"Death Is Not Something To Fear," NDE of Branden Densmore

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome everybody to Round Trip Death, and I'd like to welcome all the way from Maine in the United States, Brandon Densmore.

0:46 Good morning. Hey, Eric. How you doing? Thanks for inviting me on the show. You're very welcome and I'm doing great. I hope you're doing well as well. Would you mind letting our listeners get to know you just a little bit? Who's Brandon? Yeah, my name is Brandon. I love coaching. That's what I do for career now, and I'm a painter. I like painting little statues, little miniatures. Been doing it for quite some time. Love practicing new techniques with painting and light and shadow and understanding color and stuff like that. That's what I'm doing currently. I have a son, Daniel.

1:26 He's a year and a half old, and I'm happily married to the love of my life, Mary Marcel, and we are living in a beautiful home that we bought here in Union, Maine. That is fantastic. That one and a half year old age, I love that age. It's amazing. They don't get much better than that, so I hope you're totally enjoying every minute of that. I am. I'm researching Montessori, which is like a teaching method slash lifestyle, and I'm so glad that I found this out now while he's still only a year and a half, and I'm working on creating a Montessori environment. It just encourages children to, it promotes their natural curiosity, and it's a great philosophy, so I'm excited about that.

2:11 Now, you said you love coaching. Are you talking football, basketball, or people? People, I'm a certified spiritual coach, so I'm talking about people. Great. All right. Well, I want to jump right into it. You're a good boy now, but a few years ago, you were into some stuff maybe wasn't so good for you. That's true. I'm a recovered opiate addict. Yeah, I was into some pretty dark stuff for a long time, and it kind of progressed over the years, but it ended with a heroin overdose back in 2014. It's been about 10 years now.

2:52 Do you mind if I asked how the addiction got started? Yeah. Spoiler alert, I'm going to talk about maybe some stuff that might trigger people. If you don't want to hear about that kind of thing, you might want to turn the channel now, but I was sexually molested when I was eight years old, and that shattered my self-esteem, my self-confidence, and then I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. Taught me a lot of great values, but it kind of made the other children at school see me as different, I think, and it was easy for them to single me out and bully me. I was bullied horrendously through middle school, and I only went to one year of high school, so I got out.

3:37 But anyways, I was diagnosed, so that kind of set up a lot of emotional turmoil as a young child, and then I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and sacrilegexpondylitis. It's basically arthritis of the spine and stomach, like intestines. That's what the Crohn's disease is. It's very painful, and I was put on opiates at age 14. Wow. And it was, what, 18 years or something later that you had this overdose? Correct. Yep. They are so addictive. They are. They are. Okay. Tell us about the heroin overdose. Well, I was waiting for my guy to show up, my dealer, and I was in my mom's apartment, and I'd been in withdrawals for three days, and it's kind of hard to explain what a withdrawal is like for people who aren't addicted to opiates, but it's just full of anxiety, time standing still, not comfortable in my own skin, moving around in the chair, keep looking at the clock in only a minute as fast, and all of these anxieties inside of me just screaming, these voices, you're not good enough.

4:50 Your life sucks. You have X, Y, and Z problems, and it's just all of that stuff is just in my face and evident as I'm waiting for this guy to show up and spend three days living hell, right? So finally the guy gets there, and he brings me the stuff, and then I do some, and it's like steam rolling off a hot lake in mid-summer, the anxiety, the stress, it all just evaporated. Finally, I can collect myself, and I can think clearly, and I don't have all these voices, these negative thoughts in my head screaming at the top of their lungs.

5:32 So it felt good until I realized that I was dying, and it was like my breath was slowing down, and I felt like I was falling into a hole. Then next thing I know, I'm standing beside myself, and I'm looking at my dead body on the couch. And oddly enough, it didn't seem strange to me. I knew that I had died, and I was looking at my body, but it wasn't odd. It wasn't strange, and that's weird. But I'm looking at myself, and I'm wondering, what was the point of my life? I was sexually molested. I was bullied in school. I was put on these opiate medications, and I went through this whole educational journey.

6:13 I dropped out of school in the ninth grade and was in a fist fight at age 21, which caused me to question my identity, because I had believed up to that point at age 21 that I was stupid, that I wasn't going to go anywhere in life. Somehow I had adopted that belief, probably from being bullied so much in school. So I had adopted these beliefs. I was in a fist fight at age 21, and questioned those beliefs and decided to test them to see if they were actually true. Am I really stupid? So dropped out of school in the ninth grade, had the fist fight, went back to school, got my GED, then went to a two-year community college, graduated from there, and then I won a full scholarship to go to Yale's sister school, Basser College, where I graduated with a philosophy degree.

