#244 - Mark Anthony "The Psychic Lawyer" Explains NDE's

0:00 One of life's greatest questions is what happens to us after we die? Is death the end or a new beginning? Welcome to the Roundtrip Death Podcast. In this show, we listen to first-hand accounts of people who have gone beyond the veil and return to talk about it. We are ending our first season of the show with a big celebrity on today. A little bit different kind of format. We have with us Mark Anthony, JD's psychic explorer, also known as the psychic lawyer.

0:41 Now just to tell you a little bit more about Mark, he is a fourth-generation psychic medium who communicates with spirits. And here's the big thing, he is an Oxford-educated attorney, licensed to practice law in Florida, Washington, D.C. and before the U.S. Supreme Court. He appears nationwide on TV and radio, including CBS's The Doctors and Gaia TV's Beyond Belief with George Norrie. Whole lots of other credentials behind him. He has spoken at conferences and universities, including Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Yale. This guy has a resume a mile long. He also most recently is author of the bestseller, The Afterlife Frequency, which is the gold winner of the C.O.V.R. Visionary Awards and was up for a Pulitzer and ranked as one of the top books about faith in God.

1:33 His other bestselling books are Never Letting Go and Evidence of Eternity. Mark, it is so good to have you on today. Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here. It was fun, we were talking before the show about the recent launch down in Florida. Did you happen to see that? Artemis won. You know, the night that it went up, I was asked to be on coast to coast AM to speak about of all things near-death experiences. The title of that episode was Ancient Mysteries Reveal New Discoveries. I'm close enough to the cape that I knew when it went up because I could feel the house rumbling from the sonic booms.

2:19 Unfortunately, I didn't get to see it, but my neighbor said it lit up the sky like the sun itself was coming up. Those things used to be so huge. They were on every single TV channel live, and now we take them for granted, which seems a little ridiculous. But anyway, you have not only had your own NDE, you're an expert on the topic, and a lot of things related to it. Could you give us a little bit of understanding here about what it takes for people who have had one of these experiences to actually not only comprehend it, but figure out what it means for them?

3:00 It can take years, even an entire lifetime. I had my NDE when I was four years old. The reason that I don't go into it in interviews is because it's such a key component to my latest book, The Afterlife Frequency. For the listeners who want to find out about my NDE and how it took years for the significance of it to unfold, it's essential to read the afterlife frequency. But both of my parents had NDE's. My dad had two, and my mother had at least one.

3:42 My dad was 16 years old when he was in this horrific car accident. He said the next thing he knew, he was floating. He said about 30, 40 feet above the accident, and he saw the crumpled cars and all these people running to his body. They pulled him out, and they were doing CPR on him. He said, I saw this light, and I heard this voice. He said, I felt, wow, I'm dead. This feels great. I remember dad saying, this feels great. The voice, and dad said, it wasn't the voice that you hear when you think. It was a different voice. His name was Earl, and the voice said, Earl, you have to go back.

4:26 Dad then said the next thing he knew, he was in his body again. He goes, Mark, it hurt like hell. So there he was, a teenager. Then after that, he was in the Navy, and he had served as a Navy SEAL. And so about, gosh, it had to be 10, almost 15 years later, he was out of the Navy, but he was a scuba diver. And he was diving off the coast of New Jersey, and they were in really deep water, 125 feet. And he said that his regulator jammed. Now that's never a good thing, and especially in those days, they didn't have any backup or emergency oxygen supply or anything. And he said he started sucking water, and he said, Mark, I was drowning.

5:07 And at 125 feet, there's nothing you can do. He said, that's it. He said, there I was again, that floating sensation, the light, and the voice said, Earl, it's not your time again. You have to go back. He said, Mark, I have absolutely no idea how my regulator started working again. But I started getting oxygen, I cleared my mask, and I made it to the surface. And he cleaned from that, that there was too much that he had to do in his life.

5:50 And my mother, who was a very gifted psychic medium, both my parents like me were mediums. And I know that the focus of this program is not necessarily about mediumship, but it's hard to talk about communication with our loved ones in spirit through an NDE without mediumship, because they use similar energetic modalities, and that's why there's an overlap. And my mother was particularly close to her father. And in my first book, Never Letting Go, one of my early memories, and really, Eric, the only memory I have of my mother's father, she was super close to her father, who's very religious, very Catholic, venerated all the saints.

6:41 And he always wore this fedora hat. And he was from Italy, so I spoke with this Italian accent, he was like this real suave, Italian kind of a guy. And he was very, very ill, he was dying of cancer. And I remember my mother brought me to the hospital to see him in New York. We were living in Florida, dad, we had moved down there to Florida because of aerospace. And two weeks later, it was a Sunday morning, and my mom woke up, and she was staring at the doorway of her bedroom.

