#316 - Mark (Australia) Has A Near Death Experience During Brain Surgery

1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Welcome to Round Trip Death. 2 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Before we get into today's interview, I would just like to extend a huge thank you to all of our listeners around the world. 3 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:21,000 In fact, we have downloads and streams on every continent and in over 70 countries now. Thank you, thank you. 4 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:28,000 As you're listening today, you will likely have the name of a loved one, friend, or family member come to mind. 5 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:35,000 Consider sharing this episode with that person. You may not know why they need it, but just go with it. 6 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:45,000 This may be important for them right now. Now let's hear from today's guest. 7 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:51,000 We have on the line with us today Mark Waller from way down in Australia. We love our Australians. 8 00:00:51,000 --> 00:00:58,000 We have a lot of listeners down there and we've had quite a few people from there on the show too. Anyway, Mark, welcome. 9 00:00:58,000 --> 00:00:59,000 Thank you very much. 10 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:04,000 So before we talk about your near death experience, I want to hear just a little bit about you. 11 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:12,000 If you don't mind telling us where you live, what you do for a living, any of that kind of thing so our listeners can get to know you a little bit. 12 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:18,000 I live on the east coast of Australia, just south of Brisbane, a couple of hours south of Brisbane. 13 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:28,000 I'm an artist for a living. I father, husband, you know, love to serve. Pretty much sums it up. 14 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:30,000 Okay. How many children do you have? 15 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:32,000 I have three children. 16 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:35,000 And what kind of art do you do? Are you a painter? 17 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:40,000 I'm a contemporary realist painter. Yeah, that's if you want to pigeonhole it. 18 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:45,000 I don't want to, but that's okay. What kinds of things do you prefer to paint? 19 00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:57,000 You know, it seems to me that we are these conscious bags of bacteria wobbling around on the thin skin of slime on a lump of dirt next to a nuclear reactor that went through space. 20 00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:05,000 It seems like a nice idea to be immersed in the wonder of it all. So basically my paintings are that really. 21 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:20,000 They're about the magnificence of the tiniest of moments. But then also I also lean into just how incredible our existence is and how incredible being alive and being conscious is. 22 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:23,000 Where can we see some of your artwork? 23 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:29,000 I have a website which is not being updated very well. 24 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:38,000 But yeah, I have a website, Mark Bower Artists, and it's not hard to find I don't think. And you know, social media, all that sort of stuff. 25 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:47,000 Instagram and not so much Instagram. I got hacked and lost my lovely Instagram account. But yeah, Facebook, all that stuff. 26 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:56,000 Well, if you would like, we'll stick some of those links in the show notes for everybody so they can see your artwork because that description sounded really interesting to me. 27 00:02:56,000 --> 00:03:03,000 Sure. So we're going to go back just a few years and and listen to the story of your near death experience. 28 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:10,000 But first, tell us what led up to it. What was going on in your life before this happened? 29 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:16,000 To be honest, my life in a lot of ways was falling apart. My career was going really well. 30 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:34,000 I was really pushing that hard, but becoming very, very aggressive and massive testosterone surges. So very impatient, very short, short with people I loved, aggressive and probably hypersexuality. 31 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:44,000 Probably massive libido, that sort of stuff. Just really lost control basically in a lot of ways. 32 00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:48,000 To unhealthy levels, it sounds like. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. 33 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:54,000 Okay. And was that normal for you or was something going on physically that made that happen? 34 00:03:54,000 --> 00:04:02,000 Look, I've always been a pretty full on individual, but not like that. Not like that. That was next level. 35 00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:16,000 I was hating myself. I've got a studio away from home and I had moved out of my home, was coming down in the studio and literally crying myself to sleep. It was horrible. It was horrible. 36 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:19,000 So what was going on that caused all that? 37 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:26,000 Well, I didn't know what was causing it at the time, but I went to, I was doing a workshop in Perth, which is on the other side of the country. 38 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:33,000 It's about five or six hour flight. And I went over there, did a few bits and pieces and was just unraveling really quickly. 39 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:46,000 And then eventually collapsed and got rushed to hospital where I had a couple of scans and they discovered that I had a tumor the size of a peach in my brain and multiple tumors in my lungs. 40 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:55,000 What the doctor said was you have a mass in your brain and lesions in your lungs, but try not to worry. It might not be cancer. 41 00:04:55,000 --> 00:05:00,000 So guess what I did? Worry. Of course. 42 00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:04,000 The doctor says, don't worry. It might not be cancer. 43 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:11,000 Yeah. I'd sleep good that night. Now. Yeah. So what was the treatment? What happened? 44 00:05:11,000 --> 00:05:17,000 Well, at that stage I had brain surgery, I think four or five days later. 45 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:34,000 And then had to wait for a month. Apparently you can't fly after brain surgery. So I had to wait for a month for all the air to dissipate out of my brain and then flew back and then came back here to this part of the country where I was put on to new drug treatment for cancer. 46 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:39,000 And did removing that tumor fix what was going on with you? 47 00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:53,000 I was like, like someone turned the demon switch off. Yeah. It was night and day, completely different. I went into that surgery angry and confused and upset and came out in love. 48 00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:57,000 And where does the near death experience fit into this whole thing? 49 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:07,000 Well, the near death experience itself happened during the surgery, but I believe that there was a gateway that facilitated that prior to the surgery. 50 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:17,000 So I had definitely had three experiences. The first one was kind of like an introduction, probably for one of a better term that happened before the surgery. 