about 25 years ago in the Jubilee year of 2000.

That's good.

You know what, let's do this.

Let's start with the near -death experience and if we have time maybe we'll get into some of the other out -of -body type experiences.

I know that's a passion of yours right now and you have a foundation and we'll stick all that in the show notes for people that want to find it and find you.

But let's go back a few years.

Well this happened in 2003 but what led up to it earlier on?

Well, shortly after my youngest child was born, I was diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy, which is a pretty kind of rare complication of pregnancy, but I was diagnosed a little bit late.

So I was in heart failure.

And what that means with peripartum cardiomyopathy with associated heart failure is your heart's enlarged and it's not pumping right.

It is one of the most cardiomyopathy.

any form of it, not necessarily peripartum is one of the most common reasons people will get heart transplants.

By the time 2003 rolled around, my heart was not doing very well.

My doctors had suggested, based on some of the testing they had done and my symptomology, that they should do a cardiac catheterization.

They were gonna have a chopper standing by, because I lived in the mountains of Colorado, and they were gonna send me up to the University of Colorado in Denver.

where I'd been a few times and they would take it from there.

That's where they did the transplanting.

They had a transplant hospital up there and I'd been up there and been typed out before.

And this is what they were going to do.

That was the plan.

And so the night before I was supposed to go in for the procedure, I had some kind of an arrhythmia or something went wrong.

And all of a sudden I was out of my body and I was standing before the dark tunnel.

with the light at the end.

I was very excited because I saw sitting in the light, my little dog, my little dog Joy, who was my terrier that I had for like 25 years, most of my childhood.

And so I was so excited to see her because she was my little dog and hadn't seen her in a long time.

And she was just very happy to see me, wanted to see me.

So I was thrilled about that.

went towards this light going down the tunnel.

As I went down the tunnel, there were a few different things going on all around.

There was the world was off in the distance.

I could see it and hear it in the distance.

And so I was up in space and I knew that because I could see the whole earth was like a round globe over there.

And we were up here and the Lord Jesus had appeared.

and he had come and he was wearing the robes of the Sacred Heart.

It was beautiful.

It was the white and the red, and he had the beautiful heart that he shows in all the images that you see, and it was much more brilliant, of course, than what we would see on Earth in our paintings and things like that.

Off in the distance, you could see, you could not...

I could not fathom them yet, but you could see off in the distance like these overlapping worlds.

They were all, there were like many of them.

I wouldn't say I could see infinities of them yet, but I knew that there were many of them from there.

So now I'm walking down the tunnel.

I get to the end of the tunnel and there's this pale light flowing barrier at the end where the light is.

And I know I have had these out of body experiences throughout my life.

I know that if I touch that light or try to go through it, that I will not be able to return.

This is like a point of no return.

And so I'm just thinking and stuff and I'm like, I don't know what to do.

I really wanna touch it.

I really wanna touch it.

I wanna go through, but I'm afraid that if I do that, I have to leave permanently.

And then I make the decision, no, I'm not gonna touch it.

and I start turning back.

And you had young children at the time, right?

I did.

My children were very small, so my youngest was probably about two.

My kids were a little further apart in age just because of the way things turned out, so I had probably about 12, five, and two.

And so I had younger kids.

They all needed me.

I'm walking back, and Jesus takes my hand and We whoosh up into the sky.

He takes me beyond another barrier that I know I'm not really allowed to go past, you know, unless I'm not going back.

But there's this sense that's given me immediately not to worry about it.

It's all okay.

Jesus is giving me some kind of permission for this.

So now I am taken into these worlds that I saw just the outskirts of from before.

I'm like literally traveling like with him at the speed of light, you know, through these worlds.

And so all of these are like different spheres, realms, and each one of them has their own colors and their own energy and vibration and pulse.

And they're all extremely beautiful.

But I'm only, you know, whisping through them very, very fast with the lore.

And then he brings me back to the front end.

of where the tunnel was.

And at the side of the tunnel is this, it's like an old fashioned stick thing.

It's like a way to judge something, a way to meter something, but it's with sticks.

So you know how we would, we still do when our children are young, we try to put up little things on the wall to gauge how tall they are, right?

It was something like this, but there were sticks.

And this was different.

This was how do we gauge the development of different souls in relation to their selflessness versus selfishness.

When the stick was at the ground, that meant that they were totally engrossed in selfishness.

And as it moved up, the soul was cultivating selflessness and more selflessness.

