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 to Round Trip Death everybody.

We are going all the way over to Portugal today for a really amazing story with Ishtar Howell.

Good morning Ishtar or evening for you.

How are you?

Well yes, good morning and good evening from over here.

I'm very well.

Good.

Hey, I forgot to warn you of this, but one thing our listeners love is getting to know the guests that we have on the show.

So if you wouldn't mind just taking one minute, tell us a little bit about you.

Who is Ishtar?

Actually, I think in a certain way, I feel like in a very positive way, I'm increasingly more of a nobody each day with each meditation practice that I do.

But that doesn't really help.

I'm a fellow who was born in Wisconsin, born and raised over there, moved to the West Coast to the US at 18, to the beautiful state of Oregon, and then ultimately ended up here in Portugal.

I have a lot of interests, a lot of hobbies.

I love playing the drums when they're around.

I love meditation.

I love gardening.

There's probably, I love learning Sanskrit and playing and studying Chinese and cooking.

I've done all sorts of crazy jobs in this life, including once cleaning up a crime scene, which was, that was an odd job.

And I probably have more stories in the vaults than I can tell in a hundred podcasts.

Awesome.

Very cool.

Well, if you need a new hobby, we'll get you into beekeeping one of these days.

You know, actually that that's one of the I got really excited when I found out that you were into that because that is one of the hobbies that I've been hoping at some point to pick up.

That's a whole other podcast.

We love beekeeping, but that's not where we're going today.

Today we're talking near death experiences.

Let's jump right into it.

So what was going on?

You were 13 years old.

Paint the picture.

What was happening that day of the accident?

Oh God, it was it was even kind of the the night before I I had played the sort of the first baseball game of the season It turned out had broken my arm getting hit by a pitch learned that immediately after at the at the doctor having gotten an x -ray and And that was I was kind of bummed about that because that was like a highlight of my year was was sort of a summer baseball season and I was just talking with my mom before I went to went to bed at night, and all of a sudden I just had these words just sort of fling out of my mouth without any forethought, just right there.

And I was asking her, are you going to die soon?

Whoa.

Just out of the blue.

Out of the blue, yeah.

It wasn't anything I'd ever really...

I'd never worried about my mother's health.

I had worried about my father's health.

because he had his gallbladder removed a few years before and we had to, you know, it's kind of a emergency sort of thing and I've never worried about my mother so I think she was a little bit surprised by it as well right there in the moment and she maybe took a couple seconds to kind of compose herself and before sort of reassuring me that oh no I'll be here for as long as you need me.

You know, I'll be you know, of course, I'm gonna die someday but I'll be here for as long as you need me and then I said Yeah, okay.

Okay.

I'm just gonna go to bed now Which is which is what I did and went to bed.

Well, no anxiety or anything like that.

No worries and Then I woke up the next morning as if I just jumped into my body from somewhere else.

I Say that because I even literally my body sprang up in the bed And it was exactly at the moment that my mom and dad, it was about six a .m.

or something like that, were walking outside my bedroom door.

And so I shouted at them.

Again, without any forethought, there's something I have to tell you.

There's something I've got to tell you.

And then when I went to say what I thought I had to tell them, it wasn't there.

And I was like, oh God, I forgot.

I forgot what I was supposed to say.

And I was so frustrated.

I was really...

They had to take a few minutes to calm me down, to kind of get me settled.

And so then I shook that off and said, OK, time to go to school.

And it was a good school day because I think it was the second to last day of school, which meant you're not in seventh grade, you're not really doing much of anything.

You're kind of having an award ceremony and doing some activities.

And there's no strain or worry on those days.

It's you know, I went and did the school went to school and then came home and and my mother was insistent that she drive my sister out to her new job at the edge of town, which was a movie theater and and so we did that and it was in pulling it was in the act of pulling out of the the parking lot and trying to go across a four lane sort of divided highway Right like making a left turn making a left turn.

Yeah.

Yes, you're dealing with Traffic going both directions.

Okay.

