Ned Died From Sepsis, Lived 3 Lives During NDE (Near Death Experience)

0:03 From the time that they pronounced me dead 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, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody. We're so happy that you're here and we're happy to introduce today's guest, Ned Barnett, coming to us from Henderson, Nevada.

0:49 How are you, Ned? Doing fine, thank you. People are going to be so intrigued with your near -death experience. I promise it's different than anything you've ever heard before. We'll jump into that just momentarily, but before we do, I want everybody to get to know who Ned is. So you realize he is a real live human being. So Ned, just tell me a little bit about you. I have all my professional life. I have been a writer doing public relations, advertising and marketing for my clients or employers. And when I hit 65 and had Social Security coming in, I said, the market's not as profitable, but it's where my heart is. So I started working with authors. I have published 41 books. 19 of them were ghostwritten for clients who wanted a book, whether story told, but didn't know how to do it. So I've been successful at that. And it's been a real treat. Authors are very interesting people, not me necessarily, but the ones I work with are. And just coincidentally, my wife has her master's in communication and had been a book editor. So I started working with my clients through her. So the final books that they published were professionally edited, high quality. My wife and I have had a wonderful relationship.

2:09 I've been married 50 years, but that took three marriages to do it. The first one. was a learning one and I made all the mistakes and you know if I could go back and do it over again it would have been a wonderful marriage. My ex -wife is a wonderful person. We've become friends, kind of bonded because our son's a little hard to manage and we commiserate on that. My second one was well she had suffered a number of tragedies and eventually wound up taking her own life because she was We'd lost a son, and she'd lost a son from an earlier marriage. She couldn't handle it. While we were together, she was being medically treated by a surgeon. She was getting eye problems.

2:55 And he would put in, literally shooting her eyeball, a dye that would then, you know, he could look in and see what was going wrong. She started showing allergic symptoms and we told him that and he didn't change it. Then he gave her one more and she basically went into a near -death experience. That was my first exposure to near -death. She became psychic because of that. And I've not been a big believer in psychic, but she was able to wear things like she knew two weeks in advance. what the episode next episode of star trek next generation would be we're both star trek fans but she knew it in advance and told me we realize this we started writing it down and checking it out she was finally written up in a very prestigious paranormal magazine and it was called suddenly psychic because this near -death experience this is getting bizarre before we even get going. That's okay. We're going to have fun today. I want to hear about your experience. And this was just eight years ago. And I know you had sepsis. Could you tell us just briefly what led up to that to you getting so sick? Well, I had a bladder infection, a chronic one that kept coming back. It wouldn't respond to treatment. I had had some radiation treatment for a medical condition and it burned and scarred the bladder and that made it prone to these infections.

4:20 And I was under treatment for it, but it wasn't working for a year and a half. And then one day it got really bad, which led to sepsis, which is basically a blood infection. So it goes everywhere and it can be fatal, as I quickly found out. And it attacks all your organs. So it's not something you want to have. So anyway, I was on my way to meet a client at the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble. because I was dealing with writer clients. I like to meet in a bookstore, just the right atmosphere for it. And I fell four times going from my car into Barnes and Noble. I said, this isn't right. So I just turned around, drove home, told my wife what was going on, and called an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. We barely got it right because I was in the ER and they were trying to deal with this when I died on the table. and they were able to bring me back.

5:23 And then I died again, and these two doctors who were working on me thought they wouldn't be able to bring me back. I was dead and they were ready to, you know, call it, you know, code it, time it, and all this kind of stuff. Coincidentally, and coincidences play a great role in my life, these two doctors, they had been my kidney doctor and my heart doctor for several years. We had relationships. They knew who I was. And I think they were really trying because there was that bond there. They were doing things that made no sense, but one of them worked and they brought me back. So I survived both times. Months later, separately, I talked to each of them separately at my next appointment with them. And they said, you know, you died twice on the table. They hadn't told me this at the time. The second time, we didn't think we were going to bring it back.