51 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:32,000 The second one was the whole shebang, the whole deal. And then the third one was almost like the experience was almost like tools for relating that to life and other people. 52 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:37,000 Why don't you tell us about the introduction first and then we want the whole shebang. 53 00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:48,000 Right. You know, the doctor, the nurse said what she said. But, you know, before the scans, I had this strange experience of seeing white light being shared between people. 54 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:53,000 And I was kind of putting it down to the fact that, you know, this was a surreal experience. 55 00:06:53,000 --> 00:07:07,000 But every time the nurses came in, there was this white light being exchanged between them and who they were caring for. And there was this moment in the depths of the night where I saw this woman. 56 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:14,000 Oh, I heard this woman. She was in the emergency department. This old woman had been brought in. And all I could think of was my mom. 57 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:25,000 And this woman had lost control of everything, you know, bowels, everything. And she'd bombarded. She'd lost her dignity. And I heard these nurses at three o'clock in the morning say, oh, sweetheart, don't worry. 58 00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:35,000 It's just a bit of poo. It's just a bit of wee. We'll clean it up. And then you'd hear this woman murmur. And then no, no, no, no, no, we can take it downstairs and we'll clean it up. 59 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:46,000 And then we're making that no, no, no, sweetheart, we have this box full of nighties downstairs. We'll bring it up and we'll do a fashion parade for you. And you can choose what you want to wear. 60 00:07:46,000 --> 00:08:00,000 This happened at three o'clock in the morning while the rest of the world's asleep. And these women are cleaning up, I'm guessing women, I can only hear women's voices, but cleaning up poo and vomit and giving this woman back this the most precious thing she had at the time. 61 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:15,000 And that was her dignity. And I saw and felt this light being exchanged. And somewhere around that time, I came to the realization that this cancer experience was bigger than me. 62 00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:28,000 And it was going to unfold the way it was going to unfold. And there was not a lot I could do about it. And that I surrendered. I just surrendered. I went, I'm out. I can't do much here. 63 00:08:28,000 --> 00:08:39,000 But I've heard my brain say these words. Oh, well, I guess we don't need Mark anymore. And that triggered something that I still can barely talk about to this day. 64 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:59,000 This was I gave Mark up. And in giving Mark up, I saw love everywhere. There's this light coming out of every people. And I actually experienced people who had died not long before me. They'd also died of cancer. A couple of guys younger than me. 65 00:08:59,000 --> 00:09:11,000 And they were laughing and saying, you can't come here. This isn't your time. And just laughing and kind of I don't know how to explain it. So bathing in this white light. 66 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:17,000 And again, this is prior to your surgery, right? This is prior to the surgery. Yes. This is prior to the surgery. 67 00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:36,000 And so they'd given me steroids and things at that time. And I was thinking, oh, maybe this is some kind of weird trip. But it felt real. And the walls were full of love. I don't know how to explain that. But I could literally see energy. I could see this white milk. 68 00:09:36,000 --> 00:10:01,000 It looked like everything was made out of milk, this gold through it. And it was beautiful, like absolutely beautiful. I had very little fear. In fact, at that stage, I had none. It was just and my family thought I was insane. I'm saying to them, everything's made of love. It's love. Everything's love. It's all love. And they all thought I was mental. And at that stage, I hadn't had the surgery. So it was easy to put down to. 69 00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:22,000 Yeah, blame the tumor. Yeah, yeah. And then I got moved to another sort of came out of that weirdly. But I knew, you know, it's interesting. I knew that I had to make the job for the people who are caring for me as easily as easy as possible. And I knew that my job was to contribute to other people. 70 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:37,000 Even in that at that point, I knew that that was my job. Regardless of the cancer. My job was to help other people heal in some way, even though I was lying on a plastic bed in the hospital with a tumor the size of a page you might hit. 71 00:10:37,000 --> 00:11:06,000 All right. So then came the surgery. Then came the surgery. Yeah, that was a trip. So I was six or seven hours surgery. I think six neurosurgeons. I've asked them, I asked them a dozen times. Did I die? Like what happened to me in that sort of did I die? And it turns out that I'm a joint to do brain surgery on. I don't know what that means. Everything's supposed to be where it is. But they didn't they didn't they said you didn't die. 72 00:11:06,000 --> 00:11:29,000 But something happened. Something happened. I said, Did my heart stop and they they didn't. I didn't say my heart didn't stop. That just said you didn't die. But anyway, but they said something happened. The doctors did. No, I they didn't. You did. Okay, I did. Something happened because I remembered falling into unconsciousness. Yeah. 73 00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:51,000 Then for some reason, I remembered and at that stage, I didn't know I was in surgery. I didn't know any of that stuff. I just became aware of being in this kind of cheesy milk is probably the best way to put it. Just warm and then see if I can get through this without losing my crap. I had this feeling of expanding. 74 00:11:51,000 --> 00:12:10,000 And then I saw saw is not the right word. Saw isn't the right word. I experienced I witnessed I don't know. I don't know what the word is. I joined everything. So I had kind of access to everything, if that makes sense. 75 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:27,000 And I saw atoms being formed. I saw stars collapsing and being born. I saw energy. I saw love everywhere. See, prior to, you know, in the hospital, I'd seen the walls were made of love. But then in this, I saw that everything was. 76 00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:53,000 And there was this presence that was sublime, but not separate. It's almost like I merged with I don't like the word God. I don't like the word God. It has connotations and it's a diminishment of the best thing I can say is that I merged with all it is and has never been and all it was and will never be. 77 00:12:53,000 --> 00:13:13,000 Does that I don't. Yes, even that's not even close. No, that's really pretty, but it is hard for most of us to wrap our brain around. What does that actually mean? Yeah, I and I can't answer that because the experience was beyond logic and beyond the capacity of my mind. 78 00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:29,000 It's like if I said to you, imagine infinity. You can't you can't do that. And yet this entity experience this thing that I realized that I was not separate from was that unendingness in all directions. 79 00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:48,000 You know, there's not words that can articulate that, you know, we're we're we're human beings with a limited brain that's being filtered by an identity. And so our ability to be able to experience or understand infinity is is too constrained. 80 00:13:48,000 --> 00:14:08,000 That makes any sense. Oh, absolutely. So everything that you were experiencing was like that sounds like really, really indescribable. And you didn't see clarify for me. You didn't see with a physical eye like you see the grass growing outside. 