#242 - Tony's U.S. Navy Plane Goes Down. He Experiences God's Infinite Love.

0:00 Welcome to Round Trip Death and Merry Christmas. Today we're going to hear from a retired U.S. Navy veteran and his experience of when his plane went down. But before we do, I'd like to ask a small favor. If you appreciate this show and its message, please click over to roundtripdeath.com. In the upper right corner of the homepage you'll see a little donate button. If you'd like to help us keep the lights on for another season, click there and be generous. Thank you in advance. And now let's hear about Tony's plane crash. Today we are thrilled to have on the line with us Tony Woody, retired chief petty officer from the U.S. Navy.

0:46 Served 20 plus years as a flight engineer. I'm going to call him a hero because I can see over his shoulder he's got a bunch of medals and things. And anyway, we appreciate you and your service. Tony, how are you today? Doing okay. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on. Well you're very welcome. And when I heard your story and things that you've done since then, I found it fascinating and just wanted to talk. So I'm glad you're here. And if you don't mind, let's start clear back and talk about, I mean, what what got you into the Navy and what got you into flying? Well, I grew up in a small town in East Texas and there was nothing really there for me at a high school.

1:32 For instance, we had 37 people in my senior class. So there's no industry there. It's just farming or you have something to do with the school or something or small business. And so my dad had been in the Navy. He was in World War Two. And I decided I was going to go into the Navy before I even got out of high school. So I did early enlistment and did boot camp, went to Memphis, Tennessee for A school and then got sent to my first command. And I wanted to go into aviation. I knew that. And so I went in to learn to be a jet engine mechanic. So my first tour of duty, I got sent to Jacksonville, Florida to patrol squadron 49.

2:13 Now, I didn't know as a kid that squadrons had nicknames like the blue sharks or the gray knights. So I just see patrol squadron 49 on my on my orders. Sorry about the dog. I can't do anything about that. That's OK. A little dog barking makes it real. Yeah, he's real. All right. So where was I? Squad 49. Oh, so all it says on my orders is patrol squadron 49. So I go to the squadron duty office and I check on board and I realized that I got sent to the VP 49 Woodpeckers for my first tour of duty.

2:54 My last name is Woody. And I knew that wasn't an accident. And I know the guy in Washington, D.C., who wrote my orders, is probably laughing his butt off when he wrote my orders. I know where I'm sending this kid. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's funny. And, you know, woodpeckers don't seem like the meanest, toughest animals out there. They call themselves the world famous woodpeckers. I don't know. I don't know. There's a history to the squadron. It's been around for a long, long time. It's gone now, but there was a long history to it. So when you first check on to a squadron, they put you in a gay dunk, they call it. I mean, they put you in First Lieutenant Division, which is where you do the crap jobs for a few weeks, right?

3:35 A few months until you get put into your work center and start learning your how to work on the engines and propellers and all that on the airplane. That was what I was supposed to go do. So I got put in many different jobs you can do. And I got put in the squadron snack bar. They called it a gay dunk. That's a nickname for it in the military. I don't know where that phrase comes from, but that just means, you know, place to go get food and snacks and things like that. And there was nobody in there at the time I was running the register and this commanding officer came in. I'm 10 days in the squadron. I'm a no nothing nugget, right? I'm an airman apprentice and I'm wearing my dungarees. It's got my name stenciled on my shirt and on my back, on my pants, on the above my right pocket on the back.

4:18 And so he, skipper, my commanding officer comes in. I picked up on that by seeing his name tag. It said COVP 49 on it. I realized commanding officer, right? I'm like, that's my skipper. I realized that. So he made his order. He's got all his flight gear with him. He's going flying. He's happy. He's going to take some food. He's going to go to shoot touch and goes and he's an instructor pilot and teach another pilot and you know, they're going to go what we call the salt to runway for four hours shooting, goes and, and do some training. And so he's all happy. And then he makes his order. I turn around to get his stuff and I put it back on the counter. I look up at him and he's angry and I know it.

4:58 You can see it in his face. There's something wrong and it's something to do with me. And I have no understanding what it is and I'm terrified. I'm only 18 years old. And he looks at me and he's serious and he goes, you know, son, just because you're in the VP 49 woodpeckers doesn't mean you can't stencil your proper name on your uniform. I'm like, I'm so scared. I can't talk. So I reflex action. I pulled my wallet out and I handed him my military ID card and he takes it in his hand. He looks at it and he looks over at it and raises his eyebrows. He goes, you mean I got a Woody in the woodpeckers? I said, yes, sir. I guess so.