7:07 So I guess I wasn't stupid, right? So anyways, sometimes we have these negative beliefs about ourselves that we just kind of accept as true, but they're not actually true. They're not objectively true. So I tested the belief. But anyways, here I am. I'm standing next to my body. I'm looking at the dead body, and I'm wondering, what was the point of all that? By the way, the people that are listening can't see you, and I can tell this is hard to talk about, and I really appreciate you opening up like this. As you're standing next to your body, it seemed like you didn't feel much emotion.

7:47 You didn't feel like, oh no, what am I doing here? I've got to figure out how to get back in, or I've got to something. It was almost a matter of fact. Is that the case? Yeah, it's very odd, because you would think that you might be afraid, or maybe you'd be surprised, or you'd be wondering what was happening, maybe you'd be confused. But that just wasn't the case. I was just standing there, like you said, in a very matter of fact way, looking at my body contemplating the meaning of my life, because now my life was over. And what kinds of thoughts came to your mind? What answers were there? Well, as I was standing there thinking about my life, all of a sudden, there were no answers.

8:32 But I became aware of the presence, and I looked around. There was nobody there. No spirit, no nothing. You know how you can feel that somebody's watching you sometimes? Sure. That's what it was. It was like I was being observed. So you weren't met by a bright light and ancestors and all that kind of thing? No bright light, no ancestors. All I am is standing beside myself, looking at my body, contemplating the meaning of my life up to that point, because it seemed kind of meaningless. Like why did I go through all of this stuff? Why was I sexually molested? Why was I bullied?

9:13 Why was I addicted to drugs? Why did I have this educational journey where I discovered that I had held false beliefs about myself and then overcame those beliefs? What was the point of it all? And then all of a sudden, there's this presence, I look around, nothing there. I could just feel that I was being observed. And then that's when everything changed. So I was basically, I don't know if anybody out there is a Star Trek fan, but I like to talk about the holodeck in Star Trek. It was like I was in a holodeck. And for those of you who don't know, a holodeck is like a advanced computer program that uses holographic technology and it seemed absolutely real.

9:57 And it can take you anywhere. You can talk to any person, you can go to any location, you can pretty much do anything. And it's just, it's composed of light that is solid and you're just instantly transported. That's what this was like. I was shown two visions. The first was I saw the life that I could have lived had I not died. So I was shown image after image after image. And after each image that I was shown, there was this idea of this would have happened, but you're dead now and it's not going to happen.

10:37 I was shown all of the people, the friends that I would have met, the child that I would have had, the woman that I would have met and married and fell in love with, all of the joyful experiences that were there for me, but that I would never experience because I had passed on. And the second thing I was shown was everybody that was affected by my death. I was shown like the funeral, the people who spoke at the funeral, all the different conversations that were had about my passing between family members and friends. And in particular, I was shown this very vivid image of my mother finding my dead body on her couch.

11:20 I had pus running out of my mouth and my body was all discolored. And she was out in service as a Jehovah's Witness going door to door. And then she came home and found my dead body. And when she first saw my dead body, she had all of these memories that I could see. I could see these memories and I could feel the emotions of the memories that she had. And they were memories of raising me as a little baby, first foods, tickling me and giggling, me twirling her hair with my finger around my finger, first steps, getting snowed in, eating cookies, image after image after image of these joyful experiences that my mother had as raising me as a little baby.

12:09 And then the next thing I know, she starts screaming, my baby, my baby, oh my God, my little baby, no, no, my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby. Did that make you feel guilty or remorse? It crushed me. It was overwhelming that this had that kind of an effect. And it just ruined her like the pit of despair and sadness and grief of losing the little baby. I was just overwhelmed and then the presence is there this whole time. I heard a voice at that point that said, and it was just a very matter of fact kind of voice.

12:56 Now your life is over and you wasted it. And that was like a kick in the stomach. And then I pleaded with the presence to not die that I can't let this happen. And I begged. I said, I will do anything to avert this. Whatever is required of me, I will do it to overcome this addiction. Please don't let me die. Send me back, send me back. And then the next thing I know, I'm back in my body gasping for breath. Do you have any idea who that presence was? Who or what? That's a hard question to answer.

13:39 It's like asking the question, what is God or who is God? Was it God? Was it an archangel? Was it some kind of a divine spirit of some type? Jesus, Buddha? The presence never identified itself. But I know now that what happened was an expression of divine love. It was tough love, you might say, because it shook me to the core. And that's what I needed. I needed to be shaken. Like wake up, you're going to die. And this is the effect of it. And you could have this kind of life, but look at what you're doing.

