In part 2 of our two-part series, Roland and I discuss what he discovered after his spiritually transformative experience that made him look at everything in the universe differently, including himself.

Roland offers deep insights into the human condition and not only who we truly are, but the deeper question; why are we here?

You can find out more about Roland at www.rolandachenjang.com

Transcript

Brian Smith 0:00
Close your eyes and imagine what are the things in life that causes the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we’ve been buried, but what if like a seed we’ve been planted, and having been planted, who grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes, open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is brief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey, everybody, this is part two of my interview with Roland action Jang. If you didn’t catch part one, go back and catch that. And part two, we’re going to talk about his book, who we are and why we’re here. And in part one, we talked about roelens life and the experiences that led him to writing the book. So I hope you enjoy this calculator. That’s a that’s, that’s great. Um, so what I want to do. So, what I want to do, now we’re on I’m going to transition to talking about your book, I think this is a good point, because I think this is kind of where your book kind of comes up in your life. And so tell me about the book, The title of the book, and what it’s about.

Roland Achenjang 1:26
So the book is titled, who and why you are all you need to remember. And the book is, in my best attempt, a remembrance, or documentation of everything I remembered, right after my spiritual awakening, or in a moment of my spiritual awakening. And it’s kind of laid out in a step by step sequence, each chapter builds on itself, to explain our Earth life experience to help you remember who you truly are in your in your most fundamental essence, right? You’re this in finite being a unique expression of the all having a temporary experience here on Earth, designed to help you remember this about who you are, and then also help this all this what I call consciousness is this intelligence that is self aware and self sustaining, and always existing, get this know itself better. That’s it, that’s, that’s, that’s a very big combination, or a nice way to kind of put all of this together or in the entire book. And interestingly enough, that same week, after my awakening, one morning, I get up and I can’t sleep. And I get this message, again, to grab a pen and a book. And I do. And I start auto writing basically, a couple of chapters, and I write the what, what became, eventually the chapters of the book. And in the book, I did my best right to write it to encapsulate that moment, and all the lessons and all what I remembered that would that again, basically explains like who each and every single one of us truly is, and and how brave we are, literally how infinitely brave we are to come to this planet, and experience life like we currently do, and why we’re doing this. And and in so doing that the idea is, okay, now that you’re aware of this, what are you going to do with information? How is that and now you are empowered? That seems like okay, I actually am contributing to the entire experience in the way that I consciously want to. Yeah, and yeah, I have

Brian Smith 4:01
to tell you, I, I just got your book like a week and a half ago just takes a month to get through a book, I got through it in about a week, I discovered this things changed my life that that my Kindle, my phone will actually read my Kindle books to me so I can listen to it when I’m walking. So I listened to it while I was walking but um, you know, as I’ve read so many books about people who have near death experiences, people have spiritual transformative experiences and, and there’s so many things in common, but everybody tells a story a little bit differently. And I and I, your book was really, I thought I found it fascinating. There are a lot of things about it that were unique. Even though it’s a common, you know, we have a common thing that we’re here for. And one of the things right off the bat that really grabbed me You talked about we all here that we forget when we come here, I think a lot of us really know that. But you talked about this necessary feeling of abandonment. And that really resonated with me because I remember when I was about I think was about eight years old, and I was lying in my bed and I could not sleep Cuz I’m like, why am I here by myself? And I realized that my parents were separate from me and my brother was separate for me and that when one day we wouldn’t be together. I stayed awake all night long. Because I felt abandoned. I’ve never anybody talked about that feeling before.

Unknown Speaker 5:16
Yeah.

Roland Achenjang 5:18
No, thanks, Brian. I appreciate it. And thanks for the nice words you said about the book too. And abandonment, abandonment, very important aspect of being able to experience life on this planet. And so what I remembered was when you come here, right part of that agreement with consciousness, which sources, okay, if you can imagine the conversation, to me, it went something like this. All right, whatever my sole. Name is, I’ll call it real land, but it probably isn’t rolling, what’s definitely not real and there’s consciousness is real, and you know, you’ve rested from your previous lifetimes, etc. Now, we need you to learn new lessons. Are you ready? And you’re like, yes, I’m ready, and go, all right, go ahead. And you’re going to pick a family, you’re going to learn these lessons. And when you incarnate on Earth, the number one lesson, you really have to learn to overcome the number one way for those lessons, those lessons to become part of your life, it’s through the experience of fear. And you can’t experience fear anywhere else, like you do on this planet. Unless you feel like you’re abandoned, like you’re alone. fear comes in when you don’t feel like you’re safe, or connected to something. And so the whole idea of abandonment is another way to basically explain the illusion of separation, or the illusion of being separate from everything. Soon as you incarnate on this planet, or when you incarnate on this planet, not to say that people tell you that that happens between the ages of two and seven, usually, when you go through that separation, or you become aware of that that abandonment. But yes. And I like the word abandonment, because it it just definitely encapsulates. All right, you’ve been left to fend for yourself. Yeah. And at some point as an adult, while growing up, even as a kid, you start to speak as if you’ve been abandoned, you start to claim things as yours. This is mine. Right? This is mine. This is my beliefs. This is my truths of siblings. And then all of a sudden, I hear this, I feel abandoned. Where is my tribe, who believes that Jesus Christ was the only child and didn’t have siblings. And so this abandonment, allows you now to start making sense of the earth life reality, but not the real reality, the illusionary reality, because you aren’t really abandoned, right? And another thing to add to that is without the, the feeling of abandonment without the need to forget, you really can’t experience life on Earth, as well as you think you would. Yeah. Right. If if you if you don’t want to go through that experience, you might as well just stay, stay with consciousness back where you are. Or this may sound crazy, but incarnate on a different planet, where you always remember your eternal connection to everything.

Brian Smith 8:22
Yeah, I think it’s a really fascinating answer to a question that a lot of us have, I have, you know, why do we have to have all these fears? why did why do we only grow through through hard times? Why do we, but you know, I think about and it’s a just because you and I both have the same kind of background, you call them Master Jesus. Now, I grew up with Jesus, and I still have a big admirer of Jesus. But Jesus had to go through the same thing that you know, you can’t be human with that feeling that so when I was growing up, I always had this idea of Jesus just always knew that he was God. And Jesus was never really disconnected from the source. I’ve never felt disconnected from the source because none of us really ever are. But that wouldn’t make him fully human. You know, so when he was on the cross, you know, and he said, Oh, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You know that that to me shows his his humanity. And I think that’s very, it’s a very important ask, but that was just my personal side about about Jesus, but I wanted to get that in. But I want I guess I read that in your book. And that was right in the beginning. I’m like, Yeah, that’s it. I’ve never heard anybody talk about this feeling of abandonment before. And the feeling and the thing that fear and abandonment are necessarily part of being human. It’s part of the experience.

Roland Achenjang 9:31
Yes. And it takes a whole lot of bravery to do this, right. I mean, I, in the moment I remembered, that’s one of the things I will never ever, ever forget going forward is in looking at everybody, and appreciating just what you signed up for. right you’re you’re currently experiencing life in a super superbly designed environment. I mean, Think about the the the the finesse it takes to create a, an illusionary reality that you think about as you’re in it is real. As you’re in it, you’re all born as you’re in it. At the same time, you don’t remember your eternal connection to everything. But at the same time, you’re always connected. And at the same time, all this stuff that you’re doing, and all the lessons that you’re learning, are helping you expand knowledge of yourself. And because you are this eternal, connected being, and you are basically consciousness, it’s helping consciousness expand its consciousness. Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I don’t I don’t know where else in the planet, or where else in the cosmos are people experiencing life like we do? pain, fear, death, suffering, joys. All of that, which this seems so real, my friend, I mean, we know this, you experience one of the worst, the loss of a child. And when I hear your story as well, I feel the same Michael, man, what a story. Think about the soul agreements that you had, this is me, when I when I see you, this is how I see the world now. I’m just in honor of the soul agreements that your daughter had with you and your wife, and how she would come and exit at some point. And it would be teaching you right, the ultimate lesson, which we all know it. And, and how much you have to overcome that like through what looks like an eternal pain, when? Because time is not really real, either. Right? You know that eventually. That’s where we’re all headed is remembering this truth about who we are. So that which then makes all our lessons learned. just fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Brian Smith 12:04
Yeah, absolutely. So you talk about a couple of the roles that we have. And as beings, right, you said that for every and that this is, I guess, the universal rule for every app act, actions equal opposite reaction, and there will always have free will, but we’re always, always unconditionally loved as well. Let’s talk about unconditional love. And what that really means. Because I think a lot of people, we talk about love, but for most of us love is conditional. So what is unconditional love?

Roland Achenjang 12:34
So, through my experience, again, I can only speak from my experience. Unconditional Love is basically that it’s the fact that because you are self aware, because you are aware, you are unconditionally loved, like you this sounds crazy. And I’ve had a lot of people tell me that it was actually pretty irresponsible to put this in my book. And I even struggled with it, too. But I couldn’t alter it, because it’s exactly what I remembered. Because you are as you are right now, in every moment you are unconditionally loved. Like you can literally do no wrong. Because there is no, there is nothing else except this oneness. And everything you’re doing specifically in this environment is designed to be simultaneously both. Like you can’t isolate, from what I understand you can’t isolate good from bad. And that sounds very, very, very, you know, it may sound ridiculous, but if you look back at your life, and all the experiences you’ve had, if you expand your consciousness a lot more in all those experiences, you can appreciate that there’s a way to kind of turn it into something bad, or something good. Yeah, but because everything is off consciousness, and everything is consciousness. on this planet, it’s always balanced. And so it’s simultaneously both. Mm hmm. And so unconditional love says, go out and do while you’re doing. You’re teaching all of us how infinitely creative, the myriad emotions that we can experience you’re showing us the ways to experience that you’re teaching us to build on your creativity to do other things. And because you’re doing this, and we thank you for it, the only way we can thank you is to love you immensely, regardless of what you do, because again, of the environment that you’re in. Yeah, this environment, you can’t isolate either one. And so whether you incarnate here or somewhere else, the roles that you’re playing, which are your roles, the ones you choose how you choose to act, they’re supporting the same sort of, they’re supporting the same outcomes. All of us are learning more about how infinitely creative we are. All of us are learning to experience an infinite array of emotions. Yeah. And with that we’re knowing more and more of who of who we truly are. So well, that’s love. Yeah, that encapsulating unconditional love. So

Brian Smith 15:18
let’s, let’s play a little thought game, because you, you played this in your book, and you said that the consciousness or source doesn’t really care about how we do stuff, as long as we’re authentic. And you get really extreme example, if I need to get ice for the Superbowl, you know, I go out and I can go buy the ice and be nice to the clerk and everything. Or I can, I could go out and this is disturbing, even say, I could kill the clerk and bring nice home. And either way, I got the ice home. And so from that higher perspective that the consciousness doesn’t care. Now, I would push back on that a little because I know you didn’t really mean that people should go out and kill each other. Because you’re not on this planet, I believe. And I’m just set this out there. And you can respond to it, that there’s a set of rules that there’s some things that we can do that are desirable and undesirable. And we can choose love, or we can choose fear. And so if I did do that thing, it’s got really consequences for me here and for all the other souls that I touch. So these these things, I think can both be true simultaneously. On one level, this is all simulation, it’s all a game. When the game’s over, it turns off, we’re all back home on our beds, right. But on the other level, the things we do here, we are supposed to choose love over fear. So how would you respond to that?

Roland Achenjang 16:38
No, valid point, Brian. So the best way to respond again, and I like they said is, if anyone knows me, they know I am one of the least. I’m so apprehensive to violence. Right? Like, yeah, yeah, I mean, I, I don’t want any of that to happen. But it was part of my check engine light, mm, where, in trying to justify and trying to make sense and control how people should act with each other. I found out that if I pushed really hard and try to dictate what people did, then there was a chance that I would end up becoming that which I thought shouldn’t happen. Yeah, under the pretense of preventing that which I think shouldn’t happen. I looked at the history of the planet coming from Africa, you look at slavery, you look at all the world wars. And I began to really think if there is a question as well, if there is a God, why is there so much violence? Mm hmm. Why is there so much hatred, all of this. And then I tried to reconcile that with unconditional love. But before my awakening, the one thing I was doing was putting conditions to it. And the condition was, if you’re going to do something, this is how you should do it. Because it resonates with me as an expression of love. Or I don’t, I don’t want to say unconditional love. Because if I said, this is how you should do it, then I was literally putting conditions to what has no conditions. Yeah. And I looked at, at, at even, I mean, just everything in the world. And I started to ask, but how am I contributing to what I’m saying isn’t right. And I looked at the progression of people’s lives with with anything, and I went really extreme in the book so that people could really think about this when I use death. And I said, Well, there is one way to come into this planet. And that’s being born by a woman. And then there’s another way to exit this plant. And that’s through death. We can now go into the nuances, which are called justifications in the book of how you should experience both. And based off of our conditioning, we’re going to say, this is the right way to be born. And this is the right way to die. Hmm. And in doing that, I saw Oh, I remember that I was severely limiting. How consciousness can experience itself and also dictating other sources lessons, hmm. And just and your lessons are so complicated, and so married in India, past lives, and etc, etc, etc. And then when I recognized or remembered that this place wasn’t real, and you’ve spoken to many people have had any experiences and just stories of fascinating I love them. But when you remember that death isn’t really the end. coupling that with unconditional love. Understanding the earth life and vironment. It. That’s when things kind of made sense for me. And, and I, you can also go deep into the nuances and see that we actually indirectly support violence in everything we do. But because it’s channeled in a certain way, we think it’s okay, if it’s channeled through laws that we all agree on, all of a sudden, we think it’s okay. If it’s channeled through the army going to war to protect us under the name of protecting us, all of a sudden, we think it’s okay, mind you, if it’s channeled through an animal that we’re killing to eat, all of a sudden, we think it’s okay. But there was this one beautiful story, and I’m going to paraphrase it yet that I heard Sadhguru talk about. And he had to do something along the lines of this, this man is talking to a wise sage, who is kind of like in an enlightened state. And the man’s questioning how much power we as humans have here on earth. And the wise Sage says, You have a lot of power in your spoken word. And he says, Are you kidding? So if I command something that will be done, says yes, give it a try. And it seemed like those a caterpillar that walked by or something, and he commanded that Caterpillar to die, the man did and the caterpillar died.