5:38 So he hands it back to me. Now he's really happy, right? He was already happy. He's going flying and now he's ecstatic. He just found out he's this commanding officer of the woodpeckers and he's got a Woody in the woodpeckers. He couldn't be more happy. And as he's going out the door, I blurted out a question. I said, Hey, skipper, what's it like to fly one of those big old birds? He smiled and said, come with me son and I'll show you. I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe it. He hooks me up with the flight engineer and they get me a flight suit and all that. And I hang out with him for the whole pre-flight. I just didn't know anything. And I'm asking a billion questions and just loving it. And I'm sitting behind the pilot seat on the left side.

6:19 There's a flat panel there when they're starting engines and we're getting ready to taxi out and go take off. And I don't know anything, right? I don't know anything about what I'm supposed to do in this thing. It's just watching. And so we get to the approach into the runway and I'm wondering if I ought to go get in a chair. I have no understanding of what the right thing is to do here. And the skipper's in the right seat. So I'm on the opposite side of the airplane and the engineer faces forward in that airplane and leans over and handles the power levers. When the pilot calls the power setting, they start pushing the power lever the pilot does. And he gets his rudder affected. He takes his hand off the power levers and the engineer finishes setting power, right?

7:02 So that's how that job works. And there's all three facing forward. And so I'm on the left side and the skipper turns to the engineer. We're waiting for another plane to land. We've got about a 10-minute wait because his plane's about 10 or 15 miles out. And so the skipper turns to the engineer just as I'm going to ask, what should I do? And he looks at the engineer in the seat and says, what do you think? Should we put him in there? And I didn't know what he was talking about. And the engineer goes, yeah, absolutely. And he unbuckles his harness and he gets out of the seat and sits behind the skipper on the right side. And the skipper looks at me and tells me to get in the chair. And the next thing I know, and I'm like, I had this look on my face like, probably are you nuts?

7:44 And he puts his hand up and says, don't worry, son. We'll tell you what to do. I jumped in and the next thing I know, I'm pushing power levers going down the runway. And we lift off the deck and the engineer is doing all the checklist stuff over my head right behind me. And I'm just, can't believe this. And then the skipper smacks me on my leg after they're done with the checklist on the downwind. He says, down leg turn. He goes, by the way, son, you know you could do this job. And for the next four hours, I sat in the seat and pushed power levers. Two hours earlier before that, I was selling hot dogs. Where else can you do that, man? That's really awesome. By the way, we have some younger listeners and I have a feeling they don't know who Woody Woodpecker is.

8:25 You better tell them. Okay. It's a cartoon from the 50s and 60s when I was a kid growing up. And you can probably find it on YouTube. Just look up Woody Woodpecker. You'll find all kinds of cartoons probably. But okay, keep going with your story. So where was I? So we're in the air. So after that, after the flight and everything, after I was done in First Lieutenant Division doing my stint of time in there, I didn't go to power plant shop first. I went straight into the flight engineer shop at 18 years old and started learning how to be a flight engineer. I started on the job training. And at 21 years old, I earned my wings and I was signing for a 70 ton airplane at 21 years old for the flight engineer duties, having a ball.

9:09 And so that was in Jacksonville, Florida, and then did a couple of deployments with them and then moved to Barbas Point, Hawaii in 1982. By then I had about 3,500 hours of flight time. Getting ready to make me an instructor flight engineer at that point. I'm 24 years old, 23 at the time actually. So now I'm 24 and been in Hawaii for about a year, a little over a year, year and a half. And every two years on an even year, they do a huge military exercise called the RIMPAC, Rim of the Pacific, RIMPAC exercises.

9:52 And it's all the Australia, everything all the way out. I mean, it's huge. It's gigantic. It takes them two years to prepare for the next one. That's why they do it every two years. It's so big. And so my crew is going out to do a flight. It's 12 man crew. When we are maxed out for takeoff weight and everything, we weigh 70 tons, carry 62,000 pounds of fuel. So we're climbing out and get to about 10,000 feet to go do a 12 hour mission. And the chips light on number one engine comes on, which means the engine's making metal and you don't know if it's just a piece of fuzz or if it's chunks that are about to be a catastrophic failure.

10:38 So you shut it down for precautionary shut down, we declare an emergency, start heading back to the base and have to dump some fuel. We got to get down to max allowable land weight. You can't land with all the fuel you had on board. So you don't damage the structural integrity of the airplane if you hit too hard. And so when you do an emergency landing, we brief that. We did that on the approach, coordinating with ground as well, air traffic control and ground. And we've got fire trucks on the side of the runway. There's six of them, one on each side. So they're spread out down the runway, but evenly. And as you go buy one, when you go buy a pair of them, they pull in behind you.