81 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:27,000 Exactly. Yeah. But you had meaning come into your brain. Yes. And they're saying and weirdly there was this dialogue. There was this dialogue at the same time, you know, which it was like a dialogue that was coming from inside, but that was also part of everything else at the same time. 82 00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:49,000 I see this is where it's so difficult to speak about. I've I've done a lot of investigation in since then. And I have some theories about that. But ultimately, it's not something that can be described or spoken about people because it's beyond our capabilities. 83 00:14:49,000 --> 00:15:03,000 Having said that, though, I can experience it like evil now. And it's beautiful. It's explicit. See if you can describe that emotion. I tell you're getting very emotional. What kind of emotion are you feeling? 84 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:13,000 Rapture. Just all wonder, endlessness. Rapture is probably the closest word I can come up with. 85 00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:35,000 How about love? Oh, yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. Let's go with rapturous love. Okay. I've never heard those synonyms, but that I get it. That makes sense. What else can you tell me about it? Was there kind of a sequence like this happened, then this happened, then something else or was it sort of all at one time? 86 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:58,000 Well, see, this is the interesting thing is that time for me has been forever destroyed. It happened in sequence and yet all at once. And look, to be honest, life's a little bit like that for me now, which is one of the reasons why I sort of struggle, you know, sometimes organizing things because I don't experience time in the same way that I used to anymore. 87 00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:27,000 That must be frustrating. It's frustrating to people around me. Not so much for you. Not so much for me. Let's come back to this. I want to hear about what this did to your personal relationships. It sounds like you were a better person because of having the tumor removed. But I know these experiences can really change people. I hear of a lot of divorces, for example, that come after these. What happened with your relationships? 88 00:16:27,000 --> 00:16:56,000 Okay, so my relationships with some people very, very much deepened, but with other people, not so much. It was kind of a threat to some of them, particularly because, you know, look, I've discovered that when you're dealing with a terminal illness, there's three types of people vaguely. One of them is the reals. They're the ordinary people who'll come up and go, oh, you had chemo, you had treatments the other day. Is your poo blue? You know, or something like that. 89 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:19,000 You know, did you get a secret cow from the radiation? That sort of stuff. They make stupid jokes and things. And then there's another group called the invisibles. So they're the ones that just fall off the face of the earth. They're in your life. And then something, you know, you get terminal ill and then they disappear. You usually catch the back of their heel as they disappear down an aisle in the supermarket trying not to be seen. 90 00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:35,000 Or then there's the other ones that I call the no, but reallys. And so they, you know, they go, how are you, Mark? Very sympathetic. And I say, I'm well. And they go, no, but really. 91 00:17:35,000 --> 00:17:47,000 I have a sliding scale for them, you know, how many no, but reallys I can get out of them. And the no, but reallys quite often, depending on how you handle them, will either turn into an invisible or turn into a real. 92 00:17:47,000 --> 00:18:01,000 So which do you prefer or something else? I mean, oh, the reals. No, every time the real. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things is that I've realized that everyone wants to be seen. Everyone wants to be seen, and particularly people with cancer. 93 00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:15,000 You know, like I go out of my way. Now, if I see someone who's, you know, who looks like they're going through chemo, I'll come up and I'll go, are you going? Are you well? And just start a conversation with them and then start making stupid jokes. 94 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:27,000 And it's just the act of people seeing them that, you know, because, you know, when you get an illness, because at the time I was expecting to have nine months. 95 00:18:27,000 --> 00:18:37,000 So that was the prognosis generally accepted. Not the doctors ever say that, but, you know, stage four metastatic melanoma, brains and lungs. Yeah, that's not good. 96 00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:51,000 And this was seven years ago, right? This was seven years ago. Yeah. I just had scans two weeks ago and my oncologist is very happy with my inertness. 97 00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:57,000 Yeah, that's great. Because there's no evidence of cancer. I'm cancer-prone. You love proving doctors wrong. 98 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:08,000 I do. Yeah, she's great. Like she's great. When I first met her, she said, you will have probably have this disease for the rest of your life and your life is considerably shortened. 99 00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:16,000 Apparently I laughed. I don't remember that, but she said I laughed when she told me that. But, you know, I knew I wasn't in the diet. I was told. 100 00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:19,000 All right. Tell me about that part. When were you told that? 101 00:19:19,000 --> 00:19:31,000 That was really early. That was my friends. You know, like I said, that those friends were there. They were again, you know, it's a really hard thing. I'd recognize them as them, but they were kind of these weird beings of light, basically. 102 00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:42,000 And they were just laughing and saying, look, I've got a martial arts background and they've known me for a long time. And they knew that I had been trading for a long time, nearly 50 years, I think. 103 00:19:42,000 --> 00:19:49,000 And they knew that, but they were, you know, making jokes and saying you can't block this wall. 104 00:19:49,000 --> 00:20:00,000 You know, there's nothing you can't fight this kind of thing. And then they was saying, but you can't come here. This isn't your time. This is not your time. You can't come wherever he is. 105 00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:09,000 But yeah, you can't come here. This isn't what's going to kill you. And I don't know why I knew that to be true, but I just knew it was true. 106 00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:17,000 And you know, it's interesting. I played a game through that whole cancer journey called Happy to Stay, Happy to Go. And it was incredibly confusing. 107 00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:27,000 You know, you talked about friends where the people changed around, you know, it did. It was confronting for people for me to say, yeah, I'm happy to die. I'll die tomorrow. No problems. 108 00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:35,000 You know, it's very confronting for people who care about you and also people who have a lot of fear about their own mortality. 109 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:49,000 So that did change people. But yeah, my relationship with people. But that came directly from that conversation with those people who were, you know, at the time I saw them as separate entities. 110 00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:54,000 But after after the second experience, I realized that they were all that as well. 111 00:20:54,000 --> 00:21:01,000 I know I got a sidetracked just a little bit on relationships. Let's go back to what you were talking about, about the NE itself. 112 00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:10,000 Was there more that you haven't explained here yet? Well, no, not really, because no, but yes. 113 00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:16,000 In that, like, I mean, I don't know how to explain to you that I saw everything. I don't know how you can see everything. 