And then right after that, a butterfly came through, and he commanded that Caterpillar that butterfly to die and the butterfly did. And then like a squirrel came through or something of that sorts. He commanded that squirrel to die, and the squirrel did. And the man is can say, oh, my goodness, I have this much power. And the sage is like, Yes, you do. And then an antelope walks by and the man commands the antelope to die. The antelope falls dead, bam. And then this woman walks by with a baby, right? And the sage says, There you go, command this baby to die. And the man says, whoa, now you pushing it too far. I’m not gonna do this. And the baby. The baby said, Hey, listen, I was a caterpillar. You command me die, expand my consciousness, I was a butterfly, then I was a squirrel, then I was an antelope. Now you are preventing me from experiencing enlightenment. My freedom has come. Your commandment would allow me to experience that. And you hold back. How dare you? And so in that thinking, I, when you step back, and you look at it from the perspective of consciousness, and you ask, I call consciousness God, and you ask, why would we come here? And have all these experiences? Why would he allow this to happen? If not, for the mere fact that it’s helping us learn more about ourselves? Hmm. And so, if the consciousness if this this being is unconditionally loving, like we always say, where do those conditions and where did they end? Well, and that was the push is where does it end? Now you can, in your own judgment, don’t do that. I don’t condone it. And I said, I try to say in the book a, please don’t do this. But then again, I recognize somebody has to learn some lesson. And if, if, if so I’m not saying it’s okay. And I really hate to say that too. But I get it, I appreciate that life on earth is a place where we can’t really isolate. And when we try to dictate too much what conditions evoke unconditional love, then we’re likely to end up being what was saying, we shouldn’t have.

Brian Smith 23:58
It’s, I think it’s a fascinating thought experiment that we all need to kind of play out ourselves. And I like that you’ve, you’re brave enough to push that, you know, in your book, and it reminds me, I was speaking with a client just few days ago, who thinks that this person committed the unforgivable sin. And I’m talking to this person, they’re like, I feel separated from my source. I feel separate from myself. I can’t, I can’t pray, I can’t meditate. I’m just cut off because of this thing that I did. And I had to say, the thing that you did was wrong because it harmed other people. So I have to, I have to say, I think there are things that we can do that are wrong. But from the perspective of consciousness, from a spectrum of our court, or of our source, our Creator, there’s nothing that we could do this wrong that would ever cut us off from that. And I think that’s the very important lesson and the example that you gave, not that we should go out and kill people to get ice, but that nothing that we could do nothing that we can do can separate us from the love of our God from the love of ourself from our source, but we can put ourselves in hell, you know, and people when we when we die, we do have near death experiences I’ve and people have had very Pallister death experiences, because they judge themselves, they’ve realized that I’m supposed to choose love over fear, there is a desirable outcome. There is a there is a desire to choose love. But sometimes choosing fear teaches us as well. I mean, not sometimes all the time. Everything that we do, everything that we do works out for the greater good. And that’s, it’s a hard concept for people to hold both those things in their minds at the same time, I’d like and I appreciate you exploring that.

Roland Achenjang 25:39
Yeah, Brian, it really is. And those were so many of the check engine lights that came on for me, right? You can look at history of mankind on this planet, you can look at the oppressions that the minorities have faced, right over time. And question is, if it’s speaking, like someone that like from Africa, for instance, and I thought was slavery was a big part of our history. But look at where we are now, as a continent as a country, specifically in Cameroon. We’re nowhere where I can advanced country or developed country like America is, and is a country that was you know, sort of developed on all this, you know, this what you call free labor, essentially, right? Yeah. And I said today, if I, if I try to develop Cameroon, it’s not going to be free labor, it’d be way expensive. And then at the same time, I asked, but why would this happen? Why would anybody who calls themselves unconditional loving, allow this to happen? And then today was still in a situation where cameras nowhere developed, we’re having sort of different problems there. How do I reconcile this, and it wasn’t with my rational mind, I couldn’t, you really have to elevate beyond the illusion of duality. And look at this, not from like a 30 foot level, but from like, a 30,000 miles level, where you’re looking down at this thing of play. And another thing that also made me make sense of this was the fact or the idea, or the remembrance that on this planet, for me to learn how to love or to overcome a fear. If I created that fear, in my mind, somebody had to bring it to life for me. And those are the roles that we play for each other. Hmm. And a very good example would be in the movies we watch for instance, right. And that’s the fascinating thing is, after an awakening, you begin to see this truths at play everywhere in all of Earth life. So when we watch movies, especially action movies, there’s always a hero and a villain. And our favorite action movies at once where the villain is so well developed. Right? That the challenge that hero to push and push and push and push now, and we can think back and say, Well, if they if the villain wasn’t very well developed, then the hero is like, Okay, well, that was not a good movie. What he had to overcome was in trying enough, yeah, but the cool thing is, just like life on Earth, you need people to audition to play both roles. I need somebody to play that other role for me to, to learn my lesson to, to give me the opportunity to choose love. And if we, and I quickly learned that, even I, in my sort of, quote, unquote, doings of everything that I taught was loving. Oh, boy, little did I know that I was doing everything in this love. But other people were also perceiving it as the entire opposite. I could not have learned this any more so than looking at my life in the past before my awakening, and even afterwards, especially as pharmacy director. Right, and it’s not as extreme as going to kill somebody again. I am so against that. But, but even as pharmacy director, I was doing everything that I thought was loving. But the feedback you get is boy, boy, Roland, why would you do that? That’s awful, right?

Brian Smith 29:20
Yeah. You gave some great you gave a great example in the book of Jesus, for example. Now I hear people talk about Jesus, they talk about Martin Luther King and they said we should be more like them, you know, because they were loving and peaceful. And I remind people, both of them were murdered. So they were not seen as as perfect people by everybody and those people’s eyes they they were playing that that contrast role. And you know, if you want to share the story you told about about Jesus and I want you to tell if you like

Roland Achenjang 29:55
that, sure. Again, I try to go to a try to find extremes again. To show just what it means to incarnate on this planet, Mm hmm. And Jesus is a perfect example. And you can use anybody that we currently revere today, anyone that we look up to as someone who has shaped at a pop culture or shaped spiritual culture, etc, on this planet, hmm. And I thought, well, Jesus Christ, he’s this ultimate being, he remembered entirely who he was. And he embodied that here on this planet, to a degree that I don’t want to say we’ve never seen, but to a degree that over 2000 years later, we’re still invoking his presence. Yeah. Right, as this teacher that touched all our lives. And I say, think about this from the other side, right? And this was just here as a meditating is he was here on this planet, with all of us, showing us exactly how to achieve what we’re beating our heads for searching every day. And what did we say in our genius? Boy, take a hike, take a hike with your message. It doesn’t resonate with us. I mean, how can we make sense of that? But then it gets better is after we do this, right? And I say we I and I say we just because it was it’s we as humans, we this system isn’t right. So after we do this, we start to feel guilty, because we’re on planet earth when nothing is isolated. Think about if you were in that moment, all the justifications you made for yourself, that said, killing this man will bring us peace. Again, you’re looking for that peace outside of you. You’re thinking what you do to somebody else will bring you peace, my friend. No, we killed him. And not just any way we hung him on the cross with other people who by the laws of the time were guilty. Right? We killed him if one of his mom and his odds is I just it just the most vile way we hunt this man on cross. We’re done. And then a little bit later, we start to feel guilty. Oh, my goodness, what did we do? We should have killed this man. And then we say, guess what? Everything he was teaching us was what we needed to learn. So let’s create all these churches, let’s create this religion that says his way, is the only way and the right way. And so in our geniusness we now go on crusades killing everybody disagrees again. Right. And I’m seeing but Where else? Can you have such an experience? except on planet Earth? Yeah, so we go around killing people spreading his word, hey, you need to be saved? By believing in this being if you don’t we kill you. Like Wait, what you think what’s your rational mind what kind of sense that makes it doesn’t. And it doesn’t stop there. And then after we’re killing all these people will still not save. And we’re still pushing and 10s of thousands of years later, we’re still fighting, fighting. And we’re arguing, we’re saying this is the only way and then people break off. And then you have to friend Christian teachings, Baptists, Pentecostals, orthodox, all of this you have, I mean, you can look at the history and just see how much has come out of this man’s life. And was still searching, still searching. And so I asked, but think about how much good has come out of this. How much people’s lives have changed when they’ve come in contact with this being and how much that that that change has said, or there is way more to Christianity, and the teachings that people recognize, which is where I am today is these teachings are fascinating. They’re great. They’re a stepping stone, they’re legitimate, there’s a lot of truth in them. But that truth cannot be identified or resonated with with the rational mind alone, you have to go beyond, you have to go beyond.

Brian Smith 34:08
Right. I love the way you put that. That was that was brilliant. And I was talking with someone yesterday about religion and spirituality. And they were saying how we see some people right now, I don’t like to get political, but people on the writer, they’re really becoming very religious, you know, and they’re like, this is the way to be a right minded person. And I was saying, you know, religion, I believe is a stepping stone, really, but bludgeoned will not take us to where we need to be religion can can maybe move it so I I saw the same reference for you that you do for Jesus and for the Bible. I think there’s some great stuff in there. But I think we need to move beyond that. And I love the way you talked about, you know, the way the way that Jesus was perceived because after people die again, I bring up MLK, Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for years, because he was considered terrorist. You know, he was he was the bad guy. He was the antagonist. And that story wasn’t the protagonists. It’s years later, we look back and say, yeah, that was a good guy, you know, Martin Luther King, we gotta remember, the guy was murdered for his beliefs and what we’ve tried to stand up for. So there’s two sides to everything that we do. I think that’s the point you make in the book, I think you do a great job with that. I just want to talk to you, thanks, I want to talk about this idea. Because we use the word illusion A lot of times, and you know, I use the word dream, I use the analogy, a lot of times, this is like virtual reality, you know, this is like, we’re like in a very immersive video game. And we’re all really safe. It’s also very real, you know. And when we talk about the ego we talk about the ego is a construct, which I fully believe. But some people make the ego, the enemy. And they’re like, I need to get rid of my ego. And my take on it is if you get rid of your ego, you will die. Because you can’t live on this planet without an ego. So I want to ask you about the concept of ego death? And what do you think about that? Is it possible? are what are we what should our goal be?

Roland Achenjang 36:00
Oh, that’s another fascinating question. And at the beginning of the book, just to to make this point is, I do acknowledge the, the the complexities and the challenge of using words to to, to sort of explain this truths and these universal truths that I remember. But the ego I love now, before my awakening, Brian, I was in the same boat, I wanted to get rid of the eagle. Right? The ego is awful. It’s making me think bad things. It’s making me do this and do that. It’s making me this evil person. Mm hmm. Evil, ego. Right. But no, after my awakening, I gained an entirely new perspective of what the ego is. I love your analogies of video games, right. And I’m going to use that to kind of explain how I understand the eagle today. Hmm. So, in order to play a video game, in my book, I use Super Mario Brothers, but you could literally replace with anyone, you have to pick a character in that world in order to experience life in that world. Right. And so, in Super Mario Brothers, you can pick Mario or Luigi for instance. Now Mario and Luigi are Eagles in the world, Super Mario Brothers. Now your true self, which is really not your true self. But for the sake of this analogy, your true serve now becomes I Roland who’s playing the game, I cannot physically become a character embodying my full self in that world. And think about it. If I was, a lot of my biological processes won’t work. I won’t be able to feel emotions the way I currently do, I won’t be able to pee, poop, eat fried chicken, baked beans, any of that stuff merch, right, I won’t be able to in the world, Super Mario Brothers. It’s a confined world with certain characteristics, rules, regulations, and limitations. on our planet, what I understand what I remembered was in order to experience life here, you have to have an avatar as well. And that avatar is your ego, essentially. So Roland Chen Jang is my Eagle, with all my fears, with all my beliefs with what I currently remember, as who I truly am, and what my level of connection, or my level of connection to consciousness that I’m in. I used that in the book, which is how much do you remember who you truly are? makes up my ego. Now, ego death, right? happens all the time. It’s not a one time thing, it happens regularly. And that happens when your beliefs are challenged to the point where you’re kind of forced to change. So in our previous conversation, an example of ego death that I eventually realized, but that was fighting to let go, was the idea that Jesus Christ had siblings more than of Mary. Hmm. So that belief system being challenged me holding on to is an egoic construct that I’m fighting with. It’s not really real. Maybe he did. Maybe he did it. Okay. Now I could believe in hold on to it. But if I do that’s creating my ego. What the ego does besides allow you to experience life on Earth, it allows you to identify fears and also to create within your construct within your framework within your environment. ideas or ways in which to overcome those fears. Now, after a spiritual awakening, like I did, a bunch of my ego my old ego died. Hmm. But because I am still on this planet, I have to create a new one. Like you can’t live here without. And so my new ego is now Roland, the author who is talking about my new understanding of my connection to consciousness. Mm hmm. And in spreading the word, but this is not who I was before. For my awakening, any of my beliefs have changed, right? Yeah. And so that’s what we need the ego. It’s not bad. Again, remember, you can literally do no wrong with your ego, you’re still helping all of consciousness experience life in ways that it could not ever do without you. Yeah. Your uniqueness through your ego. It’s exactly what consciousness wants you to express.