7:24 And my dad looked up and he said, Jeannie, what's going on? And she goes, daddy? And she saw her father standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She said he looked young and handsome. He had these rosy cheeks, and he was wearing his fedora, and he always trusts, you know, he had the best Italian suits. And he tipped his hat to her, which is something he always did when he left the room. And she said, he didn't say anything, but I heard in my head, there is something beyond this life, and it is wonderful. That was, I think, was 7.704 in the morning. Mom was hysterical crying, all my brother, sister and I, we all woke up.

8:04 Why is mommy crying? And she called her brother, mother, she couldn't get a sister, she couldn't get hold of anyone. And then around 9 o'clock, my uncle called and said, daddy died this morning. She goes, when? He goes, 7 a.m. So at the precise moment of his death, he came to see her. Now we now know this as a shared death experience. And shared death experiences typically occur for people who are in close proximity to the person who is dying, but not always. And in my life, I've experienced this on a number of occasions.

8:46 But when I was a teenager, my mother had Crohn's disease and her intestines actually burst. And I would never forget being at the hospital. And my dad, he's a Navy SEAL, okay? And the surgeon came out and said to us, he goes, I don't think she's going to live. We're going to lose her. And I'll never forget my dad walking right up to the surgeon, looking him right in the eyes and saying, if she dies, you die. Oh, how did he take that? Well, yeah. And let me tell you, dad, he was like 5'10".

9:30 He was one of these 6'4 guys, but man, when dad went into SEAL mode, it was like, my brother and I are standing there like, oh my God. Well, he races back into the operating room. They lost my mom for six minutes, but they got her heart going. My mother said she went into the light. And she said that she encountered my great-grandmother, Giovanna, who was very well known in the early 1900s, well, her whole life as the woman who knows things. She was very gifted, a medium, and in fact, even high-ranking officials from the Catholic Church, she used to consult with her cardinals, bishops, mother superiors.

10:17 And she encountered her grandmother, Giovanna, and then her father stepped forward and said, Jeannie, it's a nod to your time. You have too much to do. And she came back. And so, Eric, this is the household I grew up in. I had an NDE when I was four. My parents had NDE's, and it was just something that we did not take for granted. Yeah. So, you've been studying this your whole life. It's been my whole life, yes. Yeah.

10:58 It's been your whole life. There's probably isn't an answer for this, but it's something that I ponder on, and that is why some people are given a choice of whether they want to come back or not, and others, like your father, are just told, you need to go back. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be? I do. Free will is a gift from God. Now, when I talk about God, I remember I talked to some friends recently that I hadn't seen for years about God. And I said, look, when I say God, I don't mean an erotic white guy sitting on a throne with a scepter, smiting people.

11:38 I believe in the energetic link between all of us, which is based on quantum mechanics. And there's a day we're coming in, a day we're going out, and what we do in between is the choice that we have over. But it does appear in some NDE's is the choice is yours. But in my research, most of the time, the message from the collective consciousness, from the vast wisdom, is that you have to go back. We even saw this in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When Harry, in the very final book in that series, he dies, and he goes to, I think, his Victoria station or whatever, and he sees Dumbledore comes into the light.

12:31 And Dumbledore, Harry goes, well, am I dead? And Dumbledore basically says, well, that's your choice. And I think that's really fascinating the way NDE's have been part of our literature, part of our culture for really for centuries. And so the choice aspect does occasionally come up, but I'm pretty sure that when you and you get to a certain stage in your near death experience, and they tell you, you got to go back, that's because you have to. And I think that it's also part of that is sharing this experience with other people, which of course, as you all know, is not always welcomed in people's families or religions or social circles.

13:24 No, I've talked to so many people that said, especially if their NDE was years ago, 20, 30, 40 years ago, where it was just not accepted, and they were told, you sound crazy, be quiet, don't talk about it anymore. And also people who are telling me, yeah, I was and I don't want to name any religions, but I was this religion. When I told my pastor, minister, whoever about it, he just said, no, or that's of the devil or, or, you know, basically take that back. That didn't really happen. And they're like, it did happen.

14:05 It was extremely real. So what do we do with this? But I wanted to congratulate you because we've done over 40 episodes of this show, and you're the first person to mention Harry Potter in that whole time. So congratulations. I didn't know how long we were going to go without it, but now we know the answer to that. Okay, before we go on, I had one other question for you. The whole shared death experience phenomenon I find extremely interesting too. And I hadn't really thought about the fact that you could have a shared death experience with someone who is a long ways away. I kind of assumed you had to be in the room with them when they die.

14:48 That seems to being in close physical proximity seems to be the norm. But in the afterlife frequency, I introduced the concept of the electromagnetic soul, which explains it's the basis for all forms of interdimensional communication. Shared death and shared death experiences, death bed visions and DBVs, death bed visions and shared death experiences are very closely overlapped. Mediumship visitations when a spirit will come to you in the dream state. And I know we want to focus on NDEs, SDEs and DBVs, death bed visions, so we will.