And there was a level that was about waist high, which is what we needed to achieve in the earthly sphere in order to kind of complete our lessons here and move on to the next level.

And so the Lord showed me different things about people in my life and how some of them did struggle a lot with this selfishness, but he showed me that my...

My stick was in a good place that allowed me, if I wished, to leave at this time.

That I could go if I wanted, but I could also, I could go, you know, leave the planet, or I could stay.

It was kind of up to me.

And then he directed my attention to the world, which was back here.

So the world, the big blue -white planet over here.

And as he directed my attention to the planet, I heard these shrieks, screams and people just yelling at each other and complaining and just, it was this horrible sound.

It was terrible.

It was this sound of like, I guess you could call it cacophony.

It was the sound of souls that were in such inner discord that They were there.

Because this was what this realm served.

It was kind of like a bathtub for selfishness.

They're trying to work it out of their souls, right?

It's a mortal realm.

And we had to work out that good and evil, that light and darkness within each of ourselves in this realm.

So I could hear this cacophony.

And the Lord said to me, as he walked me over, standing in front of that tunnel of light again.

He said, if you go back, that will not change.

You cannot change that.

That world serves its purpose to perfection.

You can't fix it, but it's still your choice.

And I said to him, well, as long as I have a choice, I have to go back because I have three young children.

And so I will go back Lord.

and he nodded in agreement.

And he said to me, he said, then I want you to go back and pray to receive a heart transplant.

And at that moment, I got very kind of pensive and uncomfortable and I thought for a few moments.

And then I just said to him, I said, I'm sorry, Lord, I cannot do that.

But what I will do is I will go back and I will do the best that I can.

with my heart, the one that I've got, the one that you gave me, and I will pray that the person who's perfectly healthy, who would have to die to give me a new heart, is spared." And all got silent.

It was all a rush of silence.

It's like, you know, when you hear that word, like in scripture or something, you know, it was like...

Everything was silent for just a minute.

And then he said, I grant that.

Very quietly, he said, I grant that.

And then he quietly took my hand.

And I was so honored when he took my hand again.

And then he lifted me up like in a whoosh, you can't believe.

And we started flying me through space towards the earth.

We headed towards what was like a way station.

But in this way station, was similar to like a coffee shop bookstore type thing.

We got there so fast, it was almost like and we're sitting at a table and he's talking to me and he's very intense.

There's all these books around us, all these bookshelves of people who have written books.

They're all spiritual books, right?

And he looks at me and he says, I'm not going to heal you.

I'm going to help you.

and I'm gonna make good use of you for the time that you have left." And then he raises his hands like this to direct me to look up at this bookshelf that's in front of us.

So I turn my head up to look up there and there's a whole bunch of books.

And then he's trying to indicate, look closer, look closer.

And I notice that on the binding, that my name is there as the author.

And there's a whole bunch of them.

And I'm a little bit confused by that because at that time I had written two books.

At this point, it's more like it's becoming now more telepathic.

So I'm looking at him and I'm thinking to Jesus, are you telling me I'm gonna write all those?

How is that gonna happen?

What are you talking about?

What does this mean?

You know, that's kind of what I'm doing, right?

He just says, This he looks he points and he looks at me like this with this intensive gaze and Points at the books and I look at them again.

I just say okay and Then we both go back But then he's no longer holding my hand.

I'm shooting through space He's disappeared and I'm awaking in my body Alright, let's take a breath Okay, that was a lot I had 20 questions along the way, but I did not want to interrupt.

Wow, let's break this down.

Where do you want to start?

What part do you want to talk more about first?

It might be good to give the final part and then break it down, which was when I went into the catheterization and came out.

Go for it.

Okay, so then I had to hurry up and go to the hospital, right?

We got the chopper on the hospital.

We've got the doctor waiting to do the catheterization.

And to make a very long story short, I go in for the catheterization.

The plan is I'm going to wake up in Denver.

They're gonna chopper me up there, right?

But I wake up in the mountain town that I'm living in and I ask my doctor, what's going on?

Why am I here?

I don't understand.

And he says, well, we don't really know what happened or how to explain this, but you know, your heart, it's not cured or anything, but it's significantly better than it was last week.

And it's better enough that we don't need to send you up there.

And so you're good.

We're going to send you home and we're going to add this medication and we're just going to go from here.