Brian Smith 40:25
Yeah, I love the way you put that like that. That was really great. And I, you know, when you were saying I got the idea of rebirth, right? The ego dies, but then it’s reborn like a phoenix, you know, it keeps rising but in a different form. So we can we can, we can now no longer be the person where we were, but we still need to take on a new avatar. So we’re like, we’re like leveling up. Maybe, you know, there’ll be another way put it in the video game analogy. Oh, yeah. I mean,

Roland Achenjang 40:51
I love that. And one of the good ones is like Dragonball Z. I mean, I kid you not, I look back at my I look at all of life now. And all I see are these universal truths everywhere. So the idea of leveling up, it’s like Dragonball Z, his ego just kept going super saiyan mode and all this jazz. That’s it, we’re all leveling up, you’re gaining new skills and new abilities. And then when you use that now to express yourself, you still not going to avoid, right, the illusion of right and wrong. You can’t. I mean, you can’t, right. So in everything that I’m doing, someone’s going to perceive it as the other side. But the more your ego develops, the more you are in alignment with this consciousness, and you remember this, to recognize that it’s part of the earthlife game. And then you’re not afraid to like move forward, knowing that both are lessons, and then you’re not judging you. When you say when someone says what you’re doing is wrong, you get it, and you kind of smile, you’re like, I get it, it’s wrong. And then you maybe get to a place where you can both work, you be clear about your message. But you also understand that you’re on planet Earth. And it’s limited in how much you can communicate effectively with somebody else. And it’s also limited in how much you can isolate your own made up ideas of good or bad, right or wrong. And then it kind of makes it what do I say I use the word bliss, you feel a little more relaxed. You know that you can always return to consciousness, because you’re always connected. And you keep going. You show up?

Brian Smith 42:31
Yeah, I yeah, I think that that analogy really works well. And you can say it makes you more relaxed. You know, I had this friend nice. Every time I think about this, I think about my friend I argue with many years ago where he said he called ontological levels, I think it was. So from one perspective, one level, something might be wrong, but from another level, it’s not wrong. But we’re we’re in here, we’re in here, like you the video game is a great example. There are rules in the video game, there’s certain things you can’t do. And there’s a goal in the video game, there’s something you’re trying to accomplish in the game. Now outside the game as as Roland or Brian playing the game, we realized that when I turn the game off, it doesn’t really matter. I was I was just playing a game. But so there’s there’s two always two sides to this. And you know, you were speaking of the ego, and in the book, you give Satan a lot of time in the book. And I know that’s probably going to bother some people. So I’m going to talk about what your perception of Satan is, and why you give Satan so much time and why you have a chapter titled Satan is your best friend.

Roland Achenjang 43:34
Yeah. Thank you, right? Satan, the devil is your best friend. I believe that’s Chapter Eight, seven or eight. So well, if you look at my upbringing, again, right? It had basically prepared me to label Satan as the enemy of progress. anybody’s progress, right? Satan is this, my goodness, you, you anything, anything that you did that you didn’t like anything that you experienced, that was saying was at will to this? But after my awakening, I began to recognize or I remembered that again, on planet Earth, you cannot isolate either one. And I, in my analogy of using the word Satan, that’s me building on the idea of duality. Like if you think of duality, as good and bad, then the ultimate representations of each and this is me assuming that most people are like me was anything that was so good, it was almost heavenly was God like, everything that was so bad that it was almost hellish, was of Satan like saying, you’re involved with this, right? And so experienced in life, and I have this rose colored view of I always had this even before my awakening, I would go through these experiences and a friend of mine or I would have similar experiences, but we would then categorize them to different degrees of either hellish, good, bad, or like really great. And I found that it could be really easy for me to say I lost a basketball game. And that was so hellish saying did that, why what a basketball game, and that was of God’s doing? I mean, you watch award shows, you watch sports, the Packers beat the Patriots or something. And then at the end, they’re like, Gods with us. Right? Yeah. And I thought the way to wait a minute again, this is my red flags. My rational mind is like, just don’t make sense. Mm hmm. You’re telling me that all these people, the entire team or 53 players, on a on a team that you just played in, be prepared all week with your coach. And then they came on last week? Because God was not with them. It’s like, which god are you talking about? So had all these questions. And then after the awakening, I recognize that we are the constructs of both the God we believe in is entirely a representation of our current level of awareness of our connection to consciousness. Remember that, we are all one, right? I that and I saw this, everything is the same thing. It’s it’s one, it’s what I call consciousness, if you are, if you can think it, if it exists, it is this consciousness expressed as a unique, a unique in expressed in a unique way.

And so I sought that every unique thing that was being expressed, again, was simultaneously both on this planet, right? If I liked it, it was good. If I didn’t like it, it was bad. And if it went down to like, mundane things like food, I’ll be eating food with a friend. Oh, that’s gross. That’s disgusting. Why would you eat that? And then I’m like, Dude, this is good. Like, how do I make sense of this? Yeah. And what I saw was, every time something happened that we didn’t like, and we kind of chalked it up to Satan, and it would be a similar experience. That’s when our ego was sort of playing the game to say, hey, how can you overcome this fear. So every fear, we were identifying and creating our made up, Satan was bringing it to life for us. And I say he’s your best friend. Because if he wasn’t, he would keep you away from that fear. And then you will be limited in your growth and ability to express creativity, them. And every time you’ve overcome a fear, think about who brought that fear to life for you. And that’s what I’m trying to say that’s the role Satan is playing for you. And when you remember that, it becomes like your most challenging coach you’ve ever had. Or your favorite teacher, the person who pushed you to be your best, right? The person who showed you that the person who think about this, most people who end up achieving what we call Earth life success will always think, and mentioned somebody who doubted them. What this is, you hear this a lot in pop culture, music, this is to my teachers who said I would never make it. Yeah. And when I hear that, I just laugh. I go, Boy, that’s your Satan. That’s the person who motivated you to push. That’s your Satan, and you’re thanking Him, you don’t even recognize it. And you think he was against you. He saw that potential if you want to think about it this way. Or you’re Satan, which was basically you saw that potential in yourself, brought it to life for you, because it was a fear, I think I can be a great artist. Now you can’t that same talking to you back and forth. Somebody comes out and brings it to life for you, other than in your mind. role, and you will never be a great artist. Dude, I did this. Sorry to call you do that’s not appropriate. Brian. I did this to myself before I wrote my book. Sure. And my Satan came out, you can write a book, you never get to be published, what the heck. But I realized what he was doing immediately, like I just had this awakening, I know what this is. This is my fears coming to life. And Satan is bringing it to life for me. Thank you. Now let’s work together. How can I overcome this?

Brian Smith 49:10
I look, you said something in the book that I again, I hadn’t really heard put this way before. And I love that you talked about how our fears actually help us to prepare, to do to do better to do things we need to do to accomplish it. So when you said I wanted to be an author, and you had the fear, I can’t do this, then you’re like, well, what are all the things I need to do to do this? What are the things I need to accomplish? And if you hadn’t had that fear, you wouldn’t gone through that. And as I was reading, I was relating to myself personally, I’ve always had this problem with like money. For example, I’ve always had a fear of not having enough money. And I’m just about my financial planner, like a week or so ago, we were going over our finances. And I realized because I’ve had that fear for as long as I have. And when I was making, you know, good money I could do in the past I was saving and everything. It’s like you’re actually in a pretty good position now. And I’m like wow, I finally feel a little bit better. about this, but it’s because I’ve had this fear since I was 16 years old, that I put myself into that position. So I said, I’ve read your book, I’m like, Okay, now I get it. I mean, that really resonate with me a lot.

Roland Achenjang 50:13
I appreciate it. And thank you for sharing that story. But it’s true. And I see. I mean, again, when you have, when you go through an experience like this, it becomes you’re literally who you are. And it’s all you see. So every time I interact with family members, I see this. But the, I shouldn’t say the beauty, the challenge, or the interesting thing about all of this is you can read my book like you did, and then apply it to your life. And it, you know, you’re aware of it. But when you have that experience, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s now annoying, right? And every great teacher, I think that’s one of the gaps between personal experience and then like awareness through knowing or exposure. Mm hmm. That’s a huge, that’s a very big gap in trying to instill or make you really appreciate the idea of Satan in your life. Right? It’s not? Yes, I’m not I’m not saying don’t think of it as something bad. If you currently do it, that’s fine. But if you want to expand your consciousness, you have to ask, but then, but then, why is it that in everything I do, Satan seems to be involved? What is he really doing? For me? He seems to be everywhere. So, one day, I was traveling home and I missed my flight. It wasn’t my fault, right? There’s a delay. And I mean, I miss my connection flight. And my mom calls and she goes, I’m on a roll. And I’m sorry, God is in control. Because I wait. Which God? Is it the same one that caused me to miss my flight way? Like, no, it’s that if you in her mind, she’s thinking, you know what, she’s probably thinking, I did something bad. And I’ve missed my flight, maybe? Or there’s like, a bug, I miss my flight. It’s just an opportunity to learn something. What can I do with this time? Can I meet someone at the airport and just have a conversation with? Can I take this time to meditate? can I calm? If you if you start to become more aware, you start to see how the god you create and the Satan you create are literally working together to help you expand your consciousness all the time. Yeah. God brings your choice to live Satan brings your fears to life.

Brian Smith 52:28
Yeah, I think, you know, as as a coach, as a grief guide, I’m working with people, my biggest thing with people is getting them to change their perspective to how they look at things. Because everything, everything that happens is good and bad, are neither good nor bad, or however you choose to look at it. And there’s I always tell the story of my favorite stories is a tower story with this guy says, as a farmer, and his son goes out and finds a wild horse. And the villagers always come to him and say, it’s great thing, your son found a horse, he says, Well, maybe. And then the next day the sun falls, he’s trying to break the horses, he falls, he breaks his leg. And the villagers come to him and he says, It’s so bad. It’s too bad. Your son broke his leg, he says, Well, maybe. And then the next day the army comes through, and they’re conscripting people in the army. And they don’t take the son because he’s broken his leg. And they say, what’s a great thing that your son broke his leg. And the farmer says maybe, and this is this is all of our lives, we always want to judge things good or bad. And I deal with people that have been through traumas, I’ve been through trauma, it’s when my daughter’s in the picture behind me. But if my daughter hadn’t passed, you know, when she did, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. And, and we all have awakenings in different ways at different times. So when I talk to people like you and I say, Man, I kind of wish I had the experience of rolling into where I could get these crazy things in meditation, and I would just know it. But that’s not my path. That’s not my experience, my path is different. But reading your book and listening to your story, and I appreciate you sharing, so much of your time with me, can really inspire all of us to look at like what’s my path? And how do I get to this place? while I’m still in the body? because like you said, the good things. We’re all going to get there one way or the other.

Roland Achenjang 54:09
Yes, right. No, thank you. That’s a Yeah, that’s a fascinating story, too. I love it. It just shows the uniqueness and the different paths in which we’re taking to basically end up in the same place.

Brian Smith 54:21
Yeah, well, I not take up too much more of your time. I want to ask you one last thing. So we’re loving these bodies, we’re loving this, this life is kind of an illusion, you know, whatever. What happens to us when we die? What happens to to to roll land or to Brian, what can we expect? What can we expect?

Roland Achenjang 54:42
Well, it varies, right? And for someone like you who has had multiple conversations with folks who have had near death experiences, you can appreciate this. And I would encourage anybody listening to you know, continue listening to your podcast to get an idea of what This experiences are like, or even, you know, visit any websites that catalog some of these stories that are told is a NDS is a is a really good place to get in contact with or learn a lot about what happens when we pass the there are a couple underlying things that I remembered. One. And the really big one is, when you pass, right, you, you embody more of who you truly are, basically, all of who you truly are. And that’s this infinite being. And then you’re slowly then received back and the other side, which is, if you can appreciate it, you’re being birth back into that world. Just like when you come into this world, you’re being birth here. And usually you have people receiving you, if you’re in a hospital, you got the doctor and the nurses, you’re sort of crying, you’re discombobulated about the right word. And then people kind of help bring you in slowly and help you assimilate into this new reality that you’re experiencing, which is way different, in certain regards, then then then where you were before. And so when you pass here, you’re being birthed back into the outer world. And usually, you’re going to have some sort of people, family members, close, close soul guides and soul tribe members of yours, maybe even your, your teachers, etc, receive you into that world, including people who had played different roles in your life, that have crossed over before you. And then when they receive you, they help assimilate you back into that world. And then from there, over time, I don’t really want to say time here, but you go through a review with your guide or with other teachers. And you are basically kind of like the the one reviewing your life, right? With the help of these people. They’re asking you questions? Hey, how do you think you did? In this scenario, in this case, and based off of your answers, right, you’re basically showing how much you’ve grown as a soul, how much have evolved how much your consciousness has expanded. And then, after a while, I don’t, there’s really no perception of time there, after you’ve rested and sort of come back to yourself, you can choose to come back. But a big piece that are remembered is all of life is in a crude way is information that’s being kept, that can be accessed in myriad ways. Right? upon excellent the physical body, even in the physical body, if you train yourself well enough, you can access this information. Now, it also depends, I would say, I don’t want to speak for everybody. But if you chose to incarnate in a way that you really weren’t going to access this information, then that might not be available to you. But on the other side, all this information is available, you can access you can review, you can learn, there’s a big piece about learning that never seems to end, as an as a as a self aware of being human always learning. And so when you go back to the other side, everything you’re doing is continuing to learn. And all that learning is feeding back consciousness, which is this all and all that Imagine if everything you were doing was basically being fed to one source. And that’s the idea, I think of source knowing everything. So all your learning is feeding back into this source. Whether you’re studying, you’re reviewing your life, you’re asking how you could have done things better, you asking for advice from older souls, traveling to different places where you can experience life in different ways. You’re ceaselessly learning, and we do that on this planet. If you appreciate that experience you have is teaching you something. Right, then then from there, I think you’re speeding up your consciousness expansion piece. And, and so I discussed that in my book and the ability to review your life from multiple perspectives. But a great book that I read after I actually released my book was the journey of source.