15:28 But the electromagnetic soul, I've spent my lifetime developing this theory and it's been endorsed by the scientific community or at least the afterlife research and survival of consciousness wing of the scientific community. Every great spiritual teacher from ancient India through Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Lao-Zu, Muhammad, all the way up to the modern day, Native American spirituality, the religions of the Pacific, because I've studied all of these and I'm always studying more, teach that the soul, the consciousness, the who and what we are pre-exist the body, comes into the body, moves on after the body dies.

16:15 We know that from the field of neuroscience, which studies the human brain, that our entire nervous system has an electrical field. And while the brain accounts for something like 4% of the body's weight, it uses over 20% of the body's electrical energy. In other words, the electromagnetic field in our brain, and we know from the, I think it's the first law in thermodynamics and physics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed only transferred. So combining faith and science, I created the term the electromagnetic soul to describe what we really are, which is pure consciousness, that is eternal electromagnetic energy.

16:59 And that, that Eric is the basis for us understanding the science of near-death, shared-death experiences, death bedvisions, mediumship and so on and so forth. But I'll, I'll focus my discussion on the NDEs and the SDEs. So there are five different brain wave frequencies, gamma, alpha, theta, excuse me, gamma, beta, alpha, theta, delta. Gamma is when you're in the jeopardy tournament of champions, all right? Your brain is just cooking. Yeah, that's when you're like running full throttle. Beta is, is the activities for daily living, the awake state, I can drive my car, balance my checkbook, you know, use a computer, talk.

17:44 When you begin to relax and go into the meditative state or, or you start to fall asleep, you go into alpha. And then when you go into dreaming sleep, that's theta. Delta has very little brain wave activity, but that's real important because that's when your body is diverting energy to healing and, you know, cellular regeneration. But it's the alpha, theta border where psychic and mediumistic type activities occur and spirits are able to see that. And when people are in that state, spirits will adjust their frequency down to the alpha, theta frequency so that we can have contact.

18:29 So what we've seen in 2022, two huge developments in near death experience research in February of 2022 in Tartu, Estonia, an 87 year old man had a stroke rushed to the hospital. He's hooked up to an EEG and electron cephalogram and they're monitoring his brain waves and he has a massive heart attack and dies. Never before in history had someone died while being administered in EEG and what happened to astonished medical professionals worldwide, all five brain wave frequencies surged off the scale.

19:12 Now November 6th, 2022, the Grossman Institute of New York University released a study called Lucid Dying and it was conducted at 25 hospitals between the US and the UK and there were over almost 600 people who were hooked up to EEGs while being given CPR. And one in five of them who flatlined and then came back, every single one of them, their brain wave frequency surged so the data is consistent with what happened in Tartu, Estonia.

19:54 But one in five of them returned with details of going into the light, the very classic description of near death experiences. So now how does my electromagnetic solv theory fit into this? You see a light bulb has an aura because there's an energy field around it. So think of an incandescent bulb that suddenly gets real bright and burns out. We've all seen this. It's the same thing with our brain. Our brain did not create our consciousness.

20:36 It didn't create our electromagnetic soul. It hosts it. Similarly, the tungsten in the filament of a incandescent light bulb did not create the electricity that flows through it. It merely regulates it. So when we're dying, our brain begins to degrade and it's no longer able to host the amount of energy of the electromagnetic soul. So it spikes. That's why when somebody is actively dying, their brain waves, their electromagnetic souls frequency expands. People in close proximity to the dying person, family members and dear friends, hospice workers, other healthcare workers, their brain wave frequencies and their electromagnetic souls pick up on this.

21:27 And that's why people in close proximity to somebody dying, even though they're not an imminent threat of dying, will experience a floating sensation. They may actually see the spirits that are coming to greet the person in transition. And they may actually see, as I have on a number of occasions, a surge of white light coming out of the person's body before they die. So this isn't some woohoo, airy-fairy, granola snorting theory. This is based on neuroscience and quantum physics, plus on objective, the scientific method of objectively analyzing people who are dying while administering an EEG to collect and corroborate the data.

22:16 So we're at the threshold of very exciting times, Eric. For centuries, people have talked about NDE's and you're crazy and blah, blah, blah. And now we're starting to see that this is real. Yeah. I'm glad that there's finally some science behind it. I know some of the people listening today are thinking, I want to believe this. I don't know if I believe it. How can they, what can they learn from that science? Is there anything else that you want to explain about it to help them get off that fence? Well, I'd say the first thing you need to do is get my book, The Afterlife Frequency. And well, the thing is though that I spent years doing the research and I spent the better part of five years writing it because I wanted to present the science of the afterlife in a credible fashion.

23:11 But my books read like novels. So don't be afraid that you're going to be stuck reading some algebra textbook. That's not going to happen. And I'm giving a very shortened description of the electromagnetic soul theory and the frequency overlap theory. But we are seeing this more and more and it's being reported more and more that when people who are in close proximity to a dying person, they get caught up maybe in even in the person's life review. And the life reviews, the proverbial, my life flashed before my eyes. And we've all heard that expression as part of our culture.