Yeah.

And of course it's, I don't know, it's like 4 PM or something like that in small town, Wisconsin.

So usually there's not much and there wasn't, you know, we looked and there was, you know, one car that was well off and, and kind of, you know, going slowly and there was no, no cause for alarm at all.

And we, we started driving across and I was looking out the window to my right.

When I turned to the left to talk to my mom, all of a sudden there was a large kind of, I think it was big Lincoln or something like that, like a Lincoln town car, a big car, clearly what must have been hidden behind the other car.

And perhaps they even had started to accelerate quite a bit because it was much further along than the other one.

And it was just outside my mother's door.

So maybe I have no idea, maybe certainly less than a foot.

Looking over there to in that moment basically I could only register one thought which was shit and Had some more thoughts after that I was I was fairly certain that this was the end of my life as well that this didn't look like a good situation it was And instead of you know kind of freezing up because at the time even at 13 I was I was consciously very afraid of death I had developed a fear of death somewhere between age 6 and 13 that was pretty formidable.

So instead of finding myself clamping up and tightening, I found myself loosening and relaxing, which was very strange, as I would have expected myself to do the opposite and go into a panic mode or something.

But instead I found this involuntary relaxation happening.

Instead the next thought was a calm, detached, philosophical kind of thought.

Well, not really philosophical, but calm and detached.

And it was, I really thought this one was going to go more than 13 years.

I wasn't attached.

It was just, okay, this is it.

So as if it was a voice from somebody else, not from your head?

No, it was mine.

From you?

Yeah, absolutely.

The deep voice.

And I was familiar with that deep voice.

I think more familiar when I was younger.

When I was five or four or six, but as I got older each year, I think Incrementally, I started to lose my connection to that That that depth of presence or consciousness or awareness that that you know had that kind of clarity in it And so that the next thing I knew also involuntarily of I found myself going through a life review which also was interesting to me consciously at the time because I'd heard of the phenomena, at least the phenomena of the life flashing before one's eyes, and I was very skeptical that the whole thing could be packed in.

Of course, it's like, come on, I can barely remember my life as it is.

And sure enough, it was perfect detail.

In fact, it was detail better than I consciously remembered it.

And in fact, in that life review, I have to say that the quality of consciousness, the clarity was much greater than in normal waking consciousness.

And so as each sort of moment, finally it did go and rewind, but in a non -confusing way.

So as each moment happened, another thing that surprised me was it was as if I was with either a deeper aspect of myself or another presence altogether.

whether we want to say higher self or God or whatever word, I'm not really even now attached to any particular framing.

But it was as if I had like a soul guide there that was omniscient and perfectly objective.

And so it basically went through my whole life with kind of a fine -tooth comb.

Can you give me some examples?

Do you remember any specific things that you saw or experienced there?

Oh, yes, many.

So where to start?

Well, first, broadly, any time that I had lied in life, or any time that I, and lying here also included such things as didn't say exactly what was in my heart at certain moments, or any time I sort of put a mask on because I was afraid.

All those things were sort of pointed out very compassionately.

And they said, yeah, you don't need to do that.

Some of the highlights of life, for instance, I would not have picked up myself.

One of the highlights was a memory.

I think it was from third grade.

So at that time it was only four years before, something like that, second or third grade.

It was a memory of getting out to recess, walking around on the blacktop, and it was just starting to rain.

And I was looking at a puddle on the blacktop and looking at the drops and this kind of omniscient guide.

pointed this moment out to me, because I wasn't just looking at it.

I was falling into a deep mystical state, only I didn't know I was in a mystical state or have words for it.

I was in complete silence and complete peace, just looking at the raindrops going into this puddle.

And the omniscient guide said, more of this.

This is it.

Basically, suddenly, this is the bullseye for this life.

And even use that language, for this life, this is the bullseye.

Another experience that was added to that along the same lines was from my second grade year I was in a really very pretty school that had these big really quite tall windows and And so I remember looking out looking out one of these windows again on a rainy day Going into sort of a daydreaming space, but instead of daydreaming.