14:22 And it's because of your choices. Before we move on, was there anything else to it, to this experience while you were next to your body? It was just, it seemed like an eternity in an instant. And I was shown so many things, image after image after image after image, conversations between people. And basically, in retrospect, I now know that I was shown the divine blueprint for my life. That future that I was shown that wasn't going to happen because I had died, well, I was given a second chance.

15:05 And I have been through, I've had to go through a lot of spiritual refinement, like confronting my inner demons, things like that, a lot of work on myself. But I told the presence I'd be willing to do anything. And I followed through on that and I haven't used opiates since 2014. And now I went from having, you know, false friends, self-confidence issues, being depressed, all of these past traumas and things that caused a lot of pain. I was angry. I didn't have any money in the bank. I was living in a crappy little apartment. All of that has, you know, I didn't know what my purpose was.

15:48 All of that has transformed. Now, you know, I know my purpose. I'm confident. I'm calm, cool and collected. I am married now to love my life. I live in a beautiful house. I have a garden, a beautiful sun who is just a delight. And I'm doing the work that I love every day. That's like, that future existed and now it's actually manifested and I can see that it's beautiful. I'm just curious, did you see any more of your future that is still yet to come? Just the numbers of people that I'm here to help.

16:29 I was shown thousands and thousands and thousands of people. I feel like that, you know, I'm helping people now and that's wonderful. But that there's more to that and more joy and more fulfillment and stuff that's coming. So I'm guessing that's why you do coaching now. Yes. It's a good way to help a lot of people. Yeah. And getting the word out there about the experience, you know, that really ultimately death is nothing really to fear. I mean, what a load off, right? Load off the shoulders that death isn't really something that we have to be terrified of. Not only that, but that there is a divine plan to our life that our choices matter, that we can transform ourselves.

17:17 And that's part of why I'm doing these videos is just to get that message out there. You mentioned the term divine love a minute ago. Explain what that is. I think it's acceptance, like total acceptance. About a year after I had that NDE, I had gone through the steps of alcoholics anonymous and those steps are designed, the 12 steps they call them, they're designed to give someone a spiritual awakening. And Bill Wilson, the creator of alcoholics anonymous had this kind of spiritual experience and they call it a white light experience where he was in his room and this white light came.

17:58 It was like the presence of God, but I had a similar type of experience about a year after I had that near death experience where I had been having a hard time. I'd been praying and this light, I was in my bathroom, this light came down through the ceiling and just bathed me in a radiant energy. The only term I could use to describe it is an x-ray love energy where it just penetrated every aspect of my being and I was overwhelmed. I could feel the acceptance and I started having all of these thoughts like I'm not worthy of this experience and I started thinking about my past and the different things I had done wrong and I'm not worthy for this experience.

18:43 And whatever this being was, whether it was God, Jesus, Buddha, it was something very pure and holy and it came down through the ceiling and it didn't care about any of those mistakes I had made. I was judging myself, but it was not judging me. It was like, okay, interesting, you have those thoughts. Let's just move right through those thoughts and its energy just penetrated the thoughts, penetrated every aspect of my emotions, my thinking, my body and I was just bathed in this warm, appreciative, non-judgmental love acceptance.

19:24 We're someone out there that may be going through an opiate addiction. What advice do you have for them? What worked for you besides the NDE? So I went through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but first of all, if someone's watching this right now and they're addicted to opiates, that there is a solution to the addiction problem because when you're stuck in the opiate addiction, it can really seem like there's no way out. It consumes your life. There's no solution. There's no way out. This is just how it is and I just have to keep going. But you need to realize that there is a solution and if you need help, contact me and I'll tell you more about the solution and you can change.

20:13 You can, that there is a divine plan. You're meant to live a better life than this and you can overcome this. You're ready to go all in. Are you ready to put your cards on the table? Total commitment. Total commitment helps, but before total commitment, just a willingness, a willingness to entertain the possibility that there is a solution and you can overcome these opiates, whether it's heroin, methadone, oxy-cotton, all of these different opiates. You can overcome them and you can live, you can be happy and you can experience fulfillment in life without the use of these substances.

20:55 So it seems like this experience completely changed your life. I'd say that's fair. Tell me what else you learned from it. So a lot of what I learned from the near-death experience came after the near-death experience. For instance, when I was sexually molested, I realized after this near-death experience, when I was going through the steps of alcoholics, anonymous that that pain from that hadn't been resolved and I needed to go back to the basics and get to the root cause of the addiction. Because if I didn't get to the root cause, it would just grow back like a weed and I'd return to the old behavior. But anyways, I had to learn how to forgive and that resentment and anger overpassed things that have happened, traumas, things that people did to me, that that was really sucking the energy from me and having a majorly destructive effect in my life.