23:54 But that's also part of what happens as the EMS, the electromagnetic soul, begins to separate from the vessel that hosts it. Think of your brain as a computer hard drive. Your computer hard drive did not create Windows 10, Windows 11 or whatever operating system you're using, nor did your computer create the data that's on it. It merely hosts it. And when it crashes, when the body dies, that information stays coherent, yet is uploaded to a higher vibrational frequency. You've also done some study on the history of near-death experiences.

24:37 Tell us a little bit about that. There's so many wonderful stories. I love when people say, well, that's against Scripture. Is it? No, I've seen one of your talks where you use a lot of Scripture. So let's hear some of it. Yeah, Jonah in the whale. So Jonah is a prophet, and God tells him to go to Nineveh, which is in modern-day Iraq. And he's like, I don't want to go to Iraq. Apparently, it was problematic over 3,000 years ago because Jonah lived in the Old Testament era, which would be the Bronze Age, roughly eight to nine centuries before the birth of Christ.

25:18 So he hops on a ship that's headed for Spain. I guess southern Spain was a vacation destination even in the Bronze Age. Much better than Nineveh. Much better than Nineveh. Yeah, good beaches, the whole thing. Exactly. And so heavy seas hit, and the crew figures out that Jonah disobeyed the Word of God, so they promptly threw him overboard. And the Lord sends a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he's in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights until it's vomited up, and Jonah survives. But the thing is, this, I believe, is a metaphor for a near-death experience.

26:00 So Jonah, or whoever the description is about, may have drowned or may have had some other type of malady or problem where he was in an inert state for three days. And if you read the actual passage, it talks about descending to the bottom of the mountain, but then the Lord rises me up. And after the experience, Jonah embraces his piety and continues on his spiritual mission, also not an unusual after-effect of an NDE. Many people become very spiritual. Well, in support of our friends who take a literal interpretation of Scripture, even though a whale's esophagus is only five inches in diameter, in June of 2022, Michael Packard, a lobster diver, was lobster diving off of Cape Cod, and suddenly he felt engulfed, and he was in total darkness.

27:03 At first he thought a great white had hit him, but then he realized it wasn't because he didn't feel any teeth. A humpback whale had swallowed him, but it didn't take him into his stomach because it couldn't fit. So humpback whales don't eat people. They eat krill in little tiny organisms. So this whale's probably like, what is this? And he said, but Packard said, I'm done, I'm dead. That's what he thought. And the next thing he knew, the whale spit him out. And people saw this, this huge whale comes up and spits a person out. You don't see that every day. And he's taken to the hospital. So in ancient times, if this happened to you, you ended up in Scripture.

27:45 But in the 21st century, you end up on the Jimmy Kimmel show, like Michael Packard did, and being held as the modern day Jonah. So for our literalist friends, yes, you can get engulfed by a whale, maybe not for three days. But let me tell you. Being inside of a whale's mouth for 30 seconds would feel like an awfully long time. Now there's other passages in Scripture, which I describe in my books. But one of my favorite is in the first book of Corinthians, where the apostle Paul. So now we've moved from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age era of the New Testament, where Paul talks about, I know a man in Christ who ascended to the third heaven.

28:32 Somebody came back. And I'm paraphrasing here. Throughout Scripture, there are three levels of heaven in the Judeo-Christian religious philosophy. In Genesis, the first level is the sky. Then there is the second level, which is the stars. And then in Corinthians, the third level is the realm of God. So essentially, there's different frequencies to the heavens. And many people think that Paul was describing his own near-death experience. We know from Christian tradition that Paul's name originally was Saul of Tarsus.

29:12 And he actually was a Roman citizen. He was a Hebrew who was a Roman citizen, but he worked with the Romans in hunting down and persecuting Christians. So he's on his way to Damascus and gets hit by this bright white light and lays there for three days as if he's dead and then comes out of it. Paul completely changed. So I believe that Paul was, and I'm not alone in this, many theologians agree that Paul was writing in the book of Corinthians, the first book of Corinthians, about his own end. But let's fast forward to the Victorian era.

29:53 Very Christmas, how many times do we see a different version of Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol? And we all know, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge, he's miserable, nasty, and he's mean to Bob Cratchit, who's got little tiny Tim, and he doesn't want to give money to charity. And he's just a rotten guy. He's the very epitome of ego, edging God out of materialism, of self-centered behaviors. And so it's Christmas Eve and he goes home and he encounters the spirit of his former partner, Jacob Marley, who's covered in all these chains and the chains have money boxes on them. And Jacob Marley is like, you know, don't end up like me.

30:35 Well, then of course, we all know the story that throughout the night, three different spirits, the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, come to visit Ebenezer Scrooge. The ghost of Christmas past shows Ebenezer what he was like when he was a young man. He was a nice guy. But then materialism started taking hold. The ghost of Christmas present shows him now he is a completely narcissistic, self-centered, very selfish person, uncaring, unthinking. So this could be construed as the life review, both the ghost of Christmas past and the ghost of Christmas present.