I was in this big vast infinite flavor of consciousness And this experience was pointed out as a particularly good one.

I also went through a lot of the traumatizing experiences that I had been through.

And by going through them, it was as if a great deal of their content was sort of washed away and healed.

And probably a certain amount of the psychological hangups that otherwise would have been more pronounced had they not been washed were sort of taken off.

One example I had done, I think I...

The circumstance of it was I was protecting somebody from being bullied.

I did that.

I stepped in, but instead, by stepping in, I found myself definitely outnumbered in a fight.

I'm not going to win.

And so I remember that the memory that's clearest was my face, the left side, being thrown against the chain link fence.

In the NDE memory, it was interesting because my consciousness was being experienced not only in my own body, but I was in the fence as well.

And I was in the people who were either throwing me against it or the ones behind them who were sort of taunting and egging on.

And I was in the tree that was right next to the sort of the scene of the crime, so to speak.

And I was in the big, vast sky.

And then I also experienced what at this point I call maybe a particular aspect of divinity.

consciousness or whatever word we want to use, but it was as if there was a consciousness that was everywhere in the whole thing that was actually laughing in joy at this and was even specifically aware of my tiny little speck of its much vaster tapestry going through these tiny little dramatic experiences.

The more I went into that, there was even narration.

There was narration like, oh, this is excellent because because he's getting beat up here he's going to develop these sorts of things and then he will get to get over those sorts of things as if it was sort of delivering commentary on the arc of my life.

So this laughter wasn't like some evil presence going ha ha he's getting beat up it was it was some kind of beings on your team on your side seeing the good in what was happening even though it was not a fun thing you were going through.

Absolutely, and it was not derisive at all.

And the laughter wasn't simply engaged, wasn't in response simply to my thing, but it seemed to be a mirth, a completely mirthful laughter that was in all things everywhere, all at once, completely, almost in thanksgiving, almost in appreciation for the wonder of simple existence.

I simply tuned into the part of it that was at the time tuning into my dilemma, but it was clear that it was everywhere.

Life reviews fascinate me.

So if you don't mind, I want to dial down a little bit more on this.

Sure.

Even on this one particular piece of yours, if you were, did you say you felt like you were in the tree and in the fence?

Yeah.

What kinds of feelings was that tree having?

Seeing you get beat up or was it even feelings?

I I'm trying to understand here Yeah, actually there were I mean in a sense everything It was almost as if I'm sure I'll use the word holographic loosely here as a metaphor But in the sense that something of everything was everywhere in every other thing The total of this holograph was also in all the little bits of it.

And so that yeah, I do remember the tree The tree, funnily enough, the tree was feeling me and just basking love onto all of the homo sapiens.

It doesn't matter me or the person who threw me into the fence or the taunters or the sympathetic ones or the oblivious ones.

Didn't matter.

It seemed to be showering the whole recess crowd with unconditional positive regard.

Now, I'm not going to make a leap and say that that's what trees are doing all the time.

I think they probably have a mixed range of...

Feelings but that was simply the what was the case and in my own experience I can actually feel it also making a humming sound at least in the NDE life review There is a sense that the humming sound was as if I was hearing stuff trickling up its trunk In a way that this later came back as I got into meditation later in life a very very similar experience It's just not without the hassle of the of an NDE or the life review.

So that was happening now the fence was Also in my NDE life review kind of animate it wasn't just dead matter I think it was that had a very different perspective from the tree though because I didn't get as much detail with the tree I could almost the tree almost felt like a human in a vegetable form the fence was like I am metal so so That's all I could pick up in the thing But I just want to say it was almost as if like everything Experienced had eyes or some some kind of consciousness, but in a non -confusing way All right.

Well if you think of the quantum realm and quantum physics everything has vibration of some sort even things that are inanimate like metal or asphalt But usually we don't think or hear anything about them having any sort of consciousness or thought But it was very different than the tree.