Brian Smith 59:03
Yes,

Roland Achenjang 59:04
yes book. Yeah, that book is it’s it’s super fascinating what Michael Newton was able to document with his work of, of helping human beings, right, go back to their lives between lives. And it’s a very, very, very, very well written book about what happens to you when you pass. Now, this is I have not had a near death experience, right. I’ve had my spiritual awakening experience. And then another other experience that I don’t talk about in the book, where I was able to sort of see a glimpse of what happens when we pass but a very good place to go into would be any Andy’s stories. And yeah, and you’ll see that Yeah, you’re not really gonna go anywhere. And and just another food for thought is believe. Like, if I remember that everything is this conscious There’s nothing outside of it. So even when we pass, regardless of where we end, it’s still a construct of consciousness. So like, you can’t really go outside of it somewhere else. Yeah. Right. And if you’re in any constructed environment that is of conscious, know that you are learning something there. And soon enough, you will have to go to some other place to continue to learn. And that was something that I, I, you know, when when I had my awakening, and I remembered a lot of this stuff kind of made me also feel like, Ah, well, yeah. Okay. If you do go to hell, it’s a constructed environment. There’s something to learn there. Eventually, you’re going to go to heaven. But if you realize most people who go there aren’t there forever. They leave, they come back here they go somewhere else. Yeah. So yeah.

Brian Smith 1:00:51
But I think that’s a great way to kind of wrap things up. I do want to tell everybody, again, the name of the book is who and why you are all you need to remember by Roland action, Jang, a CH, n, j, and G. And that’s his website, also Roland agian jang.com. I encourage people you can tell if you listen to podcasts. We’re always a great conversationalist. So I encourage you to check out his podcast conversations with Roland I know you’ve had some some great guests on I know, you’re getting more great guests. So just to wrap it up, anything anything you’d like to say before we close?

Roland Achenjang 1:01:28
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. And then secondly, I if anything, please, please know in your heart, that you are this in finite Lee brave soul, having a temporary experience here on Earth, designed purposefully, to teach you just how infinitely creative you are and find it brave you are. And in everything you’re doing in everything you’re saying in everything you’re thinking in everything you’re wishing for. You’re helping all of us remember the same information about who we are. And then you’re helping consciousness, which is the all learn more about itself. Right? And so don’t don’t for once, like, look down upon yourself and your uniqueness. Don’t Please don’t. Your your contribution is your uniqueness. And if you can embody that you’re doing all of us a great service like all of us.

Brian Smith 1:02:29
Yeah. Well, that was great. I was well said, Roland, thank you for for being with me today. Thank you for spending so much time and doing this. Looking forward to getting the feedback on this episode, and I’m looking forward to listening to your podcast as well.

Roland Achenjang 1:02:42
Likewise, Brian, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Brian Smith 1:02:45
All right. You have a good one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Roland Achenjang is a fascinating young man I met a few weeks ago. Right away I knew I had met a kindred spirit. Roland is a Pharmacist, and has an MBA. But, when something about his life didnt’ feel quite right, Roland gave up on finding happiness through career, religion, or other means and turned within.

In the first part of this two-part interview, Roland and I discuss how he came to the dark night of the soul that sent him on his spiritual quest. In part two, we will discuss what he discovered.

To reach Roland, visit: https://www.rolandachenjang.com

Transcript

Brian Smith 0:00
Close your eyes and imagine what are the things in life that causes the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we’ve been buried. But what if like a seed we’ve been planted, and having been planted, who grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes, open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is brief to growth. And I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey, everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of preacher growth. And I’ve got with me today Roland and changing and Roland is a young man, I just a couple of weeks ago, I was totally fascinated and talking to him about his background about the book that he’s written. And so this is gonna probably a pretty be a pretty extensive episode. So I’ll probably break it up into parts, we’ll just have to see how it goes. What I want to do is just give you a short introduction role and and then I’ll talk for himself. His bio they presented to me says in 2014, he was struggling to manage the stress brought on by his attempts to meet his responsibilities. So as a last ditch effort to coach he made the conscious decision to look with that or to look in the one place it never looked before, which is within which a lot of us don’t think about doing. And Rohan developed his own meditation practices as self taught meditator. Roland is also a pharmacist. He’s an MBA said he’s quite an accomplished young man. He’s got his own podcast, which is called look at my notes or conversations with Roland I believes that right. So it’s called conversations with Roland, again, fascinate young man, I don’t want to spend a lot of time introducing him. Let him speak for himself. So I want to welcome Roland to Greta growth.

Roland Achenjang 1:59
Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. That was a pretty sweet introduction to thank you.

Brian Smith 2:04
Yeah, I like I said, you know, meeting you a couple weeks ago, we just had a conversation, I felt like a kindred spirit, we headed off kind of right away, we were introduced by a mutual friend. So what I want to do today, or at least to begin with, I want to start talking about you and your experience. And we could start in 2014 if that’s what you’d like to start or start wherever you want. Just tell me about yourself.

Roland Achenjang 2:26
Um, we thought it might be better if we go a little bit beyond or before 2014 just set a background. I mean, 2014 was 2013 2014 pretty amazing, amazing time in my life. But I am originally from West Africa, in a country called Cameroon is where I was born and raised. I lived there with my family until I was 14 years old. And that’s when we are relocated to the United States. That in itself was a pretty life altering experience. Right when it happened, I would say I was I was still pretty young and just excited to be leaving camera and to be moving to the united states that the culture shock didn’t really hit me until a couple years later, after I had settled in a little bit into the US culture and then started to compare and sort of contrast the differences. Right. And then following that, you know, there are just so many stories that we can talk about, but life continued to happen for me as it does for just about every other being that’s experiencing life on Earth. I went through ups and downs, I had, you know, many things to celebrate in my life as well as many things that I thought didn’t make sense. One way I put it is my rational mind was beginning to fail me. My beliefs were getting challenged left and right. More so just because you know, a lot of that foundational beliefs I had were molded in within the Cameroonian culture, right? Come to the United States a whole different ballgame. Trying to make sense of of all of it. And, and the challenges didn’t stop at the same light. I did well, I mean, I went to school, graduated, went to college, and then got my farm D degree in 2010. And then working in a couple of hospitals. And by 2013, I was in Nashville, Tennessee, and that’s where I was working. And this was shortly after the Affordable Care Act had been passed. And so you know, in my, in my genius at the time, I thought and you know, I’ve been working as a pharmacist for two years, three years. And again, I was getting all this you know, the metaphor the check engine lights kept coming on, right? Something is off. Yes. Something doesn’t make sense. The real world is adding up and So I thought maybe if I go get a business degree for, you know, for, for many reasons that would that would help sort of get rid of this check engine lights then that kept coming up. And so I decided to enroll in business school and I was working full time as a pharmacist and going to business school and beautiful school Belmont University down in Nashville, Tennessee, during that time is when things got really really, you know, stressful, I could not ignore, quote unquote, the check engine light anymore, I really couldn’t ignore it. And I had to find a way to cope. When I picked up a practice, I call it meditating. Now at the time, I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just I just given up on, on trying to make sense of life, using my rational mind using my analytical mind using my scientific mind using my religious upbringing mind. And, and I just thought I, I’m just going to, quote, literally go lay in my bed, one day after work, listen to my body, write everything about my body, everything about my being, my thinking, how my toes feel, just listen to my body, and and then hear what he has to tell me. I mean, just literally out of frustration, I decided that on a whim. And then did some research about meditating. Some things turned me off on the different meditative practices that we can get into in this conversation or another one. But then that was it. And I said, like it was, you know, just not easy going after that very interesting experiences began to happen. And life moved on. One thing led to another, usually the word in the spiritual community is synchronicities, then, you know, you just can’t plan for

and then ended up four years later developing this meditative practice that I, I was disciplined enough to maintain daily, averaging about two hours a day. And on the fateful Tuesday morning of August 21 2018, had a fool had a spiritual awakening, spiritual transformative experience, most people would refer to this as a Kundalini awakening in the Christian sense, if I’m, you know, using my own interpretations and understanding of those teachings is receiving the Holy Spirit in a very profound way. Or getting in touch with the intelligence that is that is the source from which our creation comes interacting with that intelligence. And then remembering all these facets and fascinating things about who I am, which is basically a universal understanding of why you are as well, Brian, and everyone who’s listening. And it, it really helped me at that point. Put a check on the engine light as in, Oh, my goodness. Now everything sort of makes sense in a way that I could not have previously understood. Not having had a spiritual awakening. Mm hmm. And yeah, then following that, I wrote my book, which is another funny story. I published that in a year after that fateful Tuesday morning. And then again, things just continued to build from there. ended up learning different energy healing practices, a lot of it was building up on the practices that I was doing to myself, while meditating. These are things I this is all self taught. And, and then I thought, well, you know, given all the lessons I’ve learned, I have to start living them out. And so the podcast came about, and then connections, and now I am here talking with you, Brian.

Brian Smith 9:18
Yeah. Well, let me let me ask you a few questions. So you mentioned you know, you came from from Cameroon. You were like 14 years old. So and then you go through school and everything sounds like you were very successful as we would use the terms you graduated with the farm D which is not an easy thing to do. But something was kind of off. You know, when what you had was, I think it was a cold dark night of the soul. So what type of things are off? What was what was creating the check engine light for you?

Roland Achenjang 9:46
That’s a great question. I love it. So many things. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you one story to just try to paint a picture of what I mean by my check engine lights kept coming on. So growing up in Cameroon, I was raised in the Catholic faith. And I started doctoring classes when I was eight years old, for instance, right. And we learned everything we, our teachers taught us about Jesus Christ, a lot of Christian upbringing, stories in the Bible to help guide you, and help you build sort of a moral corn on which you would then use to develop your your life your life through.

But amongst those stories, where,

you know, there was this, this aspect of Jesus Christ, his life and his birth, specifically, that I had never ever heard otherwise, that he was the only son of Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph was sort of his stepfather or his father, essentially. Right. And, and Jesus Christ was the Savior. And you know, the whole, I mean, most of us know this story. Mm hmm. So this was my upbringing, up until I was 14. Fast forward, the spring of 2001. I am in platteville, Wisconsin, my uncle’s house, watching the History Channel. So this was right around Easter Easter break. And on the History Channel, there’s a documentary about the life of Jesus Christ. And this is a being who an individual who I like just like, the entire world, I’m super fascinated by like, why what was so special about him, etc. I mean, he did so many things, so many miraculous things, an amazing teacher. And I’m enamored by this documentary. So I’m really, you know, caught up in it, watching the stories. And a lot of it is building on the foundation of the stories that I had been exposed to growing up in Cameron. Now, another interesting aspect about this is growing up back home, we I did not have the luxury to watch reenactments of the stories of Jesus Christ, a lot of it was what I was either reading or being taught by a teacher, right? Just Uh, yeah. And we know the power of pictures, especially moving moving pictures as in as in documentaries and reenactments.

Brian Smith 12:33
Yeah.

Roland Achenjang 12:35
Now, in the middle of all of this, I’m fully engrossed. I hear the narrator mentioned that Jesus Christ had brothers and sisters, who were born of Mary and Joseph. Now to your listeners, maybe even to you that sounds Oh, yeah, of course he did. It’s in the Bible. It’s here and there. To me, in that moment, right 2001 that was earth shattering for me. If I can channel in, you know, Steven a Smith, the blast for me, that I heard out of this narrator was earth shattering. Hmm. I stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t pay attention anymore. And I in my, you know, genius as a 15 year old, less than one year in the United States, was enamored on contacting the History Channel to tell them stop spreading this bs lie. Why are you indoctrinating the American people with this bs lies? Jesus did not have siblings. He was the only son of Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit. How dare you? Right? I mean, the blasphemy. Hmm. And so in my frustration, and not being able to make sense of this, I turned the TV off in the middle of this and walk away, now was done with it. And that’s an example of a first, you know, one of many examples, essentially, of when my check engine light came on. Hmm. My foundational beliefs were seriously challenged. Yeah. What do you mean, Jesus had siblings? I have never heard that for 15 years on this planet. And those, those are the kind of things I mean, my rational mind was failing me. And over time, I would have experiences like that and just wash them on the rug or find another sort of justification or come up with some reasoning to help me feel centered Yeah. But as those as those began to grow and add on and add on it came I mean, it came to literally had I had to make a decision I add a continue to live this sort of life that doesn’t make sense and just navigate through this fog and then hope that something happens or make sense of the fog.

Brian Smith 14:59
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, you tell that because I can relate so much to it, I was raised as a Pentecostal and was raised with a very fundamental, literal interpretation of the Bible. And I remember when I was a young man, I was in my 20s, or 30s, I guess. And I started hearing people push back against the creation story. And I always thought it was literal. And I was like, how am I gonna make sense of this, and I actually, you know, the young earth, the young, the Creation Museum is down in Kentucky is which is close to you. And and by both your local or your local, I’m in Cincinnati, there’s Creation Museum near here, and this guy, Ken Ham, they put together this this argument to say that that creation was real. And I’m a, I’m a chemical engineer by trade. So my background is like, I’m a rational person. And I’m like, yeah, it’s real. So I get into it, and I’m reading all this stuff. And then I read the other side. And then I remember reading a book about this guy was taking the Bible and not taking it literally Genesis, but saying that it was a period of seven light ages or something, and explaining how we could have both creationism, and this kind of old Earth Theory, I was sitting on my deck. And I remember I looked at my eyes looked out, and like the whole world just suddenly look different. It’s like, I suddenly understood, you know, how God got, quote, created this thing. And it just, it blew my mind. So I’m just relating to the experiences that you went through, because I had a series of those, and it creates a crisis, right? It’s like, well, what else do I believe is not real?