31:20 But then the ghost of Christmas future shows him what happens when he dies and how people laugh at him there. They're making fun of him over his body and how when he's buried, it may have well have been that he'd never even existed. And this could be interpreted as what's known as a DNDE, a distressing near death experience, also nicknamed a hellish NDE. And we can get into that more after this. Yeah, we've had a handful of those on this show too. Sure. That ended up having happy endings. Yeah. And so did Scrooge when he came out of all this.

32:00 He's like, oh my God, I've been a really horrible person. He gives Bob Cratcheter raised, Tiny Tim doesn't die, and then he reunites with his nephew and his family. Charles Dickens, when he began to examine not just the writer, but the man, this guy had a very exciting life. He was in several accidents, almost died many times, even walked away from a train wreck at one point in his life. And myself and Dr. Bruce Grayson, and there's a couple other NDE researchers, we examined this and it appears that the idea of the Christmas Carol, the inspiration for it, very well may have been Charles Dickens' own near death experiences.

32:53 And what's so fascinating about this, Eric, is they didn't even have a term for it then. And we're talking the 1830s, 1840s when he wrote this, but this phenomenon had been reported and was known for centuries. I mean, since biblical times, I mean, even the ancient Greeks, Plato in his book, Republic, writes about this warrior, his name was Ur, and Ur goes into battle, he's killed, and then the Greeks put him on a funeral pyre, and they're about to torque up the funeral pyre, he comes back to life. NDE researchers, myself included, believe that Plato was writing about his own NDE, and here is what's really notable about this.

33:37 Ur talks about going through a tunnel into a light. Ur talks about meeting deceased relatives. Ur talks about a sense of being connected to everyone and everything. Ur talks about a series of lifetimes, but we must drink from the well of forgetfulness between lifetimes. Wait a second. The ancient Greeks did not believe in reincarnation, and he just described reincarnation. Nor did they believe in going through a tunnel into the light. They didn't believe the interconnectedness. They had Hades, and if you were good, you went to the Elysium Fields and got to go be a warrior, if you were lousy, you went to Tartarus and were subjected to all these punishments.

34:24 What Plato wrote about transcended philosophically anything in the ancient Greek and eventually Roman religions. We can see from ancient times up to today, NDE's have not only been part of our culture, they have actually influenced it, including our literature. Yeah, that's fascinating. As I talk to people about their NDE's, for most people, it seems to be very therapeutic. If they haven't talked to anybody about it before, there's a point where they've held it in long enough because they were told they were crazy or something, that they finally have to let it out and talk about it.

35:08 In Charles Dickens' time, he may have tried to tell somebody about it, been told he was crazy. So this was his therapeutic way of dealing with it. Exactly. I mean, let's face it, he was a literary genius. Yeah, so he wrote about it. He wrote about it because it was fantasy, yet it put it this way. If it wasn't a good book, how come almost 200 years later, we're still making different versions of it, plays, movies, because there's a very important lesson in it. And the lessons that one can glean from a Christmas carol are also the positive after-effects one can walk away from an NDE with.

35:56 You've been jumping all over in history here, okay? I mean, all over the place, and that's okay. Welcome to my brain. I want to go back for a second to the New Testament time because you brought up Paul. And I apologize if you don't have an answer for this. This is more off the wall here. But have you thought about or done some theorizing on the amount of transfiguration where the story of Jesus taking three of his apostles with him, go into that if you can? Oh, quite a bit.

36:36 In fact, my presentation this last year at IAMS, International Association for Near Death Studies, I did go in depth into the transfiguration. Transfiguration is one of the most studied passages in the Bible, and not just by Christian scholars, but also by Hindu and Buddhist and Jain scholars, and not to mention near-death experience research scholars. So Jesus takes a select group of disciples to the top of a mountain. He begins to glow white and mist forms around him that also glows white, and the spirits of the prophet Elijah and Moses appear on either side of him.

37:23 From a theological standpoint, this is significant because Moses was the giver of the law. Elijah was the executor of the law, and Jesus was the fulfillment of the law. And that's how it's looked at the laws of God in Scripture. Also when you study what's known as physical mediumship, and I'm yet to be persuaded by any of the ones I've seen for other reasons, the mist, the glowing whites, some people could call this ectoplasm, and I don't want to get off into that, but also the United States Air Force has recorded ectoplasm when high-speed jets immediately break the sound barrier.

38:10 A white, glistening material forms around the jets, which the United States Air Force has described as appearing like ectoplasm. So Jesus does this, and then the light recedes, and he appears once again as a mortal, or no, Jesus. And there's a discussion afterwards. Jesus says, don't tell anyone that you saw this until after I've ascended. And there's the, well, who are you? Some say that you are the prophet Elijah, some say that you are John the Baptist, and I'm paraphrasing here.