I know we're getting off a little into the the woo -woo weeds here, but I find it interesting The thing that to me is most interesting about the life reviews is there's always things for you to learn and generally the emotions going through the review are very positive.

This is what most people report to me.

Hey, I hurt somebody.

I had this huge amount of empathy.

I felt what they felt.

I learned from it, but I didn't feel guilt and shame.

Was that your experience also?

Yes, absolutely.

Which also struck me because normally at the time my personality structure probably would have felt more guilt than it needed to.

And so that was very interesting to be shown all of these mistakes that I had made.

And I mean, not huge mistakes.

I didn't really have the time enough.

Yeah, you were 13.

Yeah, yeah.

But nevertheless, you know, all the mistakes and there was just complete complete saturation of love.

There was no room for any of that stuff.

Corrections were made with grace and love and compassion.

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forward slash round trip for quality therapy that's covered by insurance then at the end of the life of you was i mean through it it kind of felt even tangibly like like some kind of thin suit was being peeled off of me put it that way by the end of it like the suit was totally gone and i realized that basically that suit In language that I would have learned later that suit was the suit of sort of my overgrown Separate sense of self the misplaced ego being being used for jobs It doesn't need to be used for and it was gone and it was it was like good heavens the relief So that was part of it.

I mean in those few moments between the end of the life review and Getting hit by the car.

Those were the most alive at that point in life that I'd ever been also there was a Even in the language that I had at the time as a 13 -year -old, I was not reading a lot of metaphysical books and stuff like that.

But even in the language I had available at the time, the sentences going through my head to match my understanding was, oh my god, everything was love the whole time.

That was a thought that moved through my mind.

As I was looking at the dashboard of our car, the car again about to hit us.

The the clouds in the blue sky out the windshield in the distance Everything of the scene the grass on the side of the highway early summer grass everything clearly was was love all of it that was that that was the word I I had available to to give to these things and God, you know, it was and such a relief to realize that every moment in my past everything that I thought was unfortunate, good, bad, ugly, all of it, and an emanation of this singular vastness, this vast love.

And so that was where I was sitting until Impact, which came very quickly afterward.

That's the breaking point in the story.

How badly were you hurt?

That's strange.

I should have been hurt I'm like, if I saw how far the car was moved and I might've flipped, I don't think it did, but I was knocked out.

I already had a broken arm.

We were already going to head to the same hospital we ended up in anyways to put a cast on my arm that day.

I didn't aggravate that.

I was concussed.

I remember being knocked out when my head hit the car window to the right of me.

No bruising, no bumps.

I think I was probably spared because I had been made like completely loose.

by going through this experience before Impact.

I think that's the only way I come out.

The only thing I broke was the middle finger on my right hand.

So I walked around for about a month or a month and a half or two that summer with a cast that had me in this position all the time, which was, I think, poetic and a little bit of humor to sort of soothe the grief and everything else that was going on.

It wasn't my side of the car that was hit, so that also spared me some.

I woke up with the sound of the seatbelt makes when like a seatbelt's not on or something, that beeping sound.

My mother over there and the emergency crews were having to use sort of like the big kind of skill saw thing to get the doors off our car and get us out.

And I was definitely concussed because Although I was conscious, I really didn't know much.

I wasn't able to answer a lot of the questions that the emergency folks were asking me.

But I remember them being very good at their job.

I could feel in their hands on my body, like, oh, they know what they're doing.

Being put on a gurney, then being put in the ambulance.

And in the ambulance, I remember them asking me more questions.

It's like, I don't know any of these, but I know that's my mom over there.

That's all I know.

That's that's where I had sort of I suppose an in -body and out -of -body type of experience So like a very non -local experience of consciousness because at the same time that I was looking up through my eyes on this gurney I was also looking down from the top of the ambulance at the same time My mother called my name out a couple times a couple times.

I answered on the second answer I could tell I'm assuming that she registered Because basically I just told her I'm okay And after the second time telling her, her breathing went from sort of a breath pattern that was, you know, she was definitely struggling to stay around, to let go.