I knew immediately Jesus said I'm not gonna cure you but I'm gonna help you I knew he had helped me and that's Where it ended has that been the case ever since did you ever need the transplant or anything?

actually what ended up happening was I went through 15 years of having the cardiomyopathy heart failure and then 15 years later my heart spontaneously healed which I've been told by many doctors is not possible.

And a couple of doctors have told me, a couple of doctors of faith have told me that's actually a miracle.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Depending on who you ask.

They'll say, you know, a lot of doctors don't want to say that M word, do they?

Right.

And that's okay.

Cause they're, yeah, they're just trying to understand it.

And they did use medications.

to get me through it.

And you know the doctors were part of the miracle.

They never want to ever forget or dismiss that they were part of that whole miracle.

Doctors work miracles too.

You know God uses them and so they were part of the whole thing.

All right let's go back to the very beginning part.

This tunnel you're talking about is unusual and first of all, well seems like I say this all the time, But no two NDEs are the same.

We think, oh, there's a tunnel and you go towards the light.

That really doesn't happen that often.

Okay, so yours is really cool from that standpoint.

But I don't really understand the tunnel, how if you're in some kind of a tunnel, you're also seeing the world and seeing Jesus and seeing all these other worlds.

Explain the tunnel a little bit more.

Was it like transparent or This tunnel had some transparency to it.

And what's interesting, I can just go a little farther with that, you know, just to let the audience know that I've had the out of body experiences for 40 years.

And so I've learned that there are a lot of different types of tunnels that people travel through in the mystical spheres.

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This particular tunnel that I was seeing, there was some transparency to it.

It was like a membrane.

But there are other tunnels that are very similar, that are dark with the light at the end, that do not have that same transparency.

And they're very different.

And so it's kind of important to know that They're not all the same.

And there are different ones that have thin ribbing in them.

And these are not usually associated with near death experiences.

They're usually associated with traveling into mystery realms and things like that.

But this particular tunnel did have some transparency to it.

Another part that is different when you're in a near death experience is that you do have this...

I'm not sure, there's probably a word for it that I'm not thinking up off the top of my head.

You do have this ability to have like an awareness of this self here, this self looking here, this self remembering what was back here.

And so there is this omnipresence that you have that is different than you have in a physical body.

And so people can get confused when you're actually having this ability in a near -death experience or an experience of a mystical nature to see more than one place at the same time, but it's actually very common in mystical experience.

Besides Jesus, did you see any other people or beings of any kind?

My dog.

You mentioned the dog, yes.

I didn't mean to leave the dog out.

My cute little dog.

What was that like?

Was that like a big reunion?

It was, I know it sounds so petty, but it was just so awesome to see my dog.

And there was something very mystically special about seeing her.

People forget, well, we forget this about our loved ones too.

Every, every, every remembrance we have of someone we've loved when we cross over is a beautiful reunion.

So even with our animals, it's just a beautiful reunion.

in terms of seeing other beings mostly not in this experience except there were others I guess the way to put it there were no other main characters in this experience I saw members of my family like my current family where I was being shown things it was being shown things about my family that I usually keep private about my children and things that were going to happen to them as they grew older but they're adults now and I like to give them their privacy.

I was shown things about my husband.

I was shown other people that were floating around and in the way station there were other people in this place, this coffee shop -esque kind of place, but in terms of communicating with them, we did not do that.

Okay, next question.

I want you to think For just a second before you answer and really go back in your memory here What did it feel like when Jesus took your hand?

It felt like the wisdom and the breath of a thousand fathers and mothers Whispering you into their arms.

I mean, it's the It's the epitome of falling into the arms of the father.

You know what I mean?

There is there's nothing that can compare because the love, the unconditional love that you are experiencing, you know, everyone, well, I shouldn't say everyone, but most people talk about this who have had these experiences.

Some people have had different experiences.

But when you experience that it's like falling into the arms of thousands of mothers and fathers who are all of infinite love and realizing that you were never gone.

It's kind of like you just left for a while and you were never gone.

I honestly don't know how I didn't not leave.

No, I get it.

It's hard to understand how it's so wonderful and so loving and you could actually choose to come back.

But a mother's love is a super strong thing too.

Right.

It is.

And you know part of that it comes mother's love and the responsibility that we know and feel as mothers, we make that decision.

And we're there in the presence of our Lord who is encouraging us and filling us with that kind of strength of you can do this.

If this is for a greater good, you can do this.

You know, because wasn't that the epitome of everything that Christ did?

It was all for the greater good of all.

And he empowers you with that strength.