21:56 But I had to learn how to totally forgive among many other things. Even when somebody doesn't ask for it, that's when it's the hardest, isn't it? It can be until you explore the techniques of forgiveness because you really have to be ready. Right. You mentioned something to me the other day, a term, quantum forgiveness. Is that something that you came up with? Yeah. I'm building a course right now, an online course called Quantum Forgiveness. And it's how to take back your time and energy so that you can quickly accomplish your most important life goals.

22:39 But what does that mean, quantum forgiveness? It's the kind of forgiveness that transforms the reality that you're experiencing. It's like jumping from, I don't know if you've ever seen the show Quantum Leap. Sure. It's like moving from one existence into another, from one person into another. And it changes really, it's almost like, I don't know if it's jumping timelines, you might call it, or entering a parallel universe. But when you change yourself through quantum entanglement, you get into studying quantum physics, there's this thing, quantum entanglement.

23:20 And it's basically faster than like causality. So you change something inside of yourself and it alters everything else instantly. Give me an example. You forgive, like in my case, I forgave the guy who sexually molested me when I was eight. And I practiced some techniques and came to a place of deep, profound forgiveness. And that changed something inside of me, which also affected all my family members. It changed the way I interact in the world.

24:00 And because the way I interact in the world changed, that interaction changes others. And then I believe that it actually helped uplift all of humanity because we're all connected. We're all fundamentally one at a deep level. Everything is one. We put labels on things, we differentiate things with our human mind and our consciousness. We have these concepts of different and the same and one and not one. But at a fundamental level, the whole universe is connected. And we're all one. And when I released that karma of resentment toward the guy who sexually molested me, it actually shifted something for everyone.

24:49 And now everyone has more of an opportunity to practice forgiveness themselves. It gets a little bit easier. It's quantum forgiveness. Just trying to absorb that. I need to study quantum physics more. This comes up on the podcast all the time. And I don't have a good enough understanding. Maybe that should be one of my big objectives this year is to understand this whole thing better. So most people have not had an NDE like you that helped them go, okay, before this was my old life, after this is going to be my new life. Any advice for people that need to make a big change in their life but aren't going to have a big significant thing like you had?

25:38 How do they say today's the day? That's tough because you can say today's the day and then you can try it and then fail miserably and fall right on your face. I would say to make sure to prepare. And if it's something like a heroin addiction to get some help and if you want, you can reach out to me and talk to me about it. I talk to people all the time about these kind of things and I don't judge. I just listen. And there are solutions. But if it's something really significant, you're going to need to be prepared to maybe put your life on pause and go all in, right?

26:22 Talk to some people about the decision that you're going to make that today is the day and just make sure to have a plan and rally your support system and then be willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. Okay. Well, I appreciate all that advice. We'll put your contact info on the show notes in case people want to contact you. And any last thoughts, advice or other that you want to leave with us? Have you heard of the logos, Eric? I don't know what it is. In my business, a logo, I know what that is because I helped produce hundreds of them. But go ahead with logos.

27:03 Yeah. Well, the word logo is actually connected to this concept as are the words like logic and psychology, right, sociology. Yeah, that root word is there. Right. And John 1-1 in the Bible says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. But if you go back to the original Greek, it's logos. So this is something that's been written about for a long time and Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher wrote about the logos.

27:46 But it's basically a divine, my understanding of it is a divine blueprint that we all have a reason for being here. And it's just a matter of turning down the noise of the world, right, to really kind of get a glimpse of what that means for you. Like what is the divine plan for your life? And there is one to understand this logos and to find meaning in your life. The kind of meaning that brings you fulfillment and a feeling of contribution and service. And figuring that out can do a lot for you as far as like being happy, content, satisfied with life.

28:30 That will also help to self-esteem issues like what you used to deal with. Absolutely. Because when you have a purpose, you are pursuing the purpose and you're generating your own meaning. You're not just being pushed around by the world, going from one emergency to the next. But having that as a kind of anchor. And this guy, Dr. Victor Frankl, wrote a book called Logotherapy. He was a psychotherapist who was in a Nazi concentration camp. And then he survived that and he wrote a book called Logotherapy. But it's basically meaning therapy. But find your meaning, find your purpose, and then have that as a crystal clear vision and use it as an anchor.

29:18 All right. Thanks a lot, Brandon. Appreciate you being with us today. Sure. My pleasure. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast. Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com. If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.