And I didn't, you know, put it together at the time, being concussed, but, you know, that was the, you know, last time I'd hear my mother's voice.

And I remember when she let go, the part of my consciousness that was at the, sort of at the top of the ambulance, I kind of felt as if a breeze kind of you know sort of wished by me.

Now again I didn't put that together with you know something of my mom's soul was was letting go or releasing.

It was all a blur and next thing I knew I'm outside of sort of the screened hospital operating area.

I'm myself still made horizontal on a gurney.

I guess they figured I was probably okay.

And then I have my sister there and then my dad and sister had arrived and I just remember my dad saying, your mother's gone.

And so that was the hardest thing I'd heard in life.

And then it's all quite a blur.

We're leaving the hospital and going home and friends and family are rushing to our house and like anybody in that case.

where sort of my story continues past that is in sort of in the week or a few days after after like the real shock of it all sort of has really worn off was I started to realize that I did I no longer had a commenting self -conscious voice in my head nor was I afraid of anything and in addition there was this big sense of a big, vast silence in my heart and in the back of my head and ultimately throughout my whole body.

I could go into this silence and whenever I would do that, I wouldn't have used the word bliss at the time, I don't know why, but now I would use the word bliss.

A bliss or a joy would flood through my body like I hadn't experienced since I was having mystical experiences as a much younger child.

only now it was just on steroids.

And so I was experiencing that novel thing while at the same time I was going through all the stages of grief one goes through, like a textbook.

And so while, you know, I remember sort of a dual experience where I'd be in the garage, you know, where I could have some privacy, and I was, you know, hitting the walls with my hands.

You know cuz i was so angry and i didn't know if i believed in a deity or not at the time but i think if there's a deity you know basically cuz you know why would you would you take my mother away from me no you know what you do this to our family.

All that kind of anger at the same time that that was moving through me very freely there was also this profound peace.

And so i was like what's all this.

My mother her last profession in life was as a counselor as a therapist so she had a big sort of stack of books above above her work desk and so I you know, I picked up an Elizabeth Kubler Ross book and yet another one and I was thinking I must be going through shock Still and I was like, oh my god shock is so awesome because I realized that that like a lot of the limitations that just two weeks had been a singular Block of my life.

We're just not there at all.

I Remember one day I was curious to know if anybody else in my family was having a similar experience So I was about to ask my dad the question would have been hey dad.

Are you this time?

I learned the word bliss.

Are you experiencing the the bliss that I'm experiencing and I did not say it because right as I said Hey, hey D.

Hey da, you know without even finishing a That same calm deep inner voice came up and said the answer to that question is absolutely no and you should not ask that question.

You should keep the adults and other people from sort of meddling in your experience and you need to sort of explore this experience while you have it.

Yeah I can't imagine how hard that was as a 13 year old.

Well it doesn't matter what age we are it's so difficult to have that kind of loss but when you're 13 but also what a blessing.

to be able to draw on that bliss and go through the stages of grief and and then get comfort right so you could kind of deal with it at your pace i mean i mean i had that that blessing was there for about two and a half three months so basically my summer break yeah if that wasn't there Whoa, that would have been a lot harder because that eventually faded that that that sort of I'll call it a state of consciousness at this point and later I would learn words like Samadhi that kind of ongoing Samadhi Yeah, that that allowed all sorts of things to pass through where if I had like a rigid sort of ego structure Which often you know serves to fight back and repress?

experiences or feelings that we feel are difficult that we're afraid of.

If I had that in place, the works would have been so gummed up.

Instead, at least for that two and a half, three months, the works were just like going.

So if I needed to cry, I cried.

If I need to hit a wall, I hit a wall.

If I need to laugh in joy and sadness, it would happen.

There was no editor or filtering mechanism to be an encumbrance.

So thank goodness.

Nobody really know what's going on internally cuz i was like i'm not gonna i'm gonna keep these cards close is that that deep voice was suggesting but one person i remember if i forget who they were but they were older students i think they were in high school i was in middle school.