114 00:21:16,000 --> 00:21:22,000 I'm going to ask you to try to explain that if there's any way you can. Well, again, C is the wrong word. 115 00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:32,000 But I became conscious that cancer was a mutation. My fingers are a mutation. Death is not the end of life. 116 00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:39,000 Death is just death. It's the end of a body. I became conscious that a body was part of a cycle. 117 00:21:39,000 --> 00:21:44,000 It wasn't all it also wasn't finite. There was no there's no such thing as finite. 118 00:21:44,000 --> 00:21:54,000 There is only an evolving of things in time and space and that each of those things morphs into something else. 119 00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:59,000 You know, like I was very conscious that his body would eventually return to the stars. 120 00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:06,000 Now, I hadn't considered that in any meaningful way, but I in the experience, 121 00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:14,000 I was aware that every atom in my body would eventually be skewed into the cosmos in the same way that it was assembled by the cosmos. 122 00:22:14,000 --> 00:22:19,000 And that that was exactly what was supposed to happen. That's that was how it was meant to be. 123 00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:26,000 And that somehow in there prior to that, there would probably be creatures crawling through my eye sockets. 124 00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:29,000 And that that was also beautiful and wonderful. 125 00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:37,000 And that I also saw this profound connection with every other human being because we're all going to die. 126 00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:42,000 We're all going to do this. And it made me love people even more. 127 00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:49,000 You know, we were no longer, you know, there was no longer us and them. It was all of us together doing this life thing. 128 00:22:49,000 --> 00:22:57,000 It's it's almost like probably the best way I can explain it is imagine walking up with your little laptop 129 00:22:57,000 --> 00:23:03,000 and walking up to a mainframe that everything on the Internet's on and then everything being dumped on it. 130 00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:05,000 That's probably the best way I can explain it. 131 00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:09,000 Kind of a huge download of more information than it can really take in. 132 00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:15,000 Basically, yeah. And a lot of the time, I don't know that I took it in until I have a conversation like this. 133 00:23:15,000 --> 00:23:18,000 And it's just there. It's just there for me. 134 00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:24,000 But yeah, I mean, there's no separation. That was very, very clear. There's no separation. 135 00:23:24,000 --> 00:23:28,000 You know, we breathe in, we breathe out every time we breathe in, we're inhaling water molecules. 136 00:23:28,000 --> 00:23:32,000 It's one of those water molecules was quite probably paid out by a dinosaur. 137 00:23:32,000 --> 00:23:40,000 You know, the the things that my body are made from came from the death of thousands of animals, thousands of plants, 138 00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:43,000 you know, atoms, molecules, all of this. 139 00:23:43,000 --> 00:23:52,000 So every time I put fuel in this machine for one of a better term, I'm actually part of a cycle. 140 00:23:52,000 --> 00:23:57,000 And every time I excrete, I'm part of a cycle until I breathe in, I'm part of the cycle. 141 00:23:57,000 --> 00:24:01,000 Each time I this body moves, it's part of the cycle. 142 00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:05,000 There's this unfolding constantly and none of it's good or bad. 143 00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:10,000 It's just it just is. And it's miraculous and beautiful. 144 00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:17,000 And I saw all of that in that space. I don't know how it's been. 145 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:26,000 But, yeah, I was just very conscious of this expanded way of experiencing existence. 146 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:30,000 How did this affect your creativity in your artwork? 147 00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:35,000 Well, I did a lot of paintings of star scapes. 148 00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:39,000 And I did a lot of paintings of land stage with star sketch behind them. 149 00:24:39,000 --> 00:24:42,000 So, yeah, but, you know, people have said to me that my paintings are different. 150 00:24:42,000 --> 00:24:51,000 They have a more ethereal quality to them, which I I'm not surprised about. 151 00:24:51,000 --> 00:24:54,000 But I don't see it that way. I always had a sense of wonder. 152 00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:57,000 But I guess there's a layer of people under it now. 153 00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:04,000 So you mentioned earlier about something that happened, another experience after the surgery. 154 00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:08,000 What happened then? So this is the trippiest thing. 155 00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:22,000 So this was this was kind of like this is so the first experience was so completely expensive and overwhelming that like I'm still I'm still coming across fragments and nuggets of that today. 156 00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:30,000 You know, but it was just too much. So this was after the surgery was maybe a day or two after. 157 00:25:30,000 --> 00:25:34,000 I can't really remember. But there's a funny little story. 158 00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:39,000 So I hadn't been cleaned up at that state. 159 00:25:39,000 --> 00:25:45,000 And I felt like I was in hospital for months. It seemed like I was in there for months, but it turned out I was only in there for four or five days. 160 00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:50,000 Like I think I walked out of the surgery on the Monday and walked out of the hospital on the Friday. 161 00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:57,000 But it felt like I'd been in there for six months. Time was so completely twisted. 162 00:25:57,000 --> 00:26:06,000 But there was this evening not long after the surgery and this Indian guy came in and he was this introduced himself as Opie. 163 00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:13,000 And I was very cute. You know, because I came when I came out of the surgery, I was deeply in love with every single human being on there. 164 00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:18,000 And this human being was the most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen. And I wanted to know everything about him. 165 00:26:18,000 --> 00:26:26,000 And he told me his name was opera cash, but he'd made it abbreviated to Opie for, you know, expediency. 166 00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:31,000 And he was the most beautiful man. And he said, we started talking. We talked about age and all that. 167 00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:36,000 And then he said to me, he said, and I told him a little bit about what happened in the surgery. 168 00:26:36,000 --> 00:26:41,000 And he said, you know, 20 years ago, I collapsed and was taken to hospital for a massive heart operation. 169 00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:47,000 So he was a 70 year old man working in the hospital at three o'clock again in the morning. 170 00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:53,000 And he said to me that being taken to this hospital and had emergency surgery, came out of the surgery. 