You definitely don't want to leave.

I often think about it and I often think, hush, what it would have been like if I had just gone.

And it's like, you know, what would have happened to my children?

Would they be better off?

Would they be worse off?

You know, you think all these things, you wonder, you know.

Those are great what if kind of questions that yeah it's okay that we don't know the answers to.

I want to talk about the selflessness versus selfishness.

Did you get the idea that everybody there this is what they're learning?

I think you mentioned that it's a big part of why we're here in this life is to learn the difference.

I don't see a lot of people as they get older, getting that much more selfless.

Explain more.

How do we learn this in this world?

How do we take it with us?

What kinds of things help us learn this lesson?

Well, you know, this is ironically what most of my books talk about, which is the path of purification.

In fact, I wrote a book called From Selfishness to Selflessness, and it's a comparison of ancient sacred texts from all world traditions.

the process that all world traditions encourage us to undergo as a practice.

But the path of purification is actually what we come here to do in a mortal world so that we will undergo, we will enter into the process that souls incarnate here for, which is the initiation into, so to speak, The process wherein a soul begins to recognize that we are in a mortal realm.

What does that mean?

It's a third and fourth dimensional realm where the battles between good and evil go on they go on inside of us they go on outside of us and We all have good and evil light and dark things that we have that are life -giving things that are death -dealing with inside of us and so in order to actually Do something about it.

We actually have to enter into an Actual path of purification and a path of purification.

Well, what is that?

Well in some traditions like for instance in Catholicism Mystical theology lays it out for us You can read like the Ascent of Mount Carmel by st John of the cross or an introduction to the devout life by st Francis de sails the spiritual life by father Adolf Tinkere And these are actually textbooks on the process of how do we do that self -intrusive examination of identifying those things within ourselves that we are doing that are selfish or are dark or are moving away from God rather than moving towards God.

And when we enter into this path of purification, we accelerate our spiritual journey to the point where it becomes possible for us to actually choose a higher thrust at the time of our death, where we can actually ascend from this realm and go to the next level of development instead of doing the same things over and over again, because you're absolutely right.

that most people walk through this life blindly and they do not progress and we call this karmic circling they just turn in circles they can spend 20 years and not identify the most basic of what we might call a fetter or a hindrance or a sinful nature that needs to be altered in order for their soul to take another step and these are little selfishnesses right but there are also their hindrances and fetters and cravings and things that hold them back.

All right, let's do this.

If you don't mind, I want to take a less theoretical, less theological approach as we talk about this for a second and talk about more practical, real stuff instead.

Okay.

Because some of that goes above my head.

I admit it.

This person wrote about that path and this circular thing and okay, I want to talk about some real things that I believe.

I think one of the reasons, just to go back to your learning to be selfless, I think one of the reasons that we came here to this earth and took on these bodies was there were things that we could only learn here by experience.

For example, I was much more selfish before I had our first baby.

compared to after having a child.

You become selfless in many ways through an experience like that, that maybe we can only have here.

Would you agree with that?

Absolutely.

Can you think of some others like that?

Absolutely.

There are all kinds of things in our earthly experience that offer us the opportunity to become more selfless.

And it has with children, for instance, having a handicapped child.

allows us that opportunity.

Being married and staying with your spouse and going through the illness and health.

Going through aging and the things that are going to happen to both parties.

Having children who end up with illnesses.

But it's also the day -to -day things that we have to learn to love one another as Jesus says, as I have loved you, even though we're imperfect.

So loving each other, even when we disagree, even when we don't understand why the other person thinks differently than we do, the smaller selflessness is, right?

And so one of the simple ways that people do this is that they recognize Like the vices in themselves like so for instance if someone's like, you know, I get I'm kind of mean -spirited And so then they might say well that means I need to try to cultivate more of a kind heart in order to counter my mean -spiritedness and so they will they will either engage in practices prayer meditation spiritual reading or they will actually go out and do something that's kindhearted.

So it can be, whether it's with their own children, they might go volunteer at a home for the handicapped.

They might go volunteer at a home for the elderly.

They might go volunteer at something else that they are good at where they can offer their special gifts and they learn to give freely of themselves, right?

It can be a lot of different things.

So these things can come down to like basic things like little vices that people have, whether it's lust or greed or anger, things like that.

And then you look at the opposite virtues, which would be temperance, prudence, purity, flow to anger.

And a lot of this then comes to giving more time to understanding.