And they approached me at the school playground as i think i was walking tour from the library.

And they're like hey something's definitely different in you know like i want in on this.

Basically, I told they're like, how did this come about?

And it's like, well, you just got to go and like come really close to death and not die.

You know, so I was like, maybe get in a car accident.

And we both laughed because, you know, it was, you know, absurdly sketchy, you know, advice.

But you were different than you were prior to this.

And then other 13 year olds were.

Yeah, that was that was Again, it was like a few days before that Completely different arrangement after it a completely different arrangement.

I mean I still had Certain my personality was still there to a certain degree My memories it wasn't wasn't like an amnesiac or anything.

I was like it's just like I had all the Individual stuff, but without like all that extra tension, you know without the ego structure being inappropriately given tasks that I don't think it was really meant to carry out.

And you used the words no fear.

Now that changes somebody also.

That was the best bit.

That was absolutely the best bit.

I was so, I realized how afraid I was.

I didn't know how afraid I was from age whatever to 13.

I mean, I had a pretty easy life in the grand scheme of things.

I had good parents and good friends and You know difficulties aside it was it was it was wonderful, but that was that was a huge eye -opener Was like oh my god, even me with an easy North American life I was parallel pet paralyzed and with fear and then when I would go out on walks walk around my town Afterwards with with without it.

I could clearly see I could feel and see everybody's tensions And it didn't bring me down, but I was just like, watch.

And previously, certain people, I thought, oh, that person really has their shit together.

They must.

And then going around, it's like, oh my god, no, they're faking it.

Oh my god, there's so much effort going on under the surface there.

And I even had this other visual stuff happening, like walking around and seeing this kind of, I'll say golden light, for lack of a better word.

I'd see this golden light around people as if it was trying to come into them.

I realized, now they weren't going around batting at it, but I realized like internally, sort of a psychological or psychic level, they were pushing it away.

And I was sort of asking, you know, the universe, like, what is that light that everybody's pushing away?

And an answer came back, very, very in short order, like, oh, that's just love.

And that was like, oh my god.

The answer was like, oh yeah, everybody's basically pushing away against love itself without knowing it.

For the most part, it's like, oh okay, no wonder.

People often also appeared like 50 foot tall angels that were now sort of crunched into little personalities.

The bodies weren't an impediment.

I could tell it was the psychological structure, even at the time.

So I was like, oh, oh.

And yeah, that was a very interesting time in life, yeah, to go around like that.

Yeah.

All right, let's talk about semantics for a minute.

Because people like to define exactly things that we've been through.

You know, your mom passing right next to you, and you kind of feeling her leaving.

You know, we have a term, shared death experience for that.

The term near -death experience Some would say well you have to actually die and your heart stop and you come back And that's not exactly what happened to you So what would you call the experiences that happened to you if you had to put words to him?

And you don't have to by the way.

Oh, yeah I don't really that and that's kind of a funny thing because I never Partly because when I was a kid, I watched the film Flatliners with Kiefer Sutherland.

I remember that.

I love that film.

Yeah.

And so they're like putting themselves into NDEs, you know?

Yeah.

And so like I thought, well, that kind of intensity, that's not what I experienced.

Who knows?

Maybe in the time after Impact, my heart did stop.

I have no idea because I was out.

Probably not.

I never had a word for it.

And so NDEs at the time seemed like the closest sort of thing because in a sense, I got to go, I did die spiritually.

I mean, I suppose people use a spiritually transformative experience, whatever.

There's all sorts of acronyms that, you know, one could throw at it.

But I remember I watched the film.

It actually doesn't really have much bearing on my experience, but I also love the old Warren Beatty film, Heaven Can Wait.

And so the premise being that, you know, his angel screwed up because he was actually an athlete with great reflexes and he would have dodged the truck.

And I felt in a way that I got It's more of an antinom experience.

I felt like if I had been in my ego structure, I would have bloody well died in that crash because I would have been resisting.