171 00:26:53,000 --> 00:26:56,000 And then after recovering, he was wheeled into the ward. 172 00:26:56,000 --> 00:27:03,000 And when he was wheeled into the ward, he said, all of these people started clapping, all the people in the room. 173 00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:08,000 And he said, what's going on? He said, these people welcome you to this group. 174 00:27:08,000 --> 00:27:13,000 And he said, what group is this? And people have had a heart attack. 175 00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:19,000 He said, no, I'll let one of the patients do this. So one of the patients came up and apparently and grabbed his forearm. 176 00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:24,000 This is what he was telling me, grabbed his forearm and said, welcome. And he said, what to? 177 00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:31,000 And he said to this group and what's this group? And he said, people who are finally awake. 178 00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:38,000 And then at three o'clock in the morning, he put his hand on my arm and said, welcome. 179 00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:44,000 And then he said to me, tomorrow you're going to have a shower and it will be the greatest shower you've ever had in your life. 180 00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:53,000 I don't know how he knew this. And then so that was that. Off I went to sleep and I got up the next morning and I had the nurses was so kind. 181 00:27:53,000 --> 00:27:56,000 They were so beautiful. They put me in a room that had a shower right next to it. 182 00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:01,000 So I was in a room by myself and I had the shower right there. 183 00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:09,000 And I had to traverse this distance of about, well, maybe eight, ten feet, three meters, something like to get to the shower. 184 00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:15,000 And I did that. And it was the first time I took my foot and breath in my life, like consciously. 185 00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:21,000 And then I went into the shower room and I sat on this plastic chair and took my clothes off. 186 00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:26,000 And I had to take this plastic bag. Hope you're talking about that. Take me this plastic bag on my head. 187 00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:32,000 Or it wasn't hope yet. It was just someone else had taken this plastic bag on my head and I sat in this shower and turned on the tap. 188 00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:39,000 Anyway, you know, as you do, you know, you strategically place yourself over the holes here and there to stop all the water coming out of the chair. 189 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:45,000 So I'm sitting in a nice little puddle listening to these rain drops or the shower drop onto my head. 190 00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:54,000 And I was watching these riverless of water run down the handhold, this stainless steel handhold, because, you know, it's hospital shower. 191 00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:59,000 There's all these bars and things to hang on to. And I wasn't steady enough to stand up properly at that stage. 192 00:28:59,000 --> 00:29:06,000 So I'm sitting in this chair and watching this water run down these little sparkles with rainbows. 193 00:29:06,000 --> 00:29:11,000 And I was just really taken by that and the sensation of the water of my skin. 194 00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:17,000 It was just exquisite. It was mesmerizing. It was all my senses were kind of lit up. 195 00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:25,000 And I saw this handrail and the water running down it. And I had this, oh, that stainless steel. 196 00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:29,000 And then there was this. I don't know what happens. 197 00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:34,000 There was this thing where I went that was made in the stars. Those were made in the stars. 198 00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:43,000 And somehow, in almost in saying that, I felt myself falling through the stars. The room disappeared. 199 00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:51,000 And I was and look, you know, I laugh about this all the time because on the one hand, I can say, you know, 200 00:29:51,000 --> 00:29:58,000 I was dosed up with steroids and God knows what other things they put into you when you have brain surgery. 201 00:29:58,000 --> 00:30:00,000 So, you know, maybe this was a massive trip. 202 00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,000 Apparently my tumor was touching my right pineal gland or something. 203 00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:14,000 I was basically falling through space in a plastic chair with a plastic bag taped to my head. 204 00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:21,000 And I was sitting there going, it all everything comes from the stars. Everything comes from the stars. 205 00:30:21,000 --> 00:30:24,000 It's all from the stars. Everything comes from the stars. 206 00:30:24,000 --> 00:30:28,000 And then I heard this little voice say, where did the voice come from? 207 00:30:28,000 --> 00:30:34,000 And in the second, see, I see if I can get through this, the second that that question was formed, 208 00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:39,000 all of the stars merged back into that whiteness again. 209 00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:44,000 And I rejoined everything again. 210 00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:46,000 And there was this sort of message in there. 211 00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:57,000 And it was not these words, but ultimately it's this physical process of being aware of our bodies being assembled 212 00:30:57,000 --> 00:31:04,000 over billions of years forged in the stars is a gateway to expansion, 213 00:31:04,000 --> 00:31:13,000 a gateway to expanding beyond the identity and to being open to the love that's in everything. 214 00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:17,000 Wonder and awe are spectacular. 215 00:31:17,000 --> 00:31:26,000 And they are a gateway to the diminishment of the narrow identity that we've formed that reduces our experience of existence. 216 00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:30,000 And so, you know, even to this day, I still have to have MRIs every year. 217 00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:35,000 But when I go into an MRI, they're constantly asking me, are you OK in there? 218 00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:41,000 Because I drop into this trance and I swear I feel like the universe is talking to me. 219 00:31:41,000 --> 00:31:46,000 I can hear all these little beeps and I literally feel like I'm falling through the stars again. 220 00:31:46,000 --> 00:31:49,000 Yeah. So the first experience, as I said, was an introduction. 221 00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:52,000 The second one was this is how everything works. 222 00:31:52,000 --> 00:32:00,000 And then the third one was this is a way of presenting this gateway for people, 223 00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:05,000 because everyone can get lost in that ball of existence when they look at that. 224 00:32:05,000 --> 00:32:10,000 But if you start talking about everything's love, you kind of lose a few people. 225 00:32:10,000 --> 00:32:16,000 Hey, it is what it is. It is what it is. It has an energy, right? Yeah, absolutely. 226 00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:20,000 And so the doctor was right. That was an amazing shower. 227 00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:23,000 It was an amazing shower. Yeah. 228 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:28,000 And I said to him later and I said to him, I hope he my friend, that was the most spectacular shower. 229 00:32:28,000 --> 00:32:33,000 He put his hand on my arm again and he said, I know, because he's been there, done that. 230 00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:37,000 He's been there. He's been there. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. 