38:50 And Jesus says to them, Elijah, now we must keep in mind, John the Baptist was Jesus's first cousin, and John came before Jesus to herald the coming of Jesus, and John met his demise at the court of Herod Antipas. And Herod Antipas was one of the miserable sons of the miserable Herod the Great, and there was Salome, and he, you know, Herod wanted her and said, I'll give you anything if you dance for me. And so she dances and says, I want the head of John the Baptist, and anyway. So John the Baptist has been executed. I think it's important for people may not be familiar with that.

39:32 So the disciples say, some say that you are John the Baptist returned, others say that you are the prophet Elijah. And Jesus says to them, Elijah has returned, but they did not recognize him. And the scripture says they knew then that he was speaking of John the Baptist. And Elijah lived 800 years earlier than Jesus and his cousin John. So if Elijah has returned, but they did recognize him for he appeared in the form of John the Baptist, this is where progressive Christian scholars, NDE scholars, Hindus and Buddhist scholars believe that this may actually be a reference to reincarnation.

40:19 And I look and I've said this in interviews and you know, there's the the literalist crowd that that takes issue with this. But when you study Christian theology in the early centuries of Christianity, it was the third, excuse me, the fourth century in Alexandria, Egypt, the great Christian theologian origin. He wrote that we must all go through a succession of lifetimes and even Satan will eventually ascend into the higher light with God. So in some secs, SCCTS, sects of Christianity in the early centuries, it is believed that reincarnation was a Christian concept.

41:12 But in the year was around the year 527 to 530 AD, in what is now Istanbul and Constantinople, which was the capital of the Roman Empire at this time, the emperor Justinian convened the Fifth Ecumenical Council. And during the Fifth Ecumenical Council, reincarnation was banned as heresy. And it's believed that other passages throughout scripture, which may have referenced reincarnation, were edited out, but they either missed the transfiguration or they left it in for some purpose were not entirely clear of yet.

41:55 So I just wanted to present this because you're asking about this in scripture. There are some people, and this may really cause some reaction from people, that it based in I was raised Catholic, I was supposed to be a Catholic priest. So I want that to go on record because when I was a kid, I wanted to be a priest. There is some discussion that when Jesus was removed from the cross, that he may not have been dead, or if he did die, he had an NDE and came back. Now I know that that is an affront to the concept of resurrection, or is it?

42:42 Think about it. He went into paradise, descended to the depths of negativity, ascended into the light, and then returned. I am not saying that I believe this. I am not saying that I am promoting this. I'm just saying that there are people who don't necessarily believe the traditional view of the resurrection, but offer this as a possibility. Speaking of the Bible and NDE's, what about the story of Lazarus? Lazarus is fascinating because Lazarus was a good friend of Jesus who died, and then Jesus weeps when he hears of his friend's death, but then summons all the energy, the God energy, and says, Lazarus, come forth, and the body of Lazarus reanimates and returns from the dead.

43:45 So in literalist Christian theology, Jesus as the human form of God is able to rise Lazarus from the dead, people that believe that maybe Jesus was some type of highly advanced energy healer, or this could perhaps have been yet another example of a near-death experience. So Scripture is really fascinating when you begin to look at it in different ways. And please understand, Eric, and for the audience. I'm not here to attack anyone's beliefs. I am not here to insult or offend anyone, but as scholars and as researchers, when we come across these passages and based in light of the developments that we have discovered in the last 50 years of NDE research, it does tend to get us to look at these a bit differently.

44:48 Okay, let's lighten it up just a little bit now. Yeah, that's kind of how you think. How did Mark Anthony get from being a wannabe Catholic priest to the psychic lawyer? It's not unusual for mediums to be drawn to the spiritual. And I grew up with a mom and dad that could see spirits. You know, it's about three and a half years old, and I start seeing spirits and mom's like, oh, he's got it. And dad's like, oh, geez, he's got it. You know, because my dad knew this would be a difficult life. His own sister, who was a very gifted medium, was horribly persecuted for it. And when I was a teenager, I started thinking, well, I don't know if I really want to do the whole priesthood thing, the celibacy thing, but just being honest to you.

45:40 But I wanted to work in a capacity to serve. And I found law very appealing. I liked the aspect of the research and being able to speak and advocate for people. And so I kind of, you know, because I thought that the priesthood would have too many rules and regulations. So I jumped out of that fire right into the frying pan, you know, frying pan right into the fire, and I went into law. And so what had happened, Eric, is I was very close to my parents. I had a great relationship with them. And I was in my law office as a senior partner of a firm. And one day I was thinking about spaghetti. Makes sense.

46:21 Now being of Italian descent, thinking of spaghetti is not an unusual thing. Yeah, it may have been lunchtime. It was lunchtime and the phone rang. My secretary put it through and it was my mom. She said, honey, I made spaghetti for lunch. Why don't you come over? Hey, my folks lived about five miles away with the heck, you know, I didn't have that much on the books that day. I had the most awesome time with my mom and dad. And mom looked tired. And so before I left, she hugged me and kissed me. And I'll never forget, my mom looked and looked me in the eye and said, Mark, I love you so much. I'm so glad you've been my son. And I said, I love you too, mom.