6:16 We tried everything and it just wasn't working. But apparently something worked. And so I was there. And that helped me to shape the experience I had because while I was under, while I was dead, I lived three different lives. And this would have been the second time because I was dead for quite a while. And this is the part that people are going to have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their minds around. I don't even know what to say. This is very unusual. And I want to break it out so that it's clear. for all of us to understand. Would it make sense, Ned, if we just start with out of the three lives, were they happening simultaneously? And let's start with number one and let's go through it and then we'll go from there. Does that sound good? Sure. They were not simultaneous. They came one after the other and they were very different, but each one had a focus and a message. that as I now understand, okay, I was dead when this happened. That really caught my attention. The first one, I was creating things from my mind, not like some science fiction weird thing where I could beam it in there, but I would come up with these ideas and I could create them and share them with other people. I wasn't doing it for economic gain. I was just sharing things with other people. I think this was an influencer on me changing my career path from corporations

7:49 to individual writers that I could help one way or another. What was weird was I existed in this plane, but it was kind of a gray area. There was no ground, there was no ceiling, no walls, just floated around. Other people floated around too. And we were able to connect one with the other. in this realm and this is where I got ideas that I could then create and then bring them into physical existence and then share them with other people. Most part of it was it was creative, very creative, really excited me in this space and time and floating around was like being in outer space with no gravity except there was not even the appearance of like stars and blackness which is all light gray. That motivated me to want to be creative and to help other people benefit from that creativity. And so I started working with authors, either ghost writing their books or helping them write it or marketing it so it would sell well so other people would get it. And I got personal validation doing that.

8:59 I made a living. It wasn't a fantastic living, but it was enough. So that was the first one. Can I ask you a couple questions before you move on to the next one? Was there anything else you wanted to clarify in that first one first? Well, it seemed like I lived a long life. I was very comfortable where I was. It wasn't like, wow, this is strange. I felt like it was really, I was really there. It was really happening on another plane. I lived in it. I don't know how long it went on, but it felt like I lived that way for years. It wasn't like a brief moment. And so I had experience with a lot of ideas and a lot of people coming to me. They bring their ideas to me that I can manifest into the world or they came to me and wanted one of the ideas that I had developed. It was a blissful, positive place and I was being able to work with people and help people and go forward with it. Have you tried to put any name on this place? Some people, where they go, they'll call heaven, or they'll call a void, or they'll call it something else. Have you done that? It would be a void more than heaven. I'm a believer. I'm not an evangelist, but I am a believer, and I was then.

10:13 It didn't have religious overtones. It wasn't like in Revelation where you have you know, the angels and the believers and the thrones and all that kind of stuff. It was just this place of peace and tranquility. And it wasn't like there was no God, it just wasn't a factor in this experience that I had. And you're floating. Do you remember seeing anything? Was it light? Was there like an earth or planets? Or what did you see besides other people, you said? It was like I see other people. And things that I created were physical. And as I said, I didn't manifest them through my mind. I actually built them, assembled them, then say, here's how to do this.

10:57 Anybody wants it, here it is. I didn't go into manufacturing them because I wanted anybody could take them and do what they want with them. That was it. It just didn't, you know, it wasn't like a production line. But these ideas you had were things that applied to earth life here. They didn't apply to some heavenly spiritual kind of experience. No. Interesting. The people that I saw who drifted into my realm of existence, there was no propulsion or anything. There was no way to walk. They were there. They were just like you and me. They looked dressed in normal clothing. They had personalities and things like that. They were real people. They treated me and I treated them like real people. But it was in a place where there was no competitiveness.

11:46 There was no... negativity or hostility, it just wasn't like it wasn't possible in that place. I really hadn't thought about it until you asked that question because I only looked at it from from my perspective, which is why I was there, experienced it still. I didn't know what questions to ask. Are there any other adjectives you could put to how you felt? I felt wonderful. I felt relaxed. I felt creative, not in a competitive sense, but just in, you know, Here's something I can do. Other people were creative and they helped me with their, you know, things they were doing that I wanted to know more about her to do. It made me think that I knew what being in space was, you know, in that it was kind of a weightless thing. But it had, you know, it didn't have a sky and a planet down below or anything like that. It was just this white, almost dove color. You know, dove gray is just a soft white gray. Do you have any recollection of how you got there or how you went from this to experience number two? No, it just started and then it stopped but there was no sense of starting or stopping.

12:57 I mean I was doing it and then it was gone and the next one started up, seemed to start up right away. Okay, let's go with that one. What happened there? This is the one that I have the least memory of because I think it was about My life as I was living it right then. And I was doing things that anybody would do in their normal life. I was resolving things that I hadn't known I needed to be resolved. But it was a normal place. You know, there was a floor, there was a ceiling, there were walls. You could look out the window and see the sunlight or the moon. It was a normal place. And I was doing normal things. But it wasn't as Ned Barnett. It was just... who I was then. So there's not a lot to remember there, but I think I was probably being shown ways that I can live my life better than I was because after all this was done, I was doing better emotionally, spiritually, and eventually physically when I recovered from the sepsis. So there's not much there to say, but it helped me improve my life. It helped me see things. Just as the... first one helped me to see that I had something to give to other people to help them in their journeys wherever they were going and that that was something positive and rewarding and that helped me shift my business focus to working with individual writers who had either they could write but not through professional