231 00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:40,000 Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, look, I can't be the same human being. 232 00:32:40,000 --> 00:32:42,000 I can't be the same human being. 233 00:32:42,000 --> 00:32:45,000 That's not to say I suffer occasionally. I do. 234 00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:48,000 And I don't let my mind get the better of me occasionally. I do. 235 00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:54,000 But for the most part, you know, if you said to me, go back and do it again without this brain cancer, I'd say not a chance. 236 00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:56,000 Not a chance. No way. 237 00:32:56,000 --> 00:33:04,000 I would rather have the tiniest life and just have one taste of that experience in birth than have a really long life and not have it. 238 00:33:04,000 --> 00:33:06,000 I have a couple of questions for you. 239 00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:15,000 The first one is when you're in that MRI and you go to that place that you were describing, can you do that any time that you want? 240 00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:19,000 Yes. And do you do that very often? Yes. 241 00:33:19,000 --> 00:33:31,000 I have to be careful because, see, one of the things I've learned is one of the major functions of humans or a driver, an unconscious driver of humans is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. 242 00:33:31,000 --> 00:33:37,000 And since after the experience, directly after the experience, I could see there was no difference between the two. 243 00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:45,000 So when you're truly happy to live or truly happy to die, then pain is irrelevant. Pain is. 244 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:51,000 Yeah, but it hurts. Yeah, it does. So does life. 245 00:33:51,000 --> 00:33:54,000 Yeah. Yeah, it's part of the deal, you know. 246 00:33:54,000 --> 00:33:58,000 Well, there are opposites in all things. So that makes sense to me. 247 00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:03,000 But pain and love feel so much different that I'm having a hard time processing that. 248 00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:09,000 Well, you know, so maybe push the pain out of the way and think of it instead of pain as think of it as fear. 249 00:34:09,000 --> 00:34:12,000 So the opposite to love is fear. 250 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:15,000 Fear is a function of survival. 251 00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:20,000 And by default, then it means it directly relates to the physical 3D experience. 252 00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:23,000 It's about keeping the bag of bacteria alive. 253 00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:26,000 But love transcends all of those things. 254 00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:32,000 See, for me, if you fall in love with pain or you fall in love with fear, then you transcend it. 255 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:39,000 Because, you know, when you think about it, like you think about physical experiences that happen in your body when you feel fear. 256 00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:43,000 So your palms sweat, you know, your chest gets tight. 257 00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:45,000 There's this surge of adrenaline. 258 00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:50,000 And I've had surges of adrenaline that I can taste, you know, like you can literally taste the adrenaline, 259 00:34:50,000 --> 00:34:53,000 especially when that doctor gave me that diagnosis. 260 00:34:53,000 --> 00:34:57,000 But when you think about it, what an amazing thing. 261 00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:04,000 I've got this blob here that I'm sitting inside and a snake, a tiger, a shark or whatever it is goes past. 262 00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:09,000 And all of a sudden, all of these chemicals pour out of certain parts of my body and go to other parts of my body 263 00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:14,000 so that muscles can fire quickly, so that my brain can go, how amazing? 264 00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:19,000 It's miraculous. Like it's indescribably incredible. 265 00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:21,000 These things are incredible. 266 00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:23,000 No matter what state they're in, they're incredible. 267 00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:27,000 It took 13.8 billion years to make that this thing. 268 00:35:27,000 --> 00:35:32,000 And when you sense the awe in that, the fear disappears. 269 00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:34,000 It stops being something to be avoided. 270 00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:37,000 And this just becomes another experience. 271 00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:41,000 I think I lost my way in there, but it's difficult to say. 272 00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:43,000 There's really only two paths, fear or love. 273 00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:46,000 And most of our fear is about survival. 274 00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:53,000 But when you lose your fear of death, survival disappears and so does fear, largely. 275 00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:55,000 It still kicks in occasionally. 276 00:35:55,000 --> 00:35:58,000 Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned surfing. 277 00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:02,000 If a nice big shark swam up under your feet, you'd probably feel something. 278 00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:05,000 Well, interestingly enough, not long after the surgery, 279 00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:12,000 so where I'm sitting in my studio, if I walk probably 200 or 300 meters to my left, I'd be in the ocean. 280 00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:17,000 So I go surfing at this spot a bit further up, and quite often what I do is paddle down the beach, 281 00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:19,000 come in in front of here and walk in. 282 00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:21,000 So I don't have to walk far. 283 00:36:21,000 --> 00:36:26,000 And I was up at the point paddling back, and I saw this sort of little fin break the surface. 284 00:36:26,000 --> 00:36:27,000 And I thought, oh, what's that? 285 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:30,000 Now, if anyone knows a bit about my part of the world, 286 00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:36,000 we had a spate of about five or six great white attacks within a really short period of time, fatalities. 287 00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:39,000 And this was kind of not long after that. 288 00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:42,000 So we had a lot of great white sharks around here and big ones. 289 00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:50,000 And I'm paddling along, and all of a sudden I realized that this is a substantial fish. 290 00:36:50,000 --> 00:36:51,000 And I can't do anything. 291 00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:56,000 Like, I'm paddling towards it, it's paddling towards me, or swimming towards me. 292 00:36:56,000 --> 00:37:01,000 And it kind of went down a little bit, so its fin went underneath and went underneath me. 293 00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:07,000 Now, I could have reached out and touched this thing on the back or touched its dorsal fin, that's for sure. 294 00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:11,000 But it was massive. It was absolutely massive. 295 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:19,000 And I remember thinking, being really confused about the fact that I wasn't absolutely cracking, crapping myself. 296 00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:23,000 I was going, wow, that's amazing. Look at that thing. 297 00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:28,000 And it completely ignored me and kept heading off up towards the point. 