Roland Achenjang 16:26
Exactly. Who else is playing games with me and telling me, you know, stories or tales literally tells? And what am I supposed to do with those tales? And then you start going into, you know, this conversations in your mind of what’s right, what’s wrong. And then it hits a hits a bigger head, like me, I was just in in health care. Oh, my goodness, just so many check engine lights are coming on. And we do amazing things in the healthcare industry, right, as pharmacists, as medical doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, radiologists, etc, we do so many amazing things. But I’ve always also been, you know, deeply philosophical without actually knowing this, I never took any philosophy classes in school, to be honest. And it was only in asking this, this, this questions and trying to make sense of my Earth life experience, that I, you know, realized that I had this lie to me. And in talking to a priest One day, he was actually the first person to call me that where I was, I don’t want to say debating, but I was I was trying to paint a picture of, of how, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t I grew up not believing that Jesus Christ had siblings. And he, his answer was very straightforward to me. He goes, Well, you should have just read the Bible. And it seems so obvious, right? Just read the Bible. But then again, are you telling me all these people who were teaching me this and teaching all of us this didn’t read the Bible? And, and then you’ll get to this nuances of? Well, they did read the Bible. And, and then, you know, everyone starts coming up with justifications of, Okay, well, Catholics read the Bible, but they don’t study. And everyone’s coming up with these reasons for why I never learned that Jesus Christ had siblings. And, and I thought, well, what you’re each demonstrating is basically what I’ve come to learn is that amongst many things, we are a product of our environment. Yeah. And and those environments are as diverse as we are. And even beyond that, if you look at your environment, there’s still many outcomes to how people perceive reality, even though they came from the same environment and the same teachings that you had. And I started to now go back into those and question, and then those were the kind of things that led me to saying, but wait a minute, wait a minute. And it was a little ego. It was a little bit egotistical, but it was seriously, how can I make sense of this reality? If I continue to let other people tell me what it is?

Brian Smith 19:22
Yeah, you know, it’s, that’s a really good point. And the Bible, I think, is a great, it’s kind of a Rorschach test, we see what we want to see, we see we look at and for me, you know, when I started coming out of some of the teachings like eternal hell, and, and Jesus is the only way to be saved and all that stuff. And I was told that that’s the way it reads. And then I started talking to some other people who read the same Bible and said, but now we see it totally different, that you know, everybody is safe, and there’s no eternal hell and you know, now that and I’m like, Well, wait, it’s the same book, but we’re all reading it different ways. And we’re all getting different things out of it. So, you know, I think it’s interesting that we come to this. I think it’s common story we come to, like I said, a dark night of the soul, we all come to it differently. And it’s all manifested differently. But we come to a point where it’s like, it’s just not working anymore. So what made you decide the thing to turn within? Because a lot of times at that point people will go, Well, how can I find you tell me the truth, but you decide to turn within?

Roland Achenjang 20:20
Yes, another great question, Brian. And, again, with me at that point, I had reached a space in my life where I had experienced quite a bit already. Right, I was a practicing pharmacist. So I knew that, at least from a scientific background specific to the practice of, of medicine, and in my field. No, nobody was really going to tell me I mean, I was talking to pharmacists all the time. And many of them weren’t even interested in the kind of questions I was asking, right. And so I just knew that. At that point, I couldn’t find another colleague, to talk about this with, you know, I’ll even share an example of a story. There’s one evening I’m working with a colleague, and this patient gets admitted in the ER, R, and they have elevated liver enzymes. And so the doctors do the workup, the, you know, the order the labs, and then they admit the patient to the hospital. And I’m following the patient through from the ER to admissions on the floor. And I’m looking at the treatment plan for this patient. And the medications that, you know, we intend to give this patient. And what I find out or what I realized quickly is, even though I’m not saying that this is what happens with everyone, I have to preface preface that with this, but is we weren’t really treating the underlying elevated liver enzymes. In this case, we admitted this patient to the hospital and gave him a room to basically rest. Because every medication we gave him was what we call comfort meds, which are usually things like Tylenol as needed for pain. So you’re not really going to get the Tylenol unless you’re complaining about pain, medications for constipation, as needed, everything was as needed. And then IV fluids which is literally rehydrating you, right. And that’s what we gave this patient and I and I’m looking at this and it suddenly dawned on me that for for this patient in particular, in particular, we were basically giving them a place to rest or quote unquote, meditate and sort of get rid of maybe life’s challenges, that would be causing them additional stress, and then making it difficult for this body or their body’s autonomic regulatory system to kick in. And then and then fix the underlying issue. And I look over at my pharmacist and I go, Hey, man, are you looking at this? Like, we’re literally giving this person a place to rest? Mm hmm. Which to me sounded a little bit like, oh, meditate, right? And that those are the kinds of things I was seeing. Um, and then the another reason why I decided to go within again, was was basically that the answers the answers I was looking for, were it in pharmacy, weren’t in health care, weren’t in religion. Because again, I was raised Catholic, but I came to the United States and my Catholic upbringing in Cameroon was different, right? There were different interpretations in the same faith. And then I started to learn about so many other religions, Muslims, right Hindu in Scientology, and then old religions, Greek mythology, Egyptians, etc. And you begin to see this underlying stories that are the same. There’s a story of creation, there’s always a battle. There’s a fall of man, somehow there’s a redeemer that comes in there changes to the stories. The more I began to learn about this different aspects of religious teachings, them I began to see the similarities and how they had differentiated from each other. And then also how they were very, very dependent on the times and the cultures in which they were being spread, right. So I was seeing how the Catholic Church was changing over time, for instance, and I thought, isn’t this sort of like, maybe political in a way? But the one big thing was this, Brian, it was, well, if the founders of these religious practices, right, the founders upon which a lot of these religious practices are based, where souls who were born on this planet What is it that they did? What is it that they had available to them that I currently have today?

And, and amongst everything, it wasn’t the actual religion for one, right? It wasn’t current technology, technological practices that we, you know, we we experienced, so we get involved in, it wasn’t healthcare the way we currently practice. It was their physical bodies, their ability to breathe and their ability to think. And I thought there’s something there. And, and I looked around, and I saw that everybody had a physical body, their ability to breathe and the ability to think. And lo and behold, I had one too. Yeah. And so I, I said, Well, this is the one place I have never looked. I’ve never just paid attention to my body unless it was hurt, unless I had a cold or something. And I thought, what if I just consciously did this? And mind you? There. Many people had meditative practices, transcendental meditation, Kriya, Kundalini, but I was also turned off by those in a way just because I, in my, in my own judgment, and perceptions, I started to see similarities in those practices, and then other, at least in my mind, Catholic upbringing. Mm hmm. And I’ll give you an example. So mantras for instance, I said, what those sound like prayers, you’re repeating things after a while. You’re just saying them you’re kind of lost in them. You don’t even know what they mean. So I said, Okay, I don’t want any mantras. mala beads, they’re like you can you can meditate with mala beads. Looks like that’s, that looks like a rosary to me. Yeah. beads. You’re saying prayers. You may be ordering mantras at the same time. And, and so I said, Okay, no, I’m just going to go with with what I came to this planet with. That was naked, Roland. I mean, I had clothes on when I wasn’t. Yeah, but I mean, just my physical body. Yeah.

Brian Smith 27:11
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, Roland, because I, you know, as I went through my journey, you know, we were I was taught, you know, trust your teachers trust the Bible. Trust that, you know, and and I went through kind of the same thing. So I started going out is to look at different ways of interpret the Bible, start reading books and stuff. And I think it takes a lot for us to start really trusting ourselves, especially with that, that indoctrination. We’re kids, and if you got this, but I was told that the hardest evil that the heart is wicked, and you can’t trust your own, your own instincts, you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to read the Bible to understand what, what’s really real. But things start to open up and like you said, you start to look at, because for me, I looked at meditation, and my background was like, okay, meditation is bad. That’s, that’s evil. So I found this thing called contemplative prayer. And so I’m reading books about contemplative prayer. And I’m like, this is just meditation, you know, you read a verse, or you say it over and over again, or the mala beads are the same as the rosary beads. So I think we come to the conclusion, it’s like, well, it’s all kind of the same thing. So when you started your meditation practice, you said you didn’t call it meditation? You just, you just called it? What? Did you have a label for it?

Roland Achenjang 28:20
No, I didn’t. Okay. I mean, the best thing I would say is, I was spending time with myself as much as I could. Because, you know, you do touch on a lot of good points, too, Brian, you talk about reading all the books, and started reading a little bit. And one of the first books I read, that was really great for me was the age of reason, by Thomas Paine. Mm hmm. And in that book, he basically, he this basically, lets the reader, you know, look at the other side of the stories in the Bible, or like, religious teachings. And I thought it was fascinating. And one of the things he pointed out was, how much power we sort of give a creation of source in the sense that, right we have this, this fallen angel, who is now quote, unquote, the devil or Satan, and we fear him just as much as we feared a source and and he was saying, but if, if this being is the creation of the source, how did he get to be so big that we are basically enabling empowering and fearing this thing so much? That you know, it’s it’s basically the, the biggest message in a lot of religious teachings is there’s this being that is so bad. The Creator doesn’t want to get rid of it, but it’s so bad. The only way to get rid of it is if you come to us, and we’ll help you and we’ll show you how we teach you how, and those. So in reading, those are the kind of things that made me think and and then I also begin to began to wonder, but how did he get at this conclusion? Who did he talk to? Right? And that was just spending time I would imagine with himself and thinking and analyzing and trying to make trying to make sense of reality. And another piece to was, again, the check engine lights didn’t stop. And I would do things Brian, consciously that I knew were based off of my upbringing and conditioning, the right things to do expect him to experience similar right things. And I would not, I would experience the total opposite. And so I thought, well, something’s off. And then I would do things consciously that were the wrong things to do sometimes, because it benefited me in a selfish way. Hmm. And it would turn out, okay. And then there were times when I could care less. And I would experience the outcome of both both like a good outcome and a bad outcome. And so it was just all confusing. Even more, so if you look at the background from which I came, I came from a country that, for lack of better words, is literally a third world country under developed, it has a lot of potential that’s not been tapped into. Right. And I come to this country where it’s so developed, the problems we’re facing here, don’t even resonate with what I would say not that we what I would say, with the problems that my fellow Cameroonians are facing back home. Hmm. or in any other, you know, like third world country, for instance. I mean, I’m working in the hospital, for instance, and we’re getting mad and was saying things like, the interoperability of our electronic medical records suck. I can’t share my data with with another hospital because we’re not on the same electronic medical records. Well, I go back home to Cameroon bride, and it’s like, okay, we don’t have roads. We don’t have what is no running water. You’re getting up in the morning to go to the stream to carry water to come back? You’re, I mean, it’s just a different world.

Brian Smith 32:15
Yeah. Yeah. First of all problems. Yeah.

Roland Achenjang 32:18
Yeah. But it’s on the same planet. And if you put just several I mean, as much as you can, if you put yourself in my shoes, it’s like, how can this same planet where we are currently experiencing life? have this much diversity in experience? And then, and then you couple all of that with your own personal experience and how you’re contributing to all of it. The guilt you might feel, because Catholic teachings are really good at making you feel guilty, right? The guilt I felt of, Okay, I’m in America. Why should I be complaining about this? When I go back to Cameroon? I mean, you’re like, whoa, whoa, you’re it’s a different place. different experiences, different problems, and then your your own problems? No one you try to complain when you’re back home, people just think you’re ungrateful. Yeah. But those are the kind of things that led me to say, Okay, if there is a source of creation that we’re all seeking, and if they are these myriad ways that we’re all experiencing life on Earth, how do we reconcile both? And, and that’s why I said, No one is nothing is helping me reconcile both reconcile the pain, reconcile the suffering, reconcile the differences, reconcile the, you know, that, for lack of a better word, the shenanigans It doesn’t make sense.

Unknown Speaker 33:48
Yeah.

Roland Achenjang 33:50
And, in that was, that was my, that that was annoying. Again, many of the reasons why I decided, ah, so there’s, there’s something here that we’re missing, where is it? What are what are the enlightened beings talking about? Right? How do we find it?

Brian Smith 34:08
So you you develop this technique, and I talked to people about meditation and a lot of us are turned off by the idea of meditation, we say, I can’t sit for five minutes without, you know, falling asleep, or just being bored out of my mind or driven crazy by my own thoughts. So what was your experience? Like when you when you first started meditating?