11:22 And then the next two pulling behind them and so on to be right there in case anything goes wrong. Well, what happened was the pilot, when we landed, everything was normal when the main mounts touched down to main mount landing gears. When the nose gear came down, the pilot put in incorrect rudder. We expected a swerve to the right because two engines on that side are giving reverse thrust versus only one on the other. So you're going to have more force. It's going to pull you to the right. And we know that. I mean, it's common. We do that brief all the time. But instead of doing that, he put in the incorrect rudder.

12:03 Now, we're coming in fast because we're heavy. Typically we land with 8,000 pounds of fuel left when we're done with a long mission. We still had 42,000 pounds of fuel on the plane. So we're really fast because we have extra weight. We're coming in 135 knots, which is just a tad over 155 miles an hour. And when things go wrong at that speed, it happens really fast. And the next thing I know, I felt the swerve. I'm like, OK, he's going to correct. That didn't happen. And we kept going off the runway. And I'm just shocked. And then everything changed. Now, I'm in terror because I see us heading right at one of the fire trucks on the right side of the runway.

12:45 We landed on runway 040 left, this parallel runway. So there's asphalt between the two runways, but there's no fire trucks out there or no roads. So they only clean the taxiways and the runways. And I say this for a reason. There's going to be a lot of debris in the other areas. They'll clean them from time to time, but it's still not like what they do every day for the runway. When we departed the runway, I started panicking. I mean, I knew I was about to die. There was no question. I had death coming at me at 155 miles an hour, and there was nothing I could do about it. And I remember I had a three-year-old son at the time.

13:26 And all I wanted to do was hold him one more time. And I knew I was never going to see him again, my wife. You won't believe how much goes through your mind when you know you only have a few seconds left. It's astonishing. I cannot even put it in words, really. And then as we got closer to the fire truck, the terror was so great. The next thing I realized is I'm out of the airplane, probably 30, 40 feet above everything, looking down on all of it. The me inside the seat is terrified. And I can see the guy on the water cannon on the top screaming as we're headed straight at him.

14:08 He's looking at the propellers, probably, not at me. But I can see his face. The me outside could see everything and was absolutely perfectly calm, no concerns, just observing, watching it happen. It's like watching TV, sitting there watching TV. But with extreme detail, way better than the best HD you've ever seen. And this is back in 1982 before HD was invented. And the number four propeller should have slammed into the truck. The propeller is 13 feet in diameter from tip to tip, is spinning at 1,020 rounds a minute and weighs 2,200 pounds and moving forward at 155 miles an hour.

15:00 And two of the four blades gap the front left corner of that fire truck. Then as we got past the fire truck, the copilot starts yelling, because the pilot's not doing anything to correct the issue. So the copilot, now we're on the asphalt between the two runways and at an angle heading toward the other runway at over 130 knots. And he's not doing anything to stop it. And so the copilot yells out, get on the brakes. Get on the brakes. You better get on the brakes. I mean, he yelled it loud the last time.

15:43 And that's kind of woke up the pilot. And that's when he hit the brakes and slammed into reverse thrust properly this time. When all of that's happening, I saw this Pepsi can from inside the plane whooshed by the window from left to right, tipping over, throwing fluid out. I could read the 12 ounces on the can. I could see it. Everything was slow motion. Everything got super slow motion. And then I started focusing on the atomized water fluid that was coming out, because it was being hit by the thrust off the propeller blades. And so it's atomizing these fluids.

16:24 And everywhere the atomization happened, I became those little droplets. And then any piece of debris that was in the air, I'm wrapping and rolling around everything. And I don't understand what's going on. I don't know if I'm dead, I don't know if I'm having this crazy dream at night in bed. I don't understand anything at all. And it kept doing that all the way till we went across the runway, I mean, the asphalt between the runways. And the runways have a slight slope on it to elevated to allow for rain to wash off. So the nose gear in the right main mount bounced up on that runway.

17:07 On the other side of the runway, four right on the left side of four right. And the left main mounts off of it. So it's about a foot and a half, two feet lower. And so we're kind of at an angle sitting there, stopped, engines are running. And then all these different bio locations, I call them, or multiple locations of my consciousness or whatever you want, I don't know what it was, all pulled back into me just from outside and just closed into me. I don't even know how to say that. But there was no sound or anything, but it just all did that. And then I'm stunned. I'm trying to figure out what just happened.