47:02 And that just seemed strange. I remember when I left, I mean, the sound of the door when it closed there, the door of the house had this, you know, and I just had this ominous. I mean, it was nice. So the next morning I'm in court and the judge's assistant came and said, Mark, we need you in chambers right now. And I knew this wasn't good. And when they handed me the phone, my secretary was on the phone in tears and she said, your dad called, your mom died. And she had passed in her sleep very peacefully. Well, I spiraled into this horrible depression, understandably so. I mean, I lost my mom.

47:44 And I was driving back from court a couple of weeks later. And one of those waves of grief hit me. And everybody that's listening to this, you know, you know what I'm talking about. When you lose somebody, you know, there's times you handle it better than others. Well, I wasn't handling it very well. And I thought, let me pull over, I shouldn't be driving. And I pulled over in this convenience store parking lot and I'm sitting there alone in my car or so I thought. And this flash of light goes off in the car. And I instinctively turned to the passenger side and I see my mother's silhouette in this beautiful silver white light.

48:26 And before I can even begin to process that, her voice fills my head. And she says, Mark, you've been given the gift of mediumship so that you would not be crushed by grief. But now you must help those who are suffering with theirs. Well, Eric, I'm like now I'm breaking out into a sweat. And before I could recover from that, the second part of her message came through. She said, Mark, it is your life's mission to help people understand that God exists, that the afterlife, heaven, whatever you want to call it exists, that your souls are mortal living beings, that humans can communicate with souls, and that we will all be reunited when it is your time to leave the material world in the light that you call God.

49:17 So I am soaking wet with sweat. I sink back into my seat and all I can say is, OK. And Eric, I'm thinking, I can't tell anybody this. I'm the senior partner of a law firm. They're going to think I'm insane. I mean, everybody always thought I was a little bit weird anyway because I seemed to know things about people, particularly during jury selection. So then people knew about my family and all that. But now this was different. And I've heard the term spiritually transformative experience. And normally you think of sitting on a mountaintop in Maui meditating and, oh, I had to do it.

49:57 No, mine was the proverbial fire hose right to the face. And hey, my family is Italian. What else could it be? But I'm making a joke there. But I also realized that we all have a life mission. Every life matters. Every life counts. And that everything happens, I believe, synchronistically. And it was time for things to change. Within days, I started working on my first book, Never Letting Go. Then I got offered a job in a government agency supervising court operations.

50:39 OK, so now I'm transitioning out of running a law firm, which is a real hassle. That is a seven day a week, 16 hour a day job. Then my book, Never Letting Go comes out. And I brought on my manager, Rocky, which you probably met her at IONS. And she arranged for my first speaking tour, which took me to New York City. She got me on a show on MSNBC, which was awesome. And it was right before Christmas. So we did the whole Rockefeller Center thing. And then a couple of days later, she arranged for me to speak at Harvard University in Boston. So here we are, we're walking around Boston with our cups of coffee. It's all decorated for Christmas. And we're at Harvard campus and my cell phone rings.

51:22 And it's my boss, the elected official. And he's of a particular party that isn't real tolerant of people like me. And he said, I'm catching too much political flak for having a psychic on staff. And I said, well, the last time I checked, this was the United States of America. And I do have a First Amendment right of my beliefs. I'm not speaking about them at work. He said, and you're taking too much time off from work. I said, well, I'm also taking my vacation time. And I could hear the stress in his voice. And I said, here, let me make this simple for you. Please consider this my resignation. He said, okay, that works.

52:03 And I hung up and then I go, oh my God, Rocky, I just quit the practice of law. And she said, Mark, take a look around. Where are you? I said, Harvard. She said, what are you doing in an hour? Giving a talk on the afterlife and near-death experiences and signing copies of my new book. And she said, don't you think you're exactly where you're supposed to be right now? Very wise. Let me ask you this. This is not a show about mediums, but I know people are curious. Anyway, I spoke with someone recently who said they were in their church and their church had brought in a medium.

52:50 And they were using it as a fundraiser and some other things. He said, I was sitting on the front row and the medium came up to me and looked me in the eyes and said, declared that your father from the other side is here. And he has this message for you and got all dramatic. And I'm going to translate this message now to you. And this man says, stop right there. This is my father sitting right next to me. He is alive. And then they got up and left. So the question is, are there some mediums or psychics or whatever term we're using that we can believe?

53:33 And are there some that we cannot? And how do we know the difference? Absolutely. First off, when I do public sessions, I'll say there's a spirit coming forward. And first I get their gender, then I get an idea of the connection they may have to whoever the recipient is. And I begin to describe that person. I may see what they look like. I normally will pick up on how they passed and I'll start giving details. And then I say, does this make sense to anybody and there may be more than one person? And then I say, OK, now, and then the spirit will continue giving me information until we get to the spirit is somebody that does things like that.