298 00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:33,000 And I kept paddling that way. I did look back over my shoulder once or twice. 299 00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:37,000 But, you know, so cancer had been my greatest fear before I got it. 300 00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:41,000 I was terrified of cancer. One of my friends had died of cancer. 301 00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:45,000 My grandmother had died of cancer. I watched my father die slowly of lung cancer. 302 00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:47,000 And I ended up with tumors in my lungs. 303 00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:52,000 I thought that if someone had said to me, you're going to have cancer, or sorry, you'd have cancer, 304 00:37:52,000 --> 00:37:56,000 that I would have spent the rest of my life curled up in the fetal position under a table. 305 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:02,000 I also thought that if I'd come face to face with a great white shark like that, that I literally would have crapped myself. 306 00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:06,000 But I didn't. And I was really shocked about both of those things, really shocked about it, 307 00:38:06,000 --> 00:38:10,000 because I went, oh, look at that. You know, it's seven years now. 308 00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:13,000 I'm not sure I'd be quite as calm about it. I don't know. 309 00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:20,000 But, you know, I like to think that that big survival fear is somehow, definitely the edges come off it. 310 00:38:20,000 --> 00:38:21,000 There's no doubt about that. 311 00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:26,000 Yeah, that's awesome. OK, I'm going to ask you something you're going to need to speculate on a little bit. 312 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:32,000 I've heard now, oh, so many near death experiences. Every single one is a little bit different. 313 00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:35,000 Some are very, very different. Yep. 314 00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:46,000 I'd like you to speculate on why do some people see a lot of detail, people, faces, blades of grass, animals, 315 00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:50,000 very finite kind of things like that. 316 00:38:50,000 --> 00:39:00,000 And other people like yours, your experience was this big, too big to explain kind of thing without all of that detail. 317 00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:06,000 Well, the detail was in there, but the vastness of it overtook the detail, if that makes any sense. 318 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:10,000 Sure. Yeah. OK. So my theory. 319 00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:16,000 So I've done a lot of reading, a lot of meditating, trying to understand what happened to me. 320 00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:21,000 And what I know, what I believe is this. 321 00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:25,000 We're pushed out of a human being as beautiful as our mothers are. 322 00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:30,000 And we're conscious. And then over a period of time, we develop an identity. 323 00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:33,000 And that identity is a tool for survival. 324 00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:39,000 But we can't tell the difference between the identity and the construction of the identity and the development of the body. 325 00:39:39,000 --> 00:39:42,000 So the two are interwoven. 326 00:39:42,000 --> 00:39:49,000 And so we think that in order for our identity to survive, our body must survive. 327 00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:57,000 But also our identity takes on its own self-preservation routine, for want of a better term. 328 00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:00,000 So that's why people will fight to death over a car park. 329 00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:04,000 It's not about the car park. It's about someone taking something from them. 330 00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:09,000 You know, people, we become so incensed at someone voicing an opinion. 331 00:40:09,000 --> 00:40:12,000 It's not that we have a problem with their opinion. 332 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:15,000 It's that we feel like they're making us wrong and diminishing our identity. 333 00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:22,000 Like all of the source of our upset, our opinions are born in our identity. 334 00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:27,000 And I believe that in the process of dying, our identity is shit. 335 00:40:27,000 --> 00:40:35,000 And as the identity is shit, then we get to experience the universe as wide open consciousness. 336 00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:41,000 And I think that people's experiences, and this might be contentious, 337 00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:51,000 but I think that people's experiences are shaped by the amount of the identity they've managed to shed, if that makes any sense. 338 00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:58,000 But I think at the point of true final surrender, all of that's obliterated. 339 00:40:58,000 --> 00:41:02,000 It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It still exists in consciousness. 340 00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:09,000 But as a driver, it disappears. It's seen for what it is, just another story in consciousness. 341 00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:12,000 So I have some very religious friends, and we've had this conversation. 342 00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:17,000 And in my humble opinion, they have a very strong religious identity. 343 00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:23,000 And because it's woven around the afterlife, it's probably one of the last things for them to let go of, in my opinion. 344 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:28,000 How about the pre-life? How much of that identity did we come here with? 345 00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:33,000 Or how much did we just gain through our experiences here? 346 00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:38,000 Well, look, again, so I don't think consciousness... 347 00:41:38,000 --> 00:41:44,000 So if you sit here for a second and you did an experiment and you said, you asked yourself, are you conscious? 348 00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:46,000 You would obviously answer yes. 349 00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:49,000 But if I said to you, are you conscious, then I'll be a right knee, then you would be. 350 00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:52,000 And if I are you conscious of your entire body, you would be. 351 00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:58,000 And if I said to you, are you conscious of the entire space that you are sitting in right now, you could probably do that. 352 00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:02,000 And then I said, if you expand that, could you do that? 353 00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:07,000 And then my question to you would be, can you find an end to consciousness? 354 00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,000 And the answer is no, in my opinion. 355 00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:14,000 Like I've not been able to find an end to consciousness. 356 00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:20,000 So if there is no end to consciousness, there must also be no beginning to my mind. 357 00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:23,000 So there's this consciousness is eternal. 358 00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:31,000 And I think that when we're, before we're born, before we developed an identity, we have access to consciousness. 