17:49 And I'm on an adrenaline rush. And then I came off of it when I realized I was okay. And I felt like I just ran five marathons back and back. I mean, I was really healthy, physically fit 24 year old. And I felt like I was, I mean, I was exhausted, man, wiped out. And I looked to the right at Lieutenant Duffy in the right seat. And he, I watched him slump when he came off his adrenaline rush. I don't remember if I actually said something to him. I was trying to say something to him. I couldn't get it out. I didn't know how to express what just happened. And before I could, anything else happened, I heard this woo, woo sound.

18:33 And I didn't know what that was. And then Duffy's looking at me, we're eye to eye. Then he looks past me at Lieutenant Lovegroom. And I turn around to look at him and he's still in a panic mode, white knuckling the yoke. He still hasn't let go of the yoke. And he's just tight as he can be. And he's going woo, woo with the stress in his face. I can see it. And he goes, what the f*** did I do wrong? And I just, we kind of all just shook our heads and he calmed down. And then the fire trucks all came up around us and we talking to the tower and stuff and we realized the plane's okay. And we ended up adding power and rolling out and getting on the other runway and finishing the landing.

19:21 So I literally used, did one landing, emergency engine out landing on one runway and finished it on an entirely different runway, not a pleasant experience. But I was very, I didn't know what to do about that. I mean, it was very raw. And so I just took care of the airplane, went back to the hangar and didn't want to talk about it. I didn't know what to do. And so when I got to the hangar, I realized I'm on the flight schedule again for the next day. So do they do some kind of a debriefing after each of these missions where, or especially with an emergency where you talk about what happened or write a report or?

20:04 Oh yeah, Portland is written up in a Natop's office, but I'm not, I wasn't part of that. So you didn't really have anybody to talk to about this. Did you, did you talk to any of the other men in the cockpit to see if they had a similar experience? Not after that. It was just, I didn't know what to do. You know, I needed help. I didn't know where to go to get it. How do you go ask for help with something like that? And so without looking crazy, you know? Yeah. So when did you first, when did you first talk about it? Well, I'm getting there. Okay. So that happened on a Monday.

20:45 And you were talking about, you know, did they talk to anybody? They don't know that the next Tuesday, Tuesday, the Skipper, I find out I'm on the flight schedule. Right? So they don't today, if anything like that happened, it put you through, you know, psychiatric evaluation and all that before they ever let you back in the flight station. But not back then. Skipper, the commanding officer who was an instructor pilot took me and the pilot, my crew pilot. He was an experienced pilot. He was a good pilot. He just made a mistake one day, you know? Took us both back out to go fly. And I didn't think anything of it. I was just like, okay, we're going flying. So let's get right back on the horse, in other words, was the philosophy.

21:29 Exactly. See if you can handle it or not. And that's just how they did business back then. So not knowing anything, I didn't know it was going to affect me. On the first approach, I'm now seeing the same runway. We literally are landing on the same runway. The wind was such that we ended up using the same exact runway. I started the anxiety in me, post-traumatic stress is what it was, but I didn't understand that at the time. That wasn't even a term yet back then. And so I'm just, I'm feeling that, but I don't want the skipper to know I'm not, I don't have my head in the game.

22:10 So normally I would sit up in the seat and have a commanding 180 degree view of the flight station and the approach, and then right before we land, my job in case it's needed would be to push the power levers on a wave off if we had to go around for some reason, it might be a dog on the runway, you never know. And so I would then bend forward and do that. But I didn't want the skipper to see my face because I knew if he saw me, he'd know, he'd know. I just felt he'd know and I probably wouldn't get to fly anymore. So I kept bent forward and had my hand on the power lever and that way I couldn't, I didn't look outside, but it looked like I had my head in the game looking at all the instruments in front of me.

22:52 And to about three or four landings, I had to go through that until I convinced myself in my head. I'm like, Tony, you've been through, you know, you've got 3,500 hours flight time, done thousands of landings, you need to get your head back in the game and knock it off or something like that. I just said, I just decided I wasn't going to do that anymore and feel like that. I forced myself to sit up and watch the next approach. And then after a couple of those, I was fine and I never had that problem again. So thinking all of that stuff is over with in my life and I can move forward because I just didn't want to deal with what happened. I didn't understand it. So I just like, okay, I'm military, we're really good at compartmentalization when the time comes.

23:34 You just compartmentalize certain things. Okay, I'll deal with that later. I've got this to do now. Or just push it out and say, I'm not going to deal with that because I don't understand it and I don't know where to get help. So leave it out there. And that's just how you go about it in the military. So you can go back to work, you know? And so now this is on a Wednesday. My wife and I had a son, he's about three years old, wife and I are watching a show, he's already in bed, but we're watching a show called That's Incredible that used to come on back in the 80s. And they had this, and you can still find it on YouTube. The story about a guy named, it was her name, I think his mother's name was May, I believe.