But they made me, as the Taoist, as Chuang Tzu, the Taoist would say, they made me like a baby again, or consciousness of the universe decided.

And my higher self said like, let's take the ego off of this guy and have him be just like made of jello.

our listeners under the age of thirty i think you've got some homework to do to go watch a couple of these old films you do need to go watch heaven can wait actually it holds up it holds up in terms of pacing now the key for southerland one flatliners that one that one was a whole lot more fiction The writer of that really didn't study NDEs before making that, but still it was an interesting idea.

The people wanted to die, see the other side and come back.

I mean, who wouldn't?

You know, it's a film about forgiveness and redemption at core.

All right.

Let me throw a couple other questions at you.

One of the things that you learned was that everything was love.

Everything was love.

Okay, how did that change your life moving forward too?

So you've got fear is gone And by the way fear and love opposite emotions, right?

So fear left I imagine you were filled with a lot more love And feeling that there was love around you now i'm putting words in your mouth.

I apologize But tell me how that affected you feeling all that love That was in this case.

It was for two and a half three months eventually it faded out but in those months it was like being in a completely different life completely different nervous system and there there's a lot of adjusting but i could talk to people that i was petrified of talking to before that's a very simple of a simple change i mean i could talk to girls for instance i have to use term girls because i was a boy then but you know that was definitely not you know beforehand that would have been quite a nerve -wracking experience and Also i didn't really have to have to feel i needed i didn't have an angle with anybody i didn't have the sense which i hated to have anyways but you know you get it when you're a teenager you know.

Manipulate if you're a nice person but i don't have any angles.

And i was like okay what you know what's death ain't so scary so nothing so scary and so good life is much more fun and i found in a very brief time and i wasn't a huge social butterfly when i would have a conversation with someone.

It was like I could really find out about who they were at the essential level because I was relaxed and often then they would be relaxed as well, Tamir.

And it's like, wow, I had no idea.

I had no idea that that's what was going on below your facade.

Now that mine's dropped, yours can be dropped too.

So on a practical level, that was just a much nicer way of getting along and getting to know people and going through the world.

And I have to say also, it was at that time that my love for nature and gardening.

Really opened up because I somehow I think I was sleeping on the natural world because I was so Most teenagers so kind of caught up in your own, you know little little dilemmas But my god trees were no longer trees anymore People were no longer people people were these beautiful interesting complex songs in that time period It's so beautiful.

It's like I didn't even quite have time to explore All the all the little corners of nuance and everything and then like the trees came alive so i look at a leaf i could cry.

I look at look at look at the daffodils went out so i think it was black eyed susans and echinacea perpura there's a lot of those in my town and like of course i'd seen them my whole life but never saw them.

And so like like like william blake i was seeing universes in flower heads where before i wasn't and that's love.

You know that that's I didn't know that that was the effect of like more love and less fear, but that was looking back I realized yeah, absolutely All right couple more things before we wrap up You mentioned that this only stuck with you for two or three months, but you can remember it very well Are there times when you can bring this back when you can feel this again?

The most important thing in my life was I'm glad that I didn't just stay there because I needed to get back to it So five years after I became a monk at 18 Became a monk and meditation teacher I before I became a monk.

I was like a monk in my house.

I started meditating for six hours a day as a 17 year old I was a little bit too extreme and too intense I'd get up at three in the morning and take a cold shower and do like three hours of yoga and meditation practice and then I realized you know, I because I've walked into a metaphysical bookstore I was like I need to get back to whatever I was experiencing right after mom died and I walked into a metaphysical bookstore My sister's idea.

I picked up a book.

I looked at it and I was like, oh my god Whatever this person in the Himalayas was experiencing it sounds a lot of it sounds a whole lot like what I was sort of just Getting into there.

I slow -walked it.

I didn't start meditating like right at 14 I was kind of afraid to but at 17 I was like I've got to do this Between 14 and 17.

I also had all these wonderful guides You know humans not invisible guys but real people in my town who were meditation teachers and psychics and she gone teachers who had that same presence.