359 00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:33,000 Would that be past lives? 360 00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:35,000 See, I don't think we have a life. 361 00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:39,000 I don't say I have a life. 362 00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:44,000 I say this body is alive and I'm currently conscious of being in this body. 363 00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:48,000 But consciousness was here before this body and will be here after this body. 364 00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:52,000 So the body's a bleep in consciousness, but so is the identity. 365 00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:59,000 It doesn't mean though, while the body's recycled, the identity isn't necessarily right. 366 00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:05,000 Recycled, it's dropped back into the database for want of a better term. 367 00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:17,000 And I actually think that these past lives are actually people connecting with a previous narrowed consciousness in consciousness. 368 00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:18,000 Does that make sense? 369 00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:28,000 So my friends who appeared with me, their consciousness, their entity, their essence still exists in consciousness. 370 00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:33,000 And when I removed Mark enough, I was able to see them. 371 00:43:33,000 --> 00:43:40,000 But they, of course, and this is where it gets really confusing, is see them as identities and as personalities maybe, 372 00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:43,000 but that really they were all. 373 00:43:43,000 --> 00:43:45,000 This is where it gets confusing. 374 00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:54,000 So I actually think that the secret to transcending life and death is to see the identity, 375 00:43:54,000 --> 00:43:59,000 truly see the identity for the narrowing of consciousness that it is. 376 00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:06,000 And then you get to experience endlessness and everything that occurs in consciousness. 377 00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:15,000 My last question for today, and that is something that maybe you could help somebody that's listening today. 378 00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:26,000 If somebody is listening today, we're sitting with you and said, Hey, I just lost a child or a loved one. 379 00:44:26,000 --> 00:44:31,000 And they're distraught and they just need something positive, some hope. 380 00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:32,000 What would you say to them? 381 00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:40,000 My first thing was, so just so you know, I get a lot of people coming to me who have cancer and they come to me for various reasons. 382 00:44:40,000 --> 00:44:43,000 But a lot of the people come to me asking for hope. 383 00:44:43,000 --> 00:44:48,000 And I will clearly say to them straight away, I'm not in the business of giving you hope. 384 00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:56,000 And in fact, my advice is to give up all hope because hope is an imposition on the unfolding of things. 385 00:44:56,000 --> 00:45:06,000 You know, it's the only true path is to surrender to what it is, because the truth is we have very little control over much. 386 00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:15,000 So what I do and I do, I spend a lot of time with people who are terminally ill or who have lost. 387 00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:20,000 I have someone recently who just lost a child. 388 00:45:20,000 --> 00:45:26,000 And so what I did with them was exactly that exercise that I just did with you, except I put a spin on it. 389 00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:29,000 So if I was to say to you, are you conscious? 390 00:45:29,000 --> 00:45:32,000 And you got in touch with your consciousness. 391 00:45:32,000 --> 00:45:36,000 And then I said to you, can you find an end to that consciousness? 392 00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:40,000 And ultimately, I've not had anyone say that they can find an end to it. 393 00:45:40,000 --> 00:45:47,000 Then I put forward the proposition, if it has no beginning and has no end, then it must be eternal, 394 00:45:47,000 --> 00:45:50,000 which everyone seems to have agreed with so far. 395 00:45:50,000 --> 00:45:56,000 And then the next question is, think of someone you love, whether they still exist physically or not. 396 00:45:56,000 --> 00:46:01,000 And they do. Then I say, can you see an end to that love? 397 00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:04,000 And the answer, of course, is no. 398 00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:11,000 So to my mind, if consciousness has no beginning and no end and is therefore eternal, 399 00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:19,000 and love has no beginning and no end and is therefore eternal, then the two must be the same. 400 00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:27,000 So for me, those identities, those people are always available in consciousness. 401 00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:34,000 What we have to do is get the identity out of the way so that we can experience them in their true nature 402 00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:37,000 and not through our pain and through our suffering, 403 00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:44,000 because our pain and our suffering is a blockage a lot of the time to expansion. 404 00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:52,000 And in expansion, that's where everything is, including the people that have been lost. 405 00:46:52,000 --> 00:46:54,000 So Mark, to me, that is a message of hope. 406 00:46:54,000 --> 00:47:00,000 Well, you know, I don't see it as hope. I see it as fact. 407 00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:03,000 Yeah. Yeah, I guess there's semantics figuring in here. 408 00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:11,000 Yeah. And see, I think the problem with a lot of people with hope is that hope is a function of the identity 409 00:47:11,000 --> 00:47:18,000 trying to impose its will rather than a dance with what really is. 410 00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:21,000 And the identity is a figment of our imagination. 411 00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:24,000 So it can't truly be a relationship with what is. 412 00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:29,000 It's always going to be a relationship with what we perceive. 413 00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:32,000 And there's a big difference between the two quite often. 414 00:47:32,000 --> 00:47:39,000 So the bottom line, I think of your message there is, if I can interpret it just a little bit, 415 00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:44,000 is lost loved ones are not lost. 416 00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:46,000 Absolutely not. 417 00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:49,000 They're eternal. They are not lost. 418 00:47:49,000 --> 00:47:58,000 And we don't need to have all this mourning because we may miss them for this time, but they're not lost. 419 00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:03,000 You know, and the truth is, they're not lost. We're just blind. 420 00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:07,000 Perfect. Thanks a lot, Mark. It's been fun. 421 00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:09,000 Well, no problem with us. 422 00:48:14,000 --> 00:48:17,000 Thanks for listening and remember to share this podcast. 423 00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:22,000 To be informed when the next episode goes live, follow us on your podcasting app 424 00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:27,000 or click over to roundtriptest.com and sign up for our email newsletter. 425 00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:33,000 Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.