24:16 But his name was Leslie Limke, L-E-M-K-E, I think that spells his name. And you can find his story on YouTube. But it was the first time I'd ever seen it. It was the first time it had been aired. And so I'm watching it and May is telling about when she couldn't have any kids and she had had a dream that I think she said Christ came to her and told her that she was going to be offered three babies for adoption soon and that she was to take the baby boy that was blind, born blind. And that happened in a few months later or whatever. And so she did what she was supposed to do. And as he grew up, it became apparent he was severely mentally retarded and had to be taken care of all of his life.

25:01 And she treated him like a baby most of his life. And they brought him out and then she's telling a story where one night after he's an adult, she's in bed upstairs and she hears music downstairs and she thinks somebody left the TV or the radio on and she goes downstairs to turn it off. But here's Leslie sitting at the piano, playing it perfectly and singing gospel music. And I was just dumbfounded. And his voice was astonishingly beautiful. I called it a hauntingly holy voice. It just penetrated my heart and I was like, I knew I was seeing a miracle. To me it wasn't. So I'm thinking I'm seeing my first miracle.

25:42 And you know, I'm 24. I didn't and I now understand that absolutely everything is a miracle, but I didn't know that back then. And so I'm just grateful for that. And then that night I went to bed and I'm on my back just laying in the bed with my eyes shut, a little 10 second prayer in my head. I didn't even say it out loud. I just said out to just a genuine prayer, a prayer of just genuine gratitude from my heart to God, telling God I was grateful for seeing my first miracle and thanking God for that. And then I added the words and Lord, it'd be nice if you'd do something like that for me someday.

26:23 Not I mean, you don't really expect anything out of a little 10 second prayer in your head, you know, that's so vague. Do something nice for me, right? It's kind of a vague prayer. Yeah. Or do a miracle for me. About what? Yeah, but it kicked the door open, whatever it was. And I don't know how they're related, but somehow the what happened to me on that Monday with the out of body experiences is related to this, which is a later decades later learned is called a spiritually transformative experience, which is exactly the same as a near death experience, you just don't have to die to have it. And but I didn't know any of this back then.

27:04 So I went to sleep and probably like three, three 30 in the morning, we used to call it no dark 30 in the military in the middle of the night, right? All of a sudden, I had an instantaneous shift in my consciousness, the location of my consciousness, and it was just boom. I didn't go through a tunnel. I didn't physically die and get injured or any of that. But it was clear I was not in my bedroom anymore, at least not from my mind's perspective. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at this absolutely beautiful liquid molten golden white light, look gigantic lotus flower flames and unfolding over and over and over again, spraying light and unconditional love out in all directions, hitting me and filling me up with it.

28:02 And I'm just dumbfounded, overwhelmed, can't even think. And I remember saying three words, I said, Oh, my goodness. In the instant I said the word goodness, infinite divine goodness blasted through me just rips through every part of the essence of me. And it was an infinite, unconditional love in first and then became the goodness. And then it was just joy, bliss, ecstasy, infinite peace, excitement, God was thrilled to see me. It was like throwing a cosmic scale party, Tony's back, you know, it was it was awesome.

28:46 And beyond anything I even could comprehend, I didn't know love could be like that. I had no idea this place existed. Decades later, I learned that place has got a few names. One of them is the throne room of creation. The other is the great silent chamber. and I instantly understood that when I read that and learned that phrase, because when I was there, there was absolutely no sound at all. You know, a lot of people probably hear these podcasts like this, enjoy meditation. And when we meditate, we like to think it's you know, we've got a perfectly quiet environment.

29:31 Is it perfectly quiet? Or do you hear your own breathing or your own heartbeat or maybe a wall tick, something not there? Absolutely. It wasn't perfect silence. I call it silence perspective. It was being done on purpose. And you could tell that it was the presence of God was doing that. And there's no misunderstanding about that. And then there was infinite wisdom and intelligence, the one and the same because you can't have one without the other, and infinite unconditional love, all being expressed on a cosmic scale.

30:12 And so all I wanted to do is go deeper into that light. There's this magnetic pull that happens. It's all you want. There is nothing more important than that, in my opinion. And it wasn't for me at the time, I had a wife and a three year old in the next room, and I didn't even consider them. It's not that that sounds bad or anything. It's just you can't because your consciousness is overwhelmed with the moment. And I had this moment where I saw these hands in the peripheral of my vision out in front of me, probably about arm's length, but I didn't care about the hands. I kept focusing on the light, that's all I was interested in.