14:27 standards or they didn't think they could write at all but they had their own compelling story to tell and I just for instance helped a woman in the Midwest who was running for governor of her state to do a campaign biography. It was actually an entertaining and informative autobiography, but I wrote it for her. Everybody needs something different. Yeah. But I can't talk a lot about that one because it really is not something I can stick really cling to. It was a transition from the one to the next one. The third one was the most active and most Interesting and you know to me in a variety of ways. I would like to move on to that one Yeah, give me all the detail you have I was in this third place and it was like the real world But I was kind of a larger -than -life person. I physically manifested as about six five and not skinny Whereas normally I'm five nine and could lose a few pounds Anyway, I was in this place and I had two parallel jobs.

15:37 They work together. One of them was I was a hostage negotiator. And if that didn't work, I would lead a SWAT team in to recover, save people who've been kidnapped or trapped, something like that. People in real trouble, you know, school shooters in the school, something like that. And I was there to go and resolve it. And this was a very active thing to be doing. very rewarding, but it was dangerous and it was crisis -filled and I was able to save people and that meant a lot. The other thing I was, was I was a reality TV program host and created a producer and what I did in this TV program was go in and rescue people. So as I'm preparing to go, you know, rescue somebody or grab a school shooter and stop the violence, Rather than just doing that, I was creating these TV episodes. I didn't care about the fame, but it was wildly famous. It was successful. And that's where people knew to contact me because they had seen me in action.

16:47 So I would go in leading the charge to rescue somebody. Well, I have a microphone in my hand, you know, and a Steadicam, a guy with a Steadicam with me. You know, we charge into these places. And I had a crew with me, but, you know, I was the leader then. I don't know where the two come together except that I can have an impact in my life and I can also document it and share it with people so that they can see those experiences and understand them better. But it was a lot of fun. It was actually, I mean, it was adrenaline and all this kind of thing. In episode number three, or let's call it experience number three. Were you still in this floaty kind of place that you were in number one or was this more of a reality 3D kind of physical place? Reality 3D kind of place. You know, it could have been in Minneapolis at that, you know, the shooter who attacked all those children, you know, in the church that was attached to the church school.

17:45 I wrote an article that was published today about that and about that one in Nashville, which is also a church school. It was published earlier today on American Thinker. But anyway, it was real. It was very real. If I tripped and stumbled, I would skin my knee and it would hurt. You know, I had all my senses going, and there was danger. You know, I knew the danger, yet I was, you know, I was not only willing to do it, I was drawn to do it. I wanted to save people, not in a spiritual sense, but in a whole life situation. I was... people who were being held hostage were liberated and freed and able to get, you know, the physical health and mental health they'd need because those things do scar people. But then I go into, you know, it was a lot of glory. I went on to do the next one. And when I was doing the ones for, you know, TV, as soon as it was resolved, I would go and edit the videotape. And as a professional journalist in early life, I used to do weekend camera work for Channel 10, Columbia, South Carolina.

18:51 And they'd send me out with a camera and I'd find something and shoot it and then rush back to the studio, you know, have it developed while I wrote the script for it. And then the newscaster would read it on the six o 'clock news. It was that kind of reality. but larger than life. Tell me was there a time when this experience you felt like it ended somehow? Like some people feel in their NDE like they're out of their body and all of a sudden they're put back in their body. How did yours end? That's a great question. You know in our exchange earlier I forgot to mention this. There was a time before the first one started where I was in a room but I was trying to help people being stymied by it. But what I remember was there was this really unusual pattern in the ceiling in this room of big rectangular white spaces and really vivid black spaces. And it was haunting me. It was, it was, I couldn't understand what it was, but it was haunting me.