Roland Achenjang 34:28
Oh, great. Great. A great question. So the very first day was actually a morning I was walking home after work because I was working night shift minute. So this was another reason why I say the check engine lights were now just too many. I would go to work from 9pm to 8am. And then before going to work, I would go to class from 6pm to like 8:45pm and then leave and go to work. So I was doing this and sleeping during the day. So the first time I decided I would just sit in my bed in my bedroom, which was I had blackout curtains, my room looked like Batman’s cave. This is true. And again, it was just because I slept during the day at work that night. So, I sat in my bed and and what I decided to do was literally pay attention to as much as I can about my current being. And, and I, I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even know how to do it, I didn’t know where I would start or you know, anything like that. I just thought I would lay there, or sit there, and then see what happens. And the very first time I did it within, like five minutes, because this was out, after work, I passed out, I was gone. I mean, I slept I was so exhausted. And then I wake up. And once I woke up now I was a little more rested. And I tried it again. And instantly, you know, just laying there and trying to pay attention to my being. My mind is racing, right all kinds of thoughts. This that drama here drama, their class, this work this, my technicians are mad at me. My boss is probably not happy that I was maybe late to work. Everything’s coming on, right? I feel awful. At the time, my back was hurting like crazy, I thought I had a pinched nerve that I needed surgical intervention to heal. I was missing my family because I wasn’t seeing anybody anymore. I was just really this lonely being. It sounds really sad, but really was. I look back and I thought maybe I was clinically depressed. Most of this is going on. And then all of a sudden I see this toiling light, right. And it’s just colorful, and it’s very distinct. And it looks like a blurb. But it’s right there and just turning in my in my third eye. Mm hmm. And so I get enamored by it. And that was what my attention now became focused on. And as the lightest turning and just watching it. I’m freaking out at the same time. Like what is this? Right? Nobody up to that point had ever told me this was possible. Hmm. Not in business school at the time. Not in in pharmacy school. The idea that you could lay in your bed after waking up in your best attempt to pay attention to yourself. Sorry, I’m laughing it sounds crazy. But I see this light swirling in my in my third eye. I had no idea what a third eye was at the time. And I’m thinking What is this? What is this? And it goes on for a while. And then it stops. And I wake up. I remember I went to class that day. And I was so alert. I mean, I was awake. And I I paid attention in class that afternoon, evening. And I just being alerted like oh my goodness, and they know what happened. And so I would come back, and then continue the practice where I would sit and pay attention to myself. Hmm. Now while I was doing this, those experiences began to build on themselves. Soon the light turned into my hands would now start moving throughout my body. Kind of like in a scanning position. Mm hmm. My fingers would move through my body as if I was playing piano keys. Hmm. Sometimes my hand would move by itself. I like to pause here and say this. If you recall, I grew up in Cameroon in West Africa. If anything wasn’t off religious Christian teaching that you were experiencing outside of what this realm could explain. It was witchcraft.

Brian Smith 38:53
Exactly, devil.

Roland Achenjang 38:54
Now. I don’t know how, how else to explain it. Maybe I use the word Voodoo. But here in America, um, the whole idea of witchcraft is it’s very different back in Cameroon. It’s a taboo, huh? I mean, a taboo, even the whole idea of meditating is a taboo. That’s that’s witchcraft stuff. Don’t bring that. What do you mean meditating? What’s that? You’re gonna make us go crazy. You’re gonna. So if you can appreciate where I was, as this, this kid who is really just starting to, to dabble into paying attention to himself, and I’m having all these experiences, and my conditioning to that point was, this ain’t supposed to be happening. The red lights were This is witchcraft. Right. And I knew, and I was convinced that I had been possessed by the devil. Right. So that was my thinking. I was like, the devil’s got hold of Roland. He’s now moving his hands in weird ways. What the heck is this? But he was the kicker, Brian. I would meditate and have these experiences, and they would build on themselves One day, my hand might just move an inch. And then I would stop and freak out. Then the next day, my move three inches, and my whole hand will stop moving and moving to my body. And as this built on themselves, I would freak out and stop in a moment. But then realize how much better I was feeling. And then build up the courage to continue to practice.

Brian Smith 40:29
Yeah, and I yeah, I think it’s really fascinating to hear, because as I said, I’ve realized so much to your story, I was raised Pentecostal apostolic, which is similar, everything outside of the church has got to be the devil and stuff. But you, you’ve gotten to the point where it’s like, I’m going to trust myself, I’m going to trust my own experiences and go with it. I think that’s so that’s so powerful that you were able to do that. And, and, and the other thing I think is really cool is when you start to meditate, you had no expectations, you know, for so for myself, a lot of other people were like, Okay, well, how do I do this? And what am I supposed to experience? And I could mess this up, you know, in our own minds, because we were like, you know, am I doing it right? And you you were just free? And maybe that’s why you were able to have such an amazing breakthrough as quickly as you did.

Roland Achenjang 41:17
That is true, I mean, that that’s certainly part of it. And I created this six proven paths to effective meditating guide. And, and that is one of the paths I talked about in looking back at my experience. Now, I did have goals. So I started meditating, because I needed help, amongst other things, to cope with my work and school stress. Right? Right, I had no idea it would become this spiritual practice at all. And that it would lead to a spiritual awakening and kind of life altering and life transforming experience. But the whole idea of not trying to guide it to help me cope with work and school stress only, definitely played a role in that as I was meditating and having these experiences, I was exploring it. And the cool thing was, it was actually simultaneously helping me cope with the stresses of work in school. Yeah. And so today, I say, if you are thinking about meditating, regardless of why, as long as it is your y, as long as you say, Okay, this is why I want to do this. And you’re disciplined enough to continue to practice, right? focused, or even, I’ll just say, with the intention of achieving your y. This will also happen for you. I’m not this unique individual, who all of a sudden figured out something that has not been part of the human race since we started to incarnate on this planet. Even more so given my background, there is no no upbringing of mine, that would have said Roland would be able to find a sense of state of being that he currently has through meditating. Because this is not part of my culture growing up in Cameroon. Yeah. Today, if I even mentioned this to my, you know, fellow Cameroonians, a lot of them, you know, they’re telling me, Hey, take a hike with this witchcraft stuff. Don’t dabble in that stuff. Yeah. And, and, and, and I pray today, I appreciate that very much, right. Especially following my awakening, I do. Because these fears are what are creating the current Earth life experience that we’re having. And these fears are really based off of your upbringing, your conditioning, the lessons you chose to come and learn in this current life. And the way you choose to overcome the fears are entirely yours. And the cool thing is, the more fears you overcome, the more you expand your consciousness, and then eventually, you start to see life from an entirely different perspective, which is what I think is where I am today.

Brian Smith 44:09
Yeah, I think it’s, like I said, as I hear you, when we, when we met a couple of weeks ago, I was like, I can just see myself and you but I see a lot of other people also. And when you talk about your meditation technique, I work with a guy named Calvin chin, who’s taught meditation all around the world. And one of the things that I’ve gotten from Calvin, over the last several months I’ve known him, it’s like, stop expecting, somebody stopped worrying about whether you’re doing it right or wrong. And he had a period of time after his mother passed away when he was trying to get back to his meditation. And he said he would just cry. And he finally realized that was my meditation. It was just to sit there and to be with my own feelings. So I say this to our listeners, not so much you is that if you’re trying to meditate, stop trying, just do it and trust that you’re doing whatever you’re doing is the right thing for you and, and we all have different experiences. I’ve been meditating myself for several years. Now and every day for about the last I’m coming up in four years, I guess it is. My experiences are not like yours, and that’s okay. But your you know, listen to your experiences, they can be, I think inspirational to all of us and realize you know that you got what Roland needed at the time with your experiences. So you’re doing this meditation and you’re getting hooked on it, you’re going, you’re going longer and longer, you start off for five minutes, and now you’re up to what, a couple hours a day.

Roland Achenjang 45:29
So, now I average about two hours a day.

Brian Smith 45:32
So when you had your, your, I’m gonna call it an awakening, and I was at 2018. What was that? Like? What, what was the experience of that like?

Roland Achenjang 45:42
That? That was fascinating. So I’ll take you back a couple of months leading up to that day. Okay, um, and then Fun fact to that August 21 2018, was exactly a year to the date where we had that national solar eclipse move across the United States. It was August 21 2017, when that Eclipse happened. And it was only about, you know, six months after my awakening, where I was looking at the glasses that we had to look at the solar eclipse that I saw that date on there. Whoa, that’s odd. That was a year to date. But I digress. Sorry, to answer your question. About six months, a couple of months prior to that. Part of my meditative practice, would was, you know, still requiring me to adopt these yoga positions. Now, I’ve not mentioned that yet. But the Koreas my hand movements, those began, like I said, to build on themselves, to the point where my entire body was being moved into yoga positions and yoga poses. And it was in that realization, or it was during those experiences that I also appreciated that, you know, everything that we do is really a child of source. When you connect to source, you start to do these things. And it made sense to me in that way. Um, another interesting thing about these yoga poses that I adopt in the midst of meditating is how fine tuned and accurate there are, it’s not like going to a yoga class, I could go to a yoga class, and actually get stressed out even more. Because the poses and the flows that the yoga instructor putting me through, isn’t necessarily what my body needs energetically at the time. Hmm. In deep meditation, these yoga poses that I’m going through exactly what my body needs. And there’s a synchronicity to the entire movement and my breathing, it seems like a symphony, it’s, I’m flexing the right muscles at the right time, I’m breathing just the right amount of depth and releasing at the right time. Sometimes it’s even a firebreath, where it’s faster. So all these aspects of all these different meditation and yoga and breathing techniques, become part of my experience, without me consciously saying, I need to do this now. It’s just letting go deeper and deeper into the meditative practice. But one of these yoga positions I was trying to adopt was a boat pose as like a deep boat pose, where as my butt was on the floor, and my legs were raised up, my torso was also raised up. But then I had to connect my hands to my legs and hold them. So I look like it kind of looks like a triangle in a way. And I, I try to hold that pose. Many times I would, I’d be meditating. And I’d end up on the floor, raise my legs, and then try to hold it and then balance myself in that position. And when I did, I would fall every time I do it. Every time I attempt it, I would fall on this Tuesday morning, I kid you not I’m slipping in my bed. And something wakes me up. And I get this urge deep within, hey, don’t do anything right now. Go meditate. This, this is the time to go do it. Hmm. And because as I’ve started to build on receiving this intuitive messages, not doubting it, I get out of my bed right on the edge there. start meditating. I ended up on the floor again. My legs, right, same pose, my legs go up, my back straightens up. Then my hands in a lock my toes. And then bam. For the very first time, I was able to stabilize, I was strong enough and calm enough to stabilize myself in that position. And as I held it, I could feel this vibration in the base of my spine and a hair pop and then this energy frequency or this energy ball moves right from the base to the crown of my head. Feel it great to me. spine, as one energy wave moves up, I go, oh, now me exclaiming Oh, was actually me remembering all this information about who I was and why I was. And with every move with every way, a

energetic movement, there were three distinct, the first one comes up and I go, Oh, the second one comes up and I go, oh my goodness, that’s true. And then the third one with the third one, it was just a full foot on my goodness, that’s who I am. That’s why I’m here. And this is true for everybody. Now, there were only three ways. We have seven main chakras, depending on who you talk to. Mm hmm. But with those three waves, I had built this strong foundation. And I believe I was actually opening my lower three chakras, literally opening them that the entire hurt f life experience made sense to me, a metaphor would be alright, you have a 1 million puzzle piece. But it’s in a box, and you don’t know what the puzzle is. That’s earthlife. Now with this, we can experience I was able to put all the puzzle pieces together, and I can see the picture. And it was this divine creation. And in it and I looking back, I always think I should have stayed on and then maybe gone on seven waves. But I was so excited, I stopped, I let go, ran upstairs, open my back door and looked out my backyard. And I could see my car, I could see a storage shed right next to my car. Across the street from me was Main Street in this small town where I lived in I can see cars moving and honking my neighbor’s house, her car, the wind hit my face, I could see brushes on the left side of my house, which is kind of like property boundaries, right where it’s like, this is where our property ends, you know, separating my house from what was a photo studio at the time. And I could and then I looked at the clouds and the sky was blue patches were out those the sun shining. And all of this, there was actually like a little dry clothes hanging rack outside to just some wires. All this stuff. I looked at it. And all I could say was holy crap. That’s This is it. This is consciousness. This is, for lack of better. This is the god we’re looking for. All of this, including me Is God interacting with itself as unique expressions of itself. It was it was so beautiful. I was like laughing and crying at the same time. And I felt like I really felt in that moment after remembering all of this. Like the but to the best joke ever told, literally I thought my this is good. And I was just thinking, wow, whoever or whatever designed such an experience. You got us like this is amazing. What, what, what are the same thing? Yes. Having a unique experience. Yes. designed to teach us that we are all the same thing? Yes. What? And so I go back downstairs, and I’m on a high Brian for an entire week. I can’t I can’t sleep a full night. I can’t do anything. I go to work that day. And I couldn’t work. And I’m just spewing all this just consciousness basically just statements and everything’s making sense. I’m trying to tell my coworkers about this. And I literally sounded manic. That’s how happy I was. I was too happy to function. I mean, I’ll be honest, that whole day, eight hours, I didn’t do anything at work. I was just basically walking around laughing and smiling at people as a Do you realize how amazing and brave you are to be here? Do you even understand what you’re doing? Do you get it? Do you remember? That’s the word Do you remember? And of course they didn’t. Of course they thought I was insane. And being pharmacy director, right. It’s like, hey, Roland is supposed to dispense the drug to our patients. Right? Stop taking them. Yeah, stop, stop taking them. But that’s how I felt. And I would come home and have hours of conversations with myself which were basically downloads is one way to say it right and expanded consciousness. So I was getting all this information and all these explanations come through. And I would write them on my phone, I would audio record them. And that was the genesis of my of what eventually became my book.

I would call my wife and talk to her for hours and

and she she was she felt the same way. She’s like, okay, what’s going on? Why are you so happy? If you don’t mind, I’ll share this story just to kind of paint a picture of, of just how happy I was to the point where I wasn’t even, like you can’t function on this planet in that state of being. Yeah, I can’t maintain it. Well, I can. But

Brian Smith 55:14
yeah, I want to interject, because I think it’s a really good point. Because I’m listening to talking, I’ve got a big smile on my face. And it reminds me when I talked to Mary terhune, who had a similar experience. And when we get into your book, I want to talk about this whole idea because the idea of death of the ego, right, and but you, you were saying you couldn’t function you couldn’t you couldn’t go to work and do the normal. And she said the same thing. She went to work and she was worthless. So it’s, I think it’s a really interesting point that you brought up there. But yeah, go ahead and tell the story.