30:55 Although I acknowledged that they were there and recognized that was there, I didn't care. Shortly after that, from behind, the room came back into view. The darkness, it was a black void with this light going out everywhere. So anywhere from my vision came around, it started coming around to catch up with my hands. And then it was my own hands that were in the rooms holding up. And then that's when I realized I'm sitting up in bed and I had my arms out to the light that's at the end of the room and the wall and about a 10 foot circle is the lights in my bedroom. There's no wall. God's in my bedroom. And I'm sitting there crying and realizing also that I could see her feet, my wife's feet were the way they were positioned, that her back was to me.

31:46 But I remember I was thinking, how can she sleep through this? Because it literally was like a billion stars in the room. It was unbelievably bright. Nobody can sleep through that. And I'm thinking these things. And that's when I because God knew me, he knows I'm an engineer. And if it hadn't happened this way, I think he would have written it off as a, I would have written it off as a just an exotic dream and found some other way to push it out of the way like I did on that Monday, you know, two days before I pushed that away because I didn't want to deal with that either. But I couldn't. And that's when the the the circle started closing and not instantly but came down to that two and a half to three seconds, something like that.

32:34 When it did that and it closed, you know, my heart broke because I just had the greatest love I'll ever know. I weren't away from me. I wasn't told anything. Oh, I wanted to cover one other part of the when I was in the in the great silent chamber was how the how precious God made sure I knew I was to God. There was this essence of God's feelings for me as as as a child, a precious baby child. And it felt like my best analogy that I've ever come up with this, I can't seem to make it any better is it felt like the love felt like I was being imagine this is the end of the life of the history of the entire universe.

33:27 And I was being loved, held and cradled by every mother in every galaxy, everywhere, every win for the entire history of that universe all at once. And even that analogy is totally inadequate. And I could talk like a billion years nonstop and you still can't explain it because it's incomprehensible to the human mind until you experience it. We really just don't have the adjectives to explain that do we? Tell me how you said this. You felt all this love. And then did you feel sorrow that it was gone? What did you feel? I felt the separation, the separation.

34:09 And what did that feel like? It was just this ache in my heart. I was just yeah. And that's why you were crying. Yeah. So let me ask you something. So you said you felt this separation. Yes. And it was very emotional. Do you personally believe that before we came here to this earth that we were in the presence of God? No, absolutely, because I knew I was home when I was there too. That was the other thing I sensed. Absolutely knew that for the first time I was home and for the first time I was truly free. This is not freedom here. And not really.

34:49 I was free there. So my follow up to that is we in this life can't remember that experience before. We can't remember unless we have an experience like you're just explaining. Yeah, that's what it takes. But it takes free will to what we put our minds on so we become. We put our intentions on. So the more we put our attention on our Creator, the more attributes of that Creator we can draw into us with the light. And I'm still having spiritual things happening to me. But the point I'm trying to make here is that there have been times where I have thought that would be so wonderful to be able to remember what that was like.

35:36 Yeah, I agree with that. I use that all the time. That home that we came from that we can't remember and that's frustrating that we can't remember. But you spoke of this separation and it seemed very emotional to you. Wouldn't it be very difficult for us to be here if we did remember that because we remembered what it was like and what we felt like and now we don't feel it? Yeah, that's called human suffering. Yeah, but the fact that we can't remember that seems like a gift that we've been given because it would be too hard if we could remember.

36:18 I'm not sure if that would be true or not. Now I know both and it's not the life is still I still have my challenges in daily life, you know, but I also have the comfort of knowing where I'm going and who I am. Yes, exactly. There are other benefits to it as well. And that's a big gift that you've been given that most people don't have. What do you mean gift? Knowing what you know because you had that experience. Yeah, to a certain degree that was part of what I wanted to talk about. So a lot of times, especially back when it first happened to me, people didn't really want to hear that or about my experience or whatever.

37:03 And what happened to me after my experience, my wife woke up and realized I've been crying. I told her what happened. And I think she believed me. But later, we went to church the following Sunday, Baptist Church out in western Hawaii where we were living out in that area. And there was a guest pastor that week. And so I went up to him afterward. I needed answers. You know, I'm an engineer. So I've got to go find out what that was. Well, and you're human. So you need to talk about it also. Primarily, I wanted to know what it was and what happened to me. I just needed an answer on what happened to me.