Rather than focusing entirely on, I need to be understood, realize that you need to be more understanding.

You need to listen more so that you can also become more selfless and actually try to understand other people instead of just demanding that everyone understand you, which if we're honest with ourselves, people never understand us completely.

We have to just try to be understanding to one another.

Because we're all different, we're all so different.

There is a process that goes deeper, which is that process of mystical theology, which really helps you to hone that process in.

But life itself, as you said, getting married, having children, those are part of the life process itself that forces these teachings on us.

Our aging parents, our aging spouses, illnesses that we don't expect.

things that we don't expect, horrible things that happen to people, accidents, violence, injury, war, all the things that people are faced with where they can choose their response is going to show us opportunities where we can learn to become more selfish or more selfless.

Does this make sense?

Yeah, and maybe if we had not come here, because people sometimes ask me, what did we come here for?

Okay, and we're talking about one of those things.

Why?

Maybe a lot of these things without the trials that we have here on this planet, we just couldn't learn without them.

Just makes sense to me.

Okay.

Right.

All right.

Just a couple other little things.

The sounds that you heard, which I'm going to...

put words in your mouth were they like hellish kind of sounds you heard I forget the term that you use coming all these voices cacophony you don't want to know what hellish sounds sound like because I've been down there too but the sounds I heard coming off the earth were more of the cacophony of people complaining screaming screaming at each other.

It's what we see in our world today, ironically, and we didn't see as much of it at the time that I had the vision.

It was interesting to me because I was like, really?

Is that what it's going to be like?

And yeah, I guess it is.

And it's the way that we see where what we see in our society right now, people are not listening to one another.

They're just yelling and screaming at each other and demanding something of one another and not hearing anything.

And what they're doing, they don't realize this is what you see in a chaos realm, which is a purgatorial realm, where people just kind of bump off of each other and there's no rhyme or reason.

Nothing actually gets resolved that way.

You have to actually...

Stop the cacophony.

You have to stop the bumping off of each other You have to change the energy where people have to stop they have to step back They have to start listening to one another Even if you don't like what someone is saying you have to listen long enough to understand Even if once you understand you're like wow I understand what they think and gosh, wow, I think that's crazy.

You need to still be willing to understand where people are coming from.

This is what you have to have civil discourse and you have to be able to love one another as God has loved you.

And I think it's a good mantra, frankly, which is love one another as God has loved you.

Every time you're tempted to just start doing that.

Stop.

Step back and love one another as God has loved you.

Because anytime you just start attacking people, you're doing something that has no purpose.

It has no response that is useful.

You're wasting your time and ability to generate and create more of the things, the qualities, the selflessness, to cultivate a higher state of being that you are here to do.

It's kind of like you're wasting spiritual energy that was given to you as a gift.

Being born here is not an accident, it's a gift.

What we are seeing a lot of these days is people wasting a lot of good gifts and they're not progressing, just the way you originally stated it.

People are not getting more selfless as they get older.

They're not making progress as they get older.

And all these things need to happen, but it's also happening.

It's happening across the board in the youth and in every age bracket where we're not seeing the progressions that should be happening as a result of incarnating into this realm and the purpose of it being made manifest.

Well, if we were to talk about characteristics of Jesus, you brought him up.

And we could talk about selfless.

We could talk about the opposite.

If you also believe in a devil or Satan, that would be the epitome of the selfish.

And some of these things you're talking about, I wish you would just go to Washington and preach to all of the politicians on both sides of the aisle and the politicians all over the world for that matter.

Let's get back to if we just love a little more and serve a little more and be a little more selfless, world's going to be a whole lot better place.

Hey, why don't you leave us with just a couple of things.

One, I'm curious your level of your fear of death since the experiences that you've had and leave us with some kind of a brief message of hope.

I'm not afraid of death at all.

Sometimes I just have to like kind of temper my excitement about it because you know, I look forward to it is what I'd say.

You know, the message of hope would be that we do have the power within us.

within our hands to change the world.

Every single one of us does.

It's not in the way that I think many of us have thought.

It's in the fact that the power to change the world is in our power to change ourselves and the way that we interact with this world.

Interact with this world in a higher way.

And the more of us who do that, that it will change the whole world.

it will change everyone's ability and what they have to do in order to interact with the world in a way that matters.

All right Marilyn, thank you so very much.

I've really enjoyed it.

Thanks, me too.

Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.

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If you want to share your near -death experience, or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to eric at roundtripdeath .com.

Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.