19:56 People were chasing me. I was trying to hide from them and I needed to get back to my wife. Those were the things I remembered in this time frame. I was driven to try to get a hold of my wife, tell her I was okay. And I was also hiding from people who I did not want to have to deal with. They were a threat and I didn't want to go there. That led me into this empty space. It was a transition. That was where I went from the world into this place. And I had the idea that I was in a hotel. that had convention hotel. I don't know why I thought that, but that was it. There were people at the convention that were there to do me harm. So I wanted to stay away from them. But I really needed to get a hold of my wife. And then when I came out of the third one, I was back into that kind of a space. And I was still trying to get a hold of my wife. And I realized that I was like 41 miles away from her. I was in a specific part of the Las Vegas Valley, and to get from there to where she was, 41 miles away, and I had to get out of this hotel, and if I couldn't find a car, I'd walk. I had to do whatever I could to get a hold of her. When I finally came out of all of this, I realized it was not a hotel. It was the ICU of the hospital I was in. I didn't know this at all at first. As it was ending at the

21:27 other end, as I started coming out of it, I realized that I was in a hospital. It finally dawned on me that I was not in a hotel. I was in a hospital. But I still had this overwhelming need to go and contact my wife. And I asked the nurses, give me a phone. I got to call my wife. And they said, no, no, we're not gonna do that. We don't have phones in this room and we're not gonna do that. And I thought and struggled to get out of there. So I could find a phone somewhere in the building and call her just to tell her I was okay. I didn't learn it from the nurses. They were both from the Philippines or Cambodia, something like that. They had a very poor relationship with the English language. Also, they were not really interested in helping me. I didn't realize I was in an ICU. I just knew I was in a hospital.

22:22 I struggled to get up and get out of there. And they were really harsh on it. And then later when I became aware and talked to my doctor who was there, he said, well, if you'd succeeded in that, you would have ripped out the tubes and you would have died before anybody could save you. That's how it kind of petered out. And then the next day I was able to call my wife. I didn't know that they'd been able to get a hold of her, you know, from when I went. to the ER, but she knew what hospital was at and she talked to nurses. But I didn't know that and I was just desperate to get a hold of her, to tell her that I was okay and that when this is all done, I'd come back. Okay, now is the hard part of my job. I have to play devil's advocate for just a second because there are always some people that are skeptical. Some of them might say, sounds like a dream. Ned, you were asleep, you had a dream. I have dreams like that. Tell me how you know this was different than that.

23:18 Well, for one thing, it couldn't have continued more than three or four minutes in the real world because otherwise I would have been brain dead from lack of oxygen. And as I said, the two doctors tried desperately to help me. One of the things they did was they put me on dialysis, but dialysis is a four or five hour treatment. And one of them doesn't just solve everything. And this had to turn around in a very short period of time or they would have had to pronounce me dead. Because if you go four or five minutes without oxygen, there's really not much left there. So I knew it had to be unworldly experience because I couldn't have just even done these things if I had to play out over the time period. Each one of them seemed like it was a big chunk of my life. weeks or months, maybe more. I mean, it wasn't just one moment's experience. Each one of them in their own way continued over a period of time. So when I came out of it, I couldn't have done that in a dream because, you know, there wasn't enough time. That makes sense. And you know from your doctors you were clinically dead. Yes. Yeah, twice. How does an experience like this change you? Most people are not the same after it. Do you feel like there's a sort of a NED 2 .0 going on now? How are you different?

24:51 Well, in a number of ways. First of all, right after this I was inspired to stop working for corporations. Not that there's anything wrong with that and I was good at it and it was fulfilling, but I wanted something that would nurture my soul and not just my wallet or my ego. And after that first experience, the first one, of creating things in my mind and then giving them to others. I can't think of a better way of describing writing a book, whether it's fiction or non -fiction. And I write both. And I started working on projects I'd let go years before, bringing them back into life. And some of them have been published. But that was one thing. And I was helping people.

25:35 With my creativity is helping people. And that meant something. Then the second one. I was living my life from a more positive perspective. There was nothing specifically memorable, but things were going my way because I was trying to help others instead of just helping myself. And then the third one, rescuing people, hostages, saving their lives, and then also being able to put it in, you know, on a TV show, which is, you know, a book in another format. So I was saying, okay, I'm gonna help people, I'm gonna save people, not in a spiritual sense, but in a physical sense. And then, you know, I'll tell the world so other people can maybe be helped the same way. So yeah, it changed my whole life. And now I work with people who are, you know, have a great idea, but they're financially strapped. And where for one client, it might be $3 ,500 a month. I might do it for somebody else for $1 ,500 a month because that's all they can afford. And I wanted to help them to bring their dreams to reality. For my time as PR and marketing and advertising, what I was trying to do was helping other people make their dreams come to life. I was promoting them, not me. And so then they were able to improve what they were doing and improve themselves.