37:45 How could that happen? So we were at church. There's this time frame where they'll say, you know, are there any concerns out in the church? There's about 500 people there, a lot of them from military because we weren't that far from the base. And so several people raised their hand. And I've got my hand up. And then she called on me. And as I'm starting to get up, my wife didn't want, she knew what I was going to do. She just knew. And she grasped me by my right hand around my wrist with both of her hands. She's got both hands on me, pulling me back down. And I literally, because I'm younger, a lot stronger than her. I stood up and just yanked my arm away from her.

38:28 I said, I mean, the whole place saw this. Let go of me. You know, that turned to the pastor. I just ignored her after that because I'm going to go get my answer. That's kind of how I was back then, you know. And I just kind of was demanding it, you know. And I asked him, gave him enough information. The whole church hears this. You know, I experienced something. I can't remember my words. It was too long ago. But I remember getting an answer back that totally was, didn't fit. It was inadequate. And I knew he didn't have an answer. So I let it go. And then went outside as we're leaving, there was this lieutenant commander from an aviator from another squadron that was next to ours who knew I was an aviator.

39:15 And he came up to me and told me that, I told you about the first pastor. He turned and walked away from me. I think I told you that, right? Did I tell you that part? No. The first church we went to. Oh, we went to our first church that weekend. And I asked the pastor after that. That was at the end of that. And I was crying, but I got it out. And he just kind of tilted his head and looked at me and turned his back on me and walked off. And I was stunned. Wow. Got angry about it. Yeah, that's too bad. Later, we went to the other church. And then my wife did that to me. And then I'm outside the church leaving and this lieutenant commander from another squadron comes up to me and says, you know, probably shouldn't be talking about that stuff anymore.

39:56 Because if you do, they're probably going to kick you out of the Navy and, you know, cut your security clearance and keep you. And I'm like, I love my job and I wasn't going to lose that. So I clammed up. That was it. But that doesn't work either. And it causes ultimately all kinds of other issues. And it's not uncommon that people who have had experiences end up with divorces later because it's just, it's difficult. Once you've had a taste of perfection and you come back here, it's just not easy readapting to this and then trying to understand your life anymore. Everything I understood about what I thought was a foundation of my reality got wiped out from under me in an instant.

40:41 And I, the place I went to, I experienced there was no, no time there, no space or time. I don't even know how to explain that, but you can feel it. You knew it when you're there. Totally nothing like this place at all. It's so interesting to me how each of these experiences are individual. I just talked to someone earlier today who was talking about how their experience in this heavenly spirit world had beautiful music and everything was vibrating and making this beautiful music. And you experienced this great silent chamber. Why do you think they're different for everybody?

41:24 That's God's, that's a question for God. You know, everybody's got their own path that's unique for them. And everybody's got a way back home. It's just, you have to go seek and look for it. We have to have to seek, you know, if you seek, you shall find. If you seek nothing, you find nothing. And I found, my answers came to me, you know, years later, decades later from a lady who found, I decided probably like over 20, almost 25 years later that I was going to serve God and go tell my story. However, that was going to happen. I saw some videos online. It was when YouTube started putting them out or something.

42:06 I can't remember. But I found this group in Virginia Beach that was doing that and they had a, they were asking for anybody had a story, give us a call or whatever. And so I got, that was the first place I ever spoke was down there. And the university there has been studying this for a long time. Yeah. In Virginia? Yes. Yeah. And I've met some of those people actually. So I didn't know any of this was going to turn into this pathway that it did, you know, just like I was just going to go tell my story because I thought people ought to know and I wanted to make sure they did and I felt that's what God expected of me.

42:48 And it's all led to a whole lot of other interviews since then. Speaking of that, tell us about the Johns Hopkins research that you were a part of. Oh, well that's, Lillia, I had spoken at an international association for near death studies in Orlando many years ago. I can't remember the year, Frank. It was probably 10 or so years ago. And this lady named Lillia had seen my video and somehow she figured out how to get in touch with me with an email and starts telling me about the St. Germain foundation and I've never heard of them.

43:34 So that's a different story. But because of that relationship with the St. Germain foundation and that information that is my foundation now, that's what I bear on my answers in the St. Germain series, I Am Discourses. It's a series of 20 books that perfectly describe, that's where I found the words, the great silent chamber, liquid molten gold and white living light. And I'll tell you that story right now too, but I'll get back to that in a minute. So remind me to tell you that story. So Lillia contacts me and over a period of time because of her, I was asked to write my story up in 2019 and it was submitted with however many other people's stories, I had no idea, for a narrative inquiry and bioethics article at the Johns Hopkins University.