That i experienced in the wake of the car accident so i was really a half time teenager and a half time spiritual seeker.

For about three years and at the end is like i gotta do this thing full time i gotta see what i can do and slowly but surely meditation started to take me.

back into that space, you know, little bits at a time.

And then I learned this practice called the Ishaya Ascension, meditation practice.

And my God, did that blow the doors off.

That was when I was 18, 2002, a kind of a bridge was formed in a sense, you know, that like a bridge between now and some of those experiences at 13 for sure.

that's that's been my whole life was was getting back to that because i knew just telling people to go get in a car accident was something in me knew as soon as i said that said actually it even told me when right there in the park is a 13 year old that said oh yeah you're gonna you're gonna lose this state when the next school year starts because the purpose of your life is to teach people like simple methodologies that they can do to get back get back to that starting with yourself So I was like, okay.

And so yeah, that's what my Dharma, if you will, or my vocation has been for 20 some years as a meditation teacher.

And that's what I love, seeing people without having to get into car accident.

I love seeing people get back in touch with their original innocence.

Get back in touch with that sort of primordial.

Consciousness pure consciousness whatever word we want to use for it the pure self with a capital S in that sense I'm grateful.

I remember an early spiritual teacher.

I think she even knew the the details of my life shit She's she's they were tears like, you know, your mom kind of had to die for this and it was her choice and it was a deal that you two made because otherwise you would have been a very happy person and a very successful person sort of outward ways But that's not what you want.

You you want to wake up You know, you want to experience waking up from the waking dream of having the ego be the dominant filter over life.

I very much think that was true.

If my mom had lived, I would have enjoyed that and I probably would have been a happy lawyer somewhere.

Ain't nothing wrong with that at all.

Absolutely not.

All lives are beautiful.

But yeah, it wasn't the one.

That wasn't the one that was trying to happen.

The deeper one was the mad monk.

All right.

I'd like you to leave us with some just on a really great positive message of hope.

And here's my thought.

You had a lot of fear prior to age 13, fear of a lot of things, but especially a fear of death.

Tell me where that level of fear is at now.

And for those that are feeling that fear, what message do you have for them to help alleviate that?

I want them to be able to be filled with love instead of fear.

Well, I'm actually grateful that Some fears came back, because then I can be sort of a normal person who's in the trenches of life.

Fear of death, though, no.

That one remained conspicuously absent.

But I have to say, just as much as the next person, I'm not keen on having a great white shark bite me in half or something like that.

I don't necessarily want to be run over by a London city bus.

Yeah, fear of death is not there.

And I'll say, yeah, you don't have to get into a car accident.

I've seen people who haven't had near -death experiences touch this what I could call the deathless cut part of ourselves That there is a part of ourselves and we've all actually all experienced it if we've had a and Almost all of us have had a peak experience as Maslow coined the term In fact, I say all of us have at the core of the peak experience and we don't necessarily notice it at the core of the peak experience is is an immersion even if it's ever so briefly Into the deathless part of our own consciousness and when people systematically just a little bit of time each day doesn't have to be In an ashram, you know 24 7 or whatever an hour each day could be pretty robust for most people of touching that deathless space and It's it's it's a wonder the things that fall off.

It's it's just it's it is a wonder Including the fear of death.

I think actually other fears are more difficult in a sense though For most people, I think the other fears are a little bit more intractable than the fear of death.

But there's a space that knows, not up here, but in here.

Or as Heinlein would say in Stranger in a Strange Land, there's something in us that grocks that no matter what happens to us, we'll be fine.

And you can't plug it in up here.

You have to dive into it.

You have to immerse yourself in that gear.

Yeah, life has been very, very different.

for me, both in that period after the NDE and then later.

I'll call it a slow burn NDE of about several years of lots of meditation.

Life changed permanently.

Ishtar, I really enjoyed it.

I hope we can do it again someday.

We will do it again someday.

We'll talk again in the future.

That'd be lovely.

Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.

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