54:18 They're either charlatans or they're just not very experienced. And there's a huge quantitative difference. I think that if people are going to engage the services of a medium, check his or her website, read their credentials. My website is afterlifefrequency.com, just like my book. And you can look at my videos. I've been tested in laboratories at the University of Arizona in LA in the United Kingdom. I've done over 15,000 readings. I'm an evidential medium. Being a lawyer, once again, everything in my life led to a reason. I had to have this basis and evidence and science and be credible because I see people all the time.

55:04 Oh, your grandmother's here and she loves you. Well, that's great. But most people's grandmothers love them. Oh, and I bet she baked cookies too. All right. So you got to start giving you big hugs and big hugs. Well, here's the difference. I was doing a reading for this woman recently and her mother's spirit came through and I said, she's talking about a young man in this world who's very close to you and there's something going on with his eyes. And he looks like he's maybe around seven. She goes, well, I have a seven-year-old nephew. She goes, I don't have any children. I'm very close to my nephew. That's my sister's son. I said, well, there's something going on with his eyes and eyesight.

55:46 She said, that's weird because my sister said he was complaining about blurred vision. I said, the next part of the message is you got to get him to an eye doctor and your mom's now giving me the song, Tutti Frutti, Oh, Rudy by Little Richard. She goes, well, that doesn't make any sense at all. I said, that's fine. But that's what I'm getting. You have to realize we're not on spirits or not on our schedule. So a month later, this woman contacted me. She said, Mark, I called my sister, told her about this, and she said, let's definitely take my son to the eye doctor. We got an appointment and I went with them.

56:27 And the second we walked into the doctor's office on the radio started playing Tutti Frutti, Oh, Rudy by Little Richard. Now I think we're way past a billion to one on the odds there. How did this happen? First off, spirits, the electromagnetic soul came forward. This is the spirit's grandson, her daughter's son, her other daughter's nephew. So there's the love connection, love is energy. She spirits can scan us. So they scan the little boy, they pick up on energetic anomalies. He has an issue with his eyes. Also on the quantum level, and I can explain it if you want, but on the electromagnetic subatomic level, time as we know it doesn't exist.

57:14 So the spirit was acting out of intervention and guidance. Please take my grandson to the eye doctor and to verify that you're doing the right thing. This spirit could see what you and I call the future, pick up on the electromagnetic wave, which is radio waves, and verify that by the second you got there, Tutti Frutti, we are Rudy by little Richard is playing. This is not a coincidence. This is not hocus pocus or magic. This is quantum physics. And when you look at Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, you can take a lifetime to understand that.

57:57 We know that everything's made of molecules, which in turn are made of electrons, protons, atoms, which are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and they in turn are on the subatomic level made of quanta, which is electromagnetic energy. And quantum physicists, since the time of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, all the way up to Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmar theorize that what you and I consider to be time doesn't exist, which is why spirits can oftentimes and do bring up future events. And that's what happened here. So when you deal with a medium who presents evidence, you may not always understand everything that comes through immediately.

58:45 A lot of it you will, but not everything you do. And therein lies the difference. Is a credible medium is going to be based in evidence and not jump to conclusions. Speaking of quantum physics, you mentioned something. This is going to be my last question today. You mentioned just a second ago, love is energy. Please explain that. Well, think about your relationships with the people you love. They can be exhausting, particularly if you have teenagers. But love is energy. And the thing about love, you may not be able to quantify it. You can't put it under a microscope.

59:27 But love is the energy that makes life worth living. And so many of us who've had near-death experiences describe God as love, this pure, absolute love. Now, as a former criminal defense attorney, I can assure you that very many people confuse lust with love. All right, lust is, you know, we're dealing with our lower red chakra. And it's like, oh, I got to have this particular person. And of course, in the initial phases of attraction, there's always something of that. But true love is an energetic bond that you realize that you're interlinked.

1:00:11 That's why, like when my mother's father died, at that precise moment, she woke up and there he was, standing, or his spirit standing in her bedroom, 1200 miles from where he died. That's love. That's energy. And you may not be able to see it, but you can feel it. Think about in the electromagnetic spectrum, what we can see is visible light. We can't see x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves, cosmic waves.

1:00:52 I mean, there's so much that, in other words, if you held up a yardstick and said, this is the electromagnetic spectrum, then go to one tiny line and that is visible light. And that's all that we can see in that spectrum. The rest of it, we can't. And let's face it, just because we can't see something doesn't mean it isn't there. And I like to, when I use the term electromagnetic sol, my friend and colleague, Dr. Gary Schwartz, said that, Mark, let me add to the electromagnetic sol and say that sol stands for source of universal love.

1:01:35 That's beautiful. Thanks again for listening to Roundtrip Death. Hey, when you have a minute, I hope you'll click on over to roundtripteath.com. There you can leave us a comment, make a donation, or sign up for our newsletter. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.