44:33 And the magazine doing it for them is called Voices, they do a quarterly narrative in bioethics every quarter and they've been doing it for decades, 40, 50, 60 years, something like that for Johns Hopkins. And so they said this is the most downloaded article they've ever had by far. 18 people's stories got selected. We were asked to write a 300 word summary, which is really hard to do because they had so many that they only have so much time to read them, right? So they picked the 18 out of that and then we were told to write a 2000 word story because there's a booklet, a hard copy print of it that they had a budget for, so they needed to keep the words down.

45:17 So I integrated two video links into mine because I didn't know how to write in just 2000 words everything that happened to me. And anyway, the article came out in 2020 and it's called Healthcare After a Near Death Experience and they're taking feedback from frontline providers all over the world that choose to respond and taking that data when they get however much information they need, I think they're still taking feedback and they are going to take that data and they're telling all the frontline providers to read these people's stories, see where we failed them when they came to us seeking help and give us your feedback and we'll take that data and create a medical school curriculum and clinical protocols for near death experience patients.

46:00 That's what's going on there. And so back to the St. Germain Foundation stuff, so Lillie introduced me to that and that's where I found the words that were fit perfectly for what I experienced when I was in the light. And one day I was getting a massage from a massage therapist in 2018. I was telling her about these books and she was seven months pregnant. I'm on my back and looking up at her with my head off the table a little bit and she's looking down at me and I'm telling her about these books, St. Germain books, where in one sentence it described the light perfectly and explained it exactly like I experienced it and I told her it called it the liquid molten golden white living light.

46:51 The instant I said the word light, divine peace and light and energy expanded and enfolded my entire mind, body and soul and all I could do is drop my head on the table. That's why it went on for many seconds. And then when it was over, I wiped my eyes off and I looked up at Rosalynn and she was wide-eyed looking down at me and hadn't moved at all and her face is all wet on both sides of her cheeks all the way down. And I said, did you feel that? And she says, uh-huh. And Noah did too, her unborn baby boy in her stomach. Later I found a passage in these books that I study from St. Germain. I said, this is exactly what happened to us.

47:33 But I'm going to read the, and then later I couldn't find it because I have too many pictures. This is about a year and a half or two years later or something like that. And I say this to her, I'm asking her to send it back to me. I said, hi Rosalynn, do you remember that picture of a page of information? I texted to you a long while back describing what happened to me, you and Noah, when the infinite power of divine peace blasted through all three of us the last time I got a massage from you. I mean, I don't know how more specific you can get than that, right? Yes. Yeah, that's good. I've somehow lost it in my phone. I'm hoping you can send it to me again. Please let me know, blah, blah, blah. Hope you're doing well, my eternal friend in the light. And then before she could say anything, I found it and sent it to her.

48:16 And she puts a little heart emoji by the picture. And then sends two more messages. The first one says, I love this. And then a heart emoji. The next one says, and it's so relevant for me now. Then I write back and say, me too. It's deep comfort knowing we are watched over. And in the end, everything and everyone will be raised into that state of perfect peace we each had blast through us three years ago. That moment we experienced is seared into my consciousness forever. Now, I'm pretty sure it did that to you too. God bless you and your family, Rosalynn. And she puts a heart emoji by that and then comes back and says, God bless to you and your family as well, Tony. I'm grateful to know you. A little prayer hands and heart emoji.

48:58 And so that's, she's not saying, hey, you're crazy. You need to, don't ever call me again, you know, whatever. She's acknowledging that that happened to us. It was real. It was very real. It was very real. Not just me. It's happening to people around me. And so these things have happened after I started studying these books. And at the books at the beginning, it says, if you practice these principles, these books will prove themselves to you. And they have. So after decades of seeking, I don't seek anymore. I have my answers and I study them now and daily.

49:44 Do that daily. Bring in, calling in the light. The more I do that, the more and I meditate regularly. I can feel the energy flowing through me, tingling and gently waving through me as it passes from one end to the other, starting at the head and always going through me. And it's helped me heal to the point where, you know, I can walk nine holes of golf and hit a driver 270 yards. So that's five years after a car wreck. That I shouldn't be standing. You know, that's great. Just to wrap up, do you have any last thoughts to share with everybody? What one thing can we get from all of this?

50:25 In the light, we are all one. What we do to one, we do to everyone. And when we do so, we do so most assuredly and most especially to our own selves. So go below. That's the only answer. Well said. Thank you very much, Tony Woody. Thank you. Have a good day. Thanks for asking me to do this with you. Appreciate it. Thank you again for listening and just a gentle reminder about donating to the show at roundtripdeath.com. Until then, Merry Christmas and I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.