27:01 And that was rewarding to me emotionally. Bringing ideas into the world that hadn't been there and get helping other people to open their eyes and see how they can help themselves That's another time that I thought was you know, another way I was really doing it. So yes, my whole life changed It wasn't just dramatic on day one. I did this but after this my wife Fell and broke her back was in the hospital for six weeks and then another four weeks shortly thereafter I decided I'd get back into writing books because It's tough when you're married and suddenly you're alone in the house, even though you know she's going to be coming back and all that. It's just tough. And it was something I could do with my time, and I did, and that's when I really got involved in active and aggressive writing, both for clients and for myself. A few minutes ago, you referred to yourself as a believer. Do you mind telling me what that means? I'm a believing Christian. I try to live my life with Christian tenets. And when I find myself backsliding, and I find this usually with things like, you know, suddenly the clients dry up and I'm wondering how I'm going to pay the rent, praying to God that I was trying to do it all on my own and that's not going to work. I need your help. And I've always, you know, managed to have something come through that would help me achieve my goals.

28:26 A number of the books I've ghostwritten for people were Christians who had specific beliefs that they wanted to share with the world one of them was on small talk Which said you don't want to waste your time with small talk. There's nothing really there. It's a trap It'll suck you away from leaving the light leading a life. You're supposed to lead I Don't know that I agree with that, but I I didn't disagree with it I was helper glad to help her achieve that all right two more quick things before I let you go one is How much fear of death did you have? prior to this experience? That is a wonderful, thank you, it's a wonderful question. I was afraid of death. I had not experienced it in my life. No, it had, I'd lost a son, so I had experienced that and it was traumatic and I wondered where he was and all this. I didn't know what was going on. My wife had gone through a near -death experience and I was there and helped pull her back. So quite a bit of fear.

29:30 How about after this experience? I had no fear because I realized that my life, the energy that was me, not the body, but the energy that was me, was going to go on. It was going to transition. It was going to go on. After death, I live a new kind of life. It was kind of like the first experience. After the death of the world that I had known and I was in this great place that was floating around, I continued on. I was there and I was able to do things that I wanted to do. It wasn't like I lost all my opportunities. I talked with other people who were people of faith, and some of them sought that way. A lot of them didn't. They feared death because they didn't know where it was going. That exit situation where I needed to reach my wife and tell her I was okay, that was, you know, that was really trying, you know, that's spiritual. I may die someday. But I'll still be there. You don't have to worry about that. I'll be there. And then you'll die and you'll still be there and we'll be together. So yeah, it took away all that.

30:35 I don't I'm not afraid of it anymore. I'm not seeking it out. I'm not eager for it. But it doesn't it's like it's just going to be I walk through a door to another room. Yeah, I love that analogy. Last thing, if there's somebody out there struggling today with just not having hope. in the future, or maybe they've lost a loved one, or maybe they've been given some real bad news today. What message of hope do you have for them? Without being evangelical, I'd say if you will go and read the book of Psalms and pray over each one, because some of them are going to be directly related to what you were trying to do. When my wife took her own life, I knew that she was in trouble for several weeks, but I didn't know it was going to be that far.

31:25 But every night I would sit down and read the book of Psalms, and I would read them as if they were prayers, and I was changing them as I was reading them to reflect her particularly, to help her, to spare her. The answer to the prayers was no. It's not right. When she died, I was attending Episcopal Church in St. George, she came out to do last rites for Carol. after she died, and she said, I want to just tell you this, I felt no evil there. She was in desperate need and now she's in a better place. So don't worry about that. Yes, suicide is not the best way of handling things, but we're looking at it selfishly.

32:09 We lost somebody in a shot, but God's had a better plan. So don't worry about it. If I was talking to somebody, I'd say, do that, read the Psalms, or if there's another book of the Bible you like, Read it and try to understand it and pray on it and you'll get help. If you ask for help from God, He'll give it to you. He's waiting. Again, I don't want to be evangelical. I'm not saying be an Episcopalian or a Mormon or what have you, but God's there for you if you're willing to open yourself up to it. And if you're really hurting, first of all, I'll pray for them, but I'll also encourage them to pray for themselves. because if they embrace that, that's a direct pipeline. If I pray for them, it's an indirect pipeline, and they're not actively involved in it, so it may be harder for that to help them.

33:01 Ned, I really appreciate your time today. When you go from a whole bunch of fear of death to zero fear of death after an experience, to me that says everything. That says to people who haven't been through it, hey, get rid of some of that fear. Okay, you don't need it. You don't need to carry that with you. We can believe in what's coming next and that's okay. So anyway, Ned Barnett, appreciate it. Thank you. Eric, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. 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 roundtripdeath .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 roundtripdeath .com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.