Roland Achenjang 55:44
Oh, yeah, no, I marry, she’s an amazing lady too. And, you know, we connected through actually the same mutual friend who connected us to so and I was also very fascinated with her story. Through meditating, she had an awakening experience as well. Mm hmm. But just to paint a picture of what I mean by you, my life literally changed. Now, at the same time, my wife, beautiful lady, beautiful souls, so brave as well to incarnate on this planet, and then choose to experience life with with my, with my behind. She was in the midst of applying into medical schools. Now, up to that, that week, I was going based on my experience, which was I only applied to to medic to pharmacy schools. And I got into both of them, and I picked one. And so in my ego, and selfishly, my argument was only apply to one or two medical schools. But she said, No, I want to apply to 1520 medical schools. And I thought, That’s ridiculous. You know how much money you’re going to spend applying to all these schools, then what the schools are going to do, because that’s what they do is they invite everybody to come and interview. But at the end, you’re only going to go to one school. So why waste all this energy going and talking to all these people, making it difficult for you to even make a decision afterwards, on which medical school you want to go to? Right, because you have to as part of the match process, you have to pick which schools are your favorite. And then if there’s a match, or if you if you get admitted there, etc, etc, etc. But I was so enamored that she only applied to medical schools, which was, I mean, it was selfish. It was also based off of my experience as you don’t need this many quit stressing yourself out. And then also, I didn’t want to spend that much money applying to all this man. And then, on top of that, you had to fly and travel. And all of this, I don’t do this, right. After my awakening, after remembering who we were and why we were when she mentioned, she, she called she’s okay, we need to talk about this. And I’m so happy, right? I was like, sweetie, if you want to apply to 50 medical schools Go for it, it doesn’t even matter. Listen, you’re gonna end up where you need to be. And all these applications that you’re gonna apply are part of your learning experience. It’s part of your uniqueness. So go for it. Right, and I’m so happy and so supportive and so positive. And it was unusual. she freaked out. But what is going on? Right? Just, that’s just an example of how life was for me that entire week. Yeah,

Brian Smith 58:32
yeah. Hey, everybody, that’s the end of part one of my interview with Roland. Go ahead and find Part Two where we really get into talking about his book. This first part has been talking about his life experience. Part Two, we’re going to talk about the book, I think you’re really going to enjoy it and I’ll see you there. That’s it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www. Grief to growth calm, that’s grief, the number two growth.com or you can text the word growth to 31996. That’s simply text growth gr o wt h 231996. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe. So hit the subscribe button. And then hit the little bell here. And it’ll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it. That helps me to get more views and to get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

I’ve been following Bernardo Kastrup for a few years. He’s a brilliant man with PhDs in both computer science and philosophy. His books “Why Materialism Is Baloney” and “More Than Allegory” have literally changed my life by giving me a deeper understanding of the origins of Everything.

Bernardo Kastrup’s work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. This idea might seem for us born during this age of materialism. But, the idea is as old as mankind. It’s what every religious tradition has always taught. What Bernardo brings is a logical way of coming to these same revelations.

Bernardo has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on ‘Scientific American,’ the ‘Institute of Art and Ideas,’ the ‘Blog of the American Philosophical Association’ and ‘Big Think,’ among others.

You can find Bernardo at:

www.bernardokastrup.com

Transcript:

Brian Smith 0:00
Hey everybody, it’s Brian. I’m back with another episode of grief to growth and today I’ve got with me one of my heroes, Dr. Bernardo kastrup. have to admit I’m a little bit nervous about interviewing Dr. cashier because I’ve been reading his books and watching him on YouTube for quite a while and finally got him here with me.

I wanted to introduce you guys to an idea called idealism. And we’ll get into that what that is in a minute. But I want to first start with a quote by Dr. Kastrup. He says, Let there be no ambiguity here. It is a direct and unavoidable implication of my worldview, that your consciousness, your subjective experience of being here right now. We’ll survive bodily death. So I want to read his bio, and then we’ll get started. Dr. Carson’s work has been leading the Modern Renaissance and metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essential and mental. He has a PhD in philosophy, ontology philosophy of mind, and another PhD in computer engineering reconfigurable computing artificial intelligence. As a scientist Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, and the Philips research laboratories, where the Casimir effect of quantum field theory was discovered. formulated in detail in many academic papers and books. His ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the Institute of Art and ideas, the blog of the American Philosophical system.

ideation and Big Think among others. His most recent book is the idea of the world, a multidisciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information for freely downloadable papers, videos, etc. Please visit his website Bernardo Kastrup calm that’s Bernardo BR and AR do Castro cacher k str. up.com. And with that, I want to welcome Dr. Kastrup. To grief to growth. Thanks for having me. burnings a pleasure. I have to tell you right up front, I just said I’m nervous about interviewing you. I’ve been following your work for a while. But I will tell you I don’t know a lot about philosophy I’d never read or I don’t think I’ve ever read a philosophy book until I read your book. Why material? materialism is baloney. And frankly, I look at philosophers and say they just tie themselves up in knots. You know, there’s a guy that says, I think, therefore I am and I’m like, why know that I am. I don’t need philosophy for that. And I hear Daniel Dennett, say think come to the conclusion that consciousness is as a as a fallacy. It’s just a artificial

construct. So, when I read your books, it really they really grabbed me you know this idea of material or of idealism. So could you explain to me what is idealism?

Bernardo Kastrup 3:12
idealism is a metaphysics like materialism, is it a hypothesis or a statement about the nature of reality about what reality essentially is? Which is to say more than to say how reality behaves? The latter is what science does science studies the behavior of nature if you do this and that, how will nature reply by manifesting a certain behavior that that’s what an experiment is, philosophy goes a step further, once we know how nature behaves, what inferences what best guesses Can we make about what nature essentially is? Today, we hardly give it a second thought, because the idea of metaphysical materialism the notion that reality is essentially material in order in other words, something outside and independent of conditions.

It’s so ingrained in the culture that we take it for granted. And very people, very few people know how precarious this idea is how malformed and untenable it is. So there is an open playing field and I think idealism is the best hypothesis for what reality is it basically says that reality is mental. It’s not in your mind alone. It’s not in my mind alone. It is out there beyond our personal mind. But it is mental at the transpersonal level. Yeah, and I think that’s, it’s interesting, also, because it’s it I was, I was reading your bio this morning. It says, you’re leading the Modern Renaissance of idealism. And I think some people times we think materialism has always been the paradigm, we’ve always thought that everything is just material. And that’s not true, is it? No, that’s not true at all, no, for most of human history. That was not the paradigm, arguably, not even the Greek atomists who were credited with having created materialism. Arguably even

They were not metaphysical materialists. materialism has become a mainstream metaphysical view, only from say the latter parts of the 19th century onwards. So it’s a phenomenon of the last 150 years. Some started thinking about it more seriously back in the 17th century, but it wasn’t mainstream for a long time. So it’s for the past century and a half that it’s been mainstream. So you have PhDs in both computer science and philosophy which one came first? Computer Science came

19 years First, the earlier Okay, and then we’ll get your idea what got you interested in philosophy? I you know, I by temperament, I was always a philosopher. Since I was a kid. I always like to think about the big questions, you know, What is life? Who are we what are we doing here? Where are we going to go? What is this all about? What’s the point of it all? I did Computer Engineering first.

Because it was also a passion like philosophy, but it was a passion that gave me a better chance of securing some financial stability in my life.

So that was my first PhD

in philosophy, I started writing books and doing philosophy for many years. I do it for several years now, as a sort of a my second life I used to be in the corporate world until until very recently now I’m a full time philosopher. And I did philosophy as the extra in my life. And at some point that I realized that I had published so many academic papers, so many so much technical material, that I could just put it together and get to PhDs in philosophy, so I got one. Yeah. So was there a shift for you when you when you just started to discover that idealism was was the way to go where rather than materialism? Yeah, that was a big thing. Because then I think like you

Most of us, when I was in academia studying doing research, I wasn’t materialist, by default, an unthinking materialists. I was materialist because everybody around me was a materialist. And I didn’t give it a second thought I was busy with other things that have a scientific nature. In other words, I was busy investigating how nature behaves.

But at some point, I was doing some research on artificial intelligence. And then it’s very easy to go from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness in your own mind. Because you build a computer that behaves intelligently and you start wondering, Well, what would it take now to make it conscious, not only intelligent, but to have it data processing the component by experience just like the data processing in my brain is accompanied by experience. And I started posing these questions to myself and tying myself up in knots because it just doesn’t compute this idea of creating consciousness out of something known

unconscious, it’s any any possible breach to make. And then I read a paper by philosopher David Chalmers years ago, in which he articulated the key problem that I was struggling with which today is called the hard problem of consciousness, which basically states that there is nothing about a material arrangement, in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience. There is nothing about the position and momentum of the atoms in my brain, in terms of which I could deduce what it is like for me to have a bellyache to fall in love or or taste a strawberry is an arbitrary bridge. And then I woke up to the idea that I was making a wrong but implicit assumption I was assuming that consciousness is the derivative phenomenon, and matter is the primary one. So you start from there and you get consciousness, but I never examined that assumption. Once they started examined it, bam, it was very quickly arrived at

Conclusion and it was a wrong assumption, it was the wrong logical step to take and it created all the problems that subsequently became obvious. So reverse that. And I realized that it makes a lot more sense, more sense to think of mind as the primary. And everything that is created is created within mind by mind, not my personal mind alone, but mind as a substrate, mind as a framework as a scaffolding, the essence of reality. And therefore you don’t need to create consciousness you can modify consciousness by, you know, interfering with the brain and doing all that you can change the configuration of consciousness, it can change the patterns of excitation of consciousness, but all reality unfolds as patterns of excitation of a transpersonal form of consciousness, and everything started falling place. And since then, I’m trying to communicate that and I’m not trying to convince people but I’m

inviting people to have a second look at this knee jerk assumption that we make in our culture that matter comes first and consciousness next, invite people to consider the possibility that it may be the other way around. And that’s all empirical observations can actually be understood as supporting this this distance that mind is first. Yeah, it’s a big shift, I guess. Because I think a lot of times when people think of and we can interchange terms mind consciousness, we think Well, okay, where did consciousness come from, but I have my consciousness and, and all we know is our own consciousness. All we can know as our own personal experiences. That’s all we have. We know what’s going on around us. So I think we assumed Well, there must have been some matter first, and then the matter became conscious and people don’t even realize that that’s an assumption in itself. And it’s consciousness you’re talking about it’s not a personal consciousness like my consciousness but it’s a it’s a greater we might call it God might call it source, the force, you know,

something of that nature to kind of get our minds out of just like it’s this little thing that’s in my head. Yeah, surely a mine in your personal consciousness have come into being at a certain point when we are born. And surely our personal consciousness consciousness will cease to be personal at some point because at some point in the future, we will not be personal agents anymore. So I’m not claiming that our personal consciousness has existed forever. I’m not a solid system. I’m not saying that my reality is your personal dream.

But our personal consciousness exists in a broader context in a in a within a broader mind, and it forms and dissolve in that broader mind. That’s the claim. Yeah, well, and in the book you go into like, there’s our personal consciousness and there’s our personal unconsciousness or you called obviously obfuscated conscious, which we’ll get into with why you choose to use that term, but then there’s also the greatest

consciousness that we’re all a part of. So it’s for people. It’s just I’m just trying to help people make this shift from consciousness just being what’s going on inside my head to consciousness being something that’s, that’s universal. And that matter, as we perceive, it rises out of that, kind of like when we dream at night that we create these characters in our dream, we create everything in our dream, through our own consciousness. Yeah, and I talk about consciousness as a type of existence.

For instance, I know that you are conscious, but I don’t have access to your personal consciousness. Yet I grant that it exists. I believe that it exists. In doing that I grant that there is consciousness beyond my own personal consciousness. We all do that. There is nothing counterintuitive about it. There is consciousness out there in the minds of other people, other animals and whatever. The claim I’m making is that even things that are known living or even the inanimate universe, as our

Hole, eat two exists in a form of transpersonal consciousness. So you have to grant that, that there is this transpersonal consciousness out there. But that’s not much more difficult than to grant that another person is conscious. Yeah. And I think that’s, you know, interesting when we talk about consciousness or life being almost like a dream, which you use a lot of allegories, which you kind of have to write because to get to this stuff we really can’t talk about through direct experiences. As you mentioned, in the book, we can only talk about the objects that are being experienced as opposed to the experiencer. So when we say that life is like a dream, it doesn’t mean like it’s like one of our dreams, where it’s arbitrary and ephemeral. It just kind of you know, it’s all crazy. We grant that there are constants in the universe, for example, that are but they’re a part of this overall mind. Is that correct? Yes, I grant that there is a world out there and we are immersed in that world.

We inhabited. And that world would continue to exist, whether we are here looking at it or not, I grant that. The only claim is that common shared world is mental in essence, and it presents itself to us in the form of perception, the things we see, hear, taste, which are themselves experiences, perception is experiential in nature. So the claim is, the contents of your perception are they appearance, the image, the representation of something that is really out there beyond us. But that’s something that is really out there is consciousness is those are experiential states that present themselves to us as matter in much the same way. As your experiential states. Your conscious in their life presents itself to me as a matter the matter of your body, your brain, its brain activity, my view that’s just the extrinsic appearance, the image of inner

experiential states, they just present themselves to me on my screen of perception in the form of matter. And then I extend this claim, and I say the universe, the inanimate universe as a whole, to present itself to us as the matter that we call the inanimate universe. But from its own first person perspective, it is experiential in nature. Yeah, and I think that these are really important concepts. And we and I hear, I’ve heard some of this coming out of science, like, we live in a simulation, or we live in a projection or something and you talk about, you have a really great analogy, I think of the cylinder projection, right? That if you look, if you take a cylinder, and you look at it from the side and make a projection on the wall, it looks like a square like a rectangle. But if you look at it from the end, it’s a circle. And so when we’re trying to describe this ultimate reality that that lies beyond what we can perceive. We can perceive it in different in different ways, but we’re kind of like a, like a derivative of it. I guess.

Polling is something that is by definition, almost by definition, ineffable, because our language has evolved for very practical purposes, you know, to the point where the food is to tell where danger lies, which anymore can jump on you and kill you. So the language has evolved for very pragmatic reasons. It didn’t evolve to talk about

what is transcendent, to our sense perception. So from that point of view, you’re bound to use metaphors. And sometimes people think that if two metaphors contradict one another, then one of them has necessarily to be false. Maybe both, but at least one of them seems to contradict one another. But that’s not necessarily the case. Because metaphors are not literal. It’s just like the shadow projection of a cylinder. Both are correct. Somebody will see the shadow of a cylinder and we’ll say it’s a circle. Somebody else will say it’s a rectangle. Oh, they contradict one another. So one is incorrect. No, both are correct, because at a higher level the reconcile but that time

leverages transcendence so it’s very difficult to talk about, which leads to all kinds of confusion.

But maybe we don’t even need to go to this transcendent space to to adopt idealism as the most plausible and fashionable view. Because, look, there is no question that mind is capable to generate an entire world on the screen of perception. It happens every night when we dream. I have had the privilege a few times in my life to have lucid dreams. And I always the first thing I do is, Oh, I know I’m dreaming now. Can I tell from the resolution, the vividness of what I’m seeing and perceiving around me that it’s a dream. And then if the attention, no, it’s crisp, the resolution The colors are vivid, it’s very autonomous, it seems to have a life of its own. And at the same time, I know that I’m dreaming because I remember having gone to bed. So because of my continuity in the continuity of my

memory. I know that the times are me, but I can’t tell it based on my perceptions in the dream alone, I know that it is my mind that’s generating all this stuff that I perceive around me in the dream. I know that it’s a part of my mind that I am dissociated from. So it looks like me inhabiting it and I am not it. During the dream, you think you are the dream avatar. But in fact, you are the one mind that is doing the Avatar and doing everything else in the dream as well.

So the we know that minds can do this and the only jump you have to make is Can it be doing this right now? Are we avatars of a dream of a dreaming mind right now? And if so, how can we explain that we are all seemingly having the same dream or at least mutually consistent dreams? Because you you will also report seeing cars and trees and stars and whatnot. And that’s consistent with my experiences.

So there seems to be a collective collective level of mind that we are dissociated from during the dream. In other words during life, which is generating this imagery for all of us. Yet even that is not very difficult to imagine because when you’re dreaming and you’re lucid in your dream, you know that it is a dissociated part of your mind that is generating the rest of the dream. And yet it feels so external to your dreaming avatar. So it is not countering to it of idealism, actually, nature is giving us floods of suggestion hints and evidence that this is what’s going on. But you’re stubborn. We get all tied up in conceptual abstractions, and then we lose touch with what is really right, right there under our noses.

Brian Smith 19:44
Yeah, you touched on that. And I think that was another brilliant thing I loved about the book, you talked about how basically, the universe nature is all a metaphor. It’s all showing us something that that can’t be really expressed in words. It’s all metaphorical. And you mentioned one of my things

Favorite philosophers actually do know swedenborg one of my favorite theologians philosophy room, a column, and he talks about correspondences. And in the latter part of more than that are in latter part of material why materialism is baloney. You talk about how, you know, really, if we wake up and look at the world, it’s always delivering messages towards just like the symbols on the dream.

Bernardo Kastrup 20:21
Absolutely. There is a famous quote, well, I’m not sure it’s a famous quote, but it is my favorite quote of an Indian Sage called and these Agata Maharaj, who lived in the 20th century even

Unknown Speaker 20:37
you he said

Bernardo Kastrup 20:40
it to see the world is to see God. There is no seeing God apart from the world. To know God beyond the world, is to be God. So, basically, what he’s saying is that the world around us that we perceive is how a human Universal Mind presents itself to us. It’s the appearance of that universal mind from our perspective from across the dissociative boundary. And that’s it all you have to know about that Universal Mind. It presents itself to you in the metaphorical way that we call the physical world. And to know more about it beyond its representation, its appearance, its extrinsic image, you have to be it. And it is possible to be it I think, because one day, the dissociative process that maintains our individuality will end we call it death. And maybe we merge back into that and then we get to know it from a first person perspective, as opposed to a third person perspective. So what many traditions are hinting at not only nisargadatta but swedenborg that you talked about? Schopenhauer, one of my favorite philosopher is just wrote a book about him. He talks about view in representation. So he says the world as it is, as it is in itself, as from a first person perspective, is a wheel. In other words, volitional experiential states. That’s why that’s why the universe is moving, going somewhere doing something. But that will present itself to us from a second or third person perspective. In the form we call physicality for Schopenhauer that’s representation. The physical is a representation of endogenous in their experiential states, volitional states that just present themselves to us in the form that we call the material world. From that perspective, matter is a metaphor for whatever is going on from the first person perspective, in just the same way that our patterns of brain activity are a metaphor for how we feel from within.

Brian Smith 22:51
Yeah, you know, I want to get into some of the things I was I was listening to your book earlier this week, so I don’t normally read it. I was listening cuz I wanted to get through it before our interview. You talked about it’s there’s just so much stuff that explains that just not explainable in other ways. And you talk about consciousness and which I kind of touched on before, and what people call the subconscious, but you call obfuscated kind of consciousness, because nothing is really outside of our conscious, and I just had to stop the recording. And just, I had like a five minute lecture with myself because I was like, I don’t want to forget this. So explain what it is that what’s the difference between what’s in our consciousness and what’s the absolute greater part of our consciousness.

Bernardo Kastrup 23:29
So, the word consciousness is used in many different ways, even by philosophers themselves, and there is a reigning confusion about what any one person means, by that word, at any one instance. To be very explicit and unambiguous. When I use the word consciousness, I mean what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. In other words, if there is something that is like to be you, anything doesn’t matter what then you are calling A conscious state is a state in which there is something that is like to be. If there is nothing, it’s like to be in a state, then it’s non conscious. If there is nothing, it’s like to be a computer, then the computer is not conscious. If there is nothing, it’s like to be a dead person. And that person is not conscious, which of course immediately raises the question. Is that the case? I don’t think it is. But this is what we mean by phenomenal consciousness. If there is experienced any, it doesn’t matter how simple you don’t need to have higher level mental functions. None of that you don’t need to self reflect the need to be self aware. Now, if there is an experience as simple as white and black, warm or cold, that’s already phenomenal consciousness and that’s what I mean by consciousness. But in even in colloquial use in our senior science of consciousness, some people use the word to mean something a lot more restricted. What they mean by It is what should be called meta consciousness. Now, consciousness is something you have when you have an experience. Meta consciousness is something you have when you both have the experience and know that you have the experience. So, meta consciousness is conscious meta cognition, you not only have an experience you, you represent that experience to yourself. Let me try to illustrate it even better. We say I have pain, or I have hunger. We when we say that that’s an expression of meta consciousness. If you were not met the conscious but only conscious what you would say is, I am pain. I am hunger, because there is no distinction between the experience and the subject of the experience to say that you have pain you have to pull yourself out of the experience and contemplate your own experience at a meta level, that is meta consciousness. Now, what I would say is that we need meta consciousness even to report to ourselves that we are conscious. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to report that to ourselves. So you would have experiences but we wouldn’t know that we have experiences. Yeah. Because of that when we study consciousness, or when we introspect into our own consciousness, all we can report is the contents of meta consciousness. The stuff that you can self reflect about, yeah, the stuff that escapes the reach of meta conscious introspection may still be experienced, but you will not be able to report it even to yourself. Let me give examples again. Some people have been without being aware of their pain. You may even ask them, are you paying attention No. But then at some point later on, they realize that actually, they were in paying all that. That’s the moment when they become a method conscious of me. Before they were having the pain and they know it in hindsight. Another another thing that everybody can relate to. Were you conscious of your breathing? 10 seconds ago? Were you experiencing the inflation of your of your of your chest, the movement of your diaphragm, the flow of air through your nostrils? I would say you were conscious of it. But you only became meta conscious of it the moment I brought your attention to it.

Brian Smith 27:39
Yeah, right.

Bernardo Kastrup 27:41
So my point is, what many of us call consciousness is actually only meta consciousness. It’s just a tiny little bit of consciousness. But because we call it consciousness, we think that it’s the hole. We created words to refer to the rest as subconscious or unconscious even psychologists did that Carl Jung, Freud, they all talk about the unconscious. My point is the unconscious is not unconscious at all. It is conscious. It is just not meta conscious. And we don’t see it because we can’t report it to ourselves and because we are so enamored, so involved with our own method consciousness, which is a sort of it just evolved with ourselves, with our own pains with our own worries with our own wishes, with our own needs, with the things that we fear and reject. We are so enamored in this narcissistic loop of meta consciousness that it obfuscates everything else if we could just turn down the volume on this meta consciousness, be a little less busy with what we can introspect into and just become receptive. Boy, you would find out so many things that are going on in consciousness, but we can’t reports to ourselves. You think Most people would be amazed how much is going on there? Yeah, I

Brian Smith 29:03
love the some of the analysis you gave in the book you talked about like effect. If you’re in your car and you’re driving, and you get home, you don’t realize how you got there. You’re obviously conscious while you were driving or you wouldn’t gotten home, but you just weren’t aware of it. And you talked about the self reflective thing, which actually amplifies these certain things, which kind of makes everything else stamping out. So we can’t perceive it. And you gave a great analogy there of the stars during the day, we can’t see the stars. And I started thinking about things. I work a lot with people like who are intuitives, who people who are meetings, for example. And they’ve done studies on them when they’re actually in a trance state, their brain is kind of turned down. And I’m wondering if that’s what it is. That’s what allows that to come through. That’s actually available to all of us, but it’s just being obfuscated by everything else is going on in our heads. Yes,

Bernardo Kastrup 29:49
I think well, there has been neuro imaging studies showing that that’s what actually happens with trance mediums their brain activity decreases. Significantly, if you pretend to be a medium, your brain activity will increase. But people who seem to be authentic trance mediums their brain activity reduces I think this has two effects. One is it reduces the obfuscation if you’re not so busy with your own narcissistic, you know, thoughts states emotional states, suddenly, more stuff begins to come into focus in your peripheral vision. You see that with the corner of your eyes. It is a metaphor and I’m talking about a mental process. But it is as if the obfuscation in the center of your field of view reduced and suddenly you realize that there is a lot going on in your peripheral vision that suddenly you become receptive to and alert to. The other thing that I think’s going on and they may be the same thing. I’m not sure is that I think normal brain activities what a dissociative person

says in a universal mind looks like it is the representation the appearance of a dissociative process we are associated alter personalities have a universal mind. And that dissociation looks like what we call living being a body with its ordinary brain activity. I think if you can reduce your brain activity, or at least those parts of patterns of brain function that correspond to this to the dissociative process itself, you reduce the dissociation, the dissociative boundary becomes more porous, permeable.

Brian Smith 31:33
Yeah. And you sort of go beyond your own individual self and you experience things that are out there all the time, but which you couldn’t reach because you are dissociated from them. So, I think both play a role in this. Yeah, I wish I had so much more time with you. But I you know, the thing is, your book also describes because we hear through a lot of religious traditions that we’re all one and you hear people that have indies that come back and say we’re all one people.

What does that really mean? through all the metaphors you use in your book in terms of us being consciousness or individual conscious being like a whirlpool in the stream, or ripples on a thing of mercury or the membrane? We’re all we’re all part of this one thing at a substrate level, but we feel differentiated because of our ego. And because of the self reflection that we’re doing, it cuts us off from the experience of the other person. Is that is that a good way of putting it? We’ll get back to grief to growth in just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach? If you’re grieving or know someone who is grieving his book, grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know, people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers at www grief to growth com www dot g ri f the number two gr o w t

Announcer 33:00
h.com or text growth gr o wt h 231996. If you’d like to support this podcast visit www.patreon.com slash grief to growth www.trn.com slash g ri e f, the number two gr o w th to make a financial contribution. And now back to grief to growth.

Bernardo Kastrup 33:28
Yes, of course this is a conceptual narrative. For most people, even the ones that buy into this conceptual story, which I think is accurate. I think it’s a correct conceptual story as conceptual stories go. They still have a very hard time sort of really grokking it really internalizing this oneness. Because even if I say, as I normally do, when you die, your consciousness will go nowhere. It will stay exactly where it is right now. You will not Brian anymore, it will be something a lot broader. And then people still can’t help but think Yeah, but but then that’s not really me. Because what I am is Brian. Yeah, but I am is this body limited in space time. So when we say that your consciousness will survive and you will still be what you are if people don’t really feel it, they understand conceptually because of all the metaphors even buy into it. They give themselves intellectual, intellectual permission to consider this a serious, plausible hypothesis, but they don’t feel it in their bones. Right. And, and it’s a pity because what I really mean is that it’s really you to survive. And in the same way that it’s really you that wakes up from the dream. When you wake up from a dream in the morning, you don’t mourn the death of your dream avatar. Do you not realize it you realize it was me all along. Didn’t know it’s during the dream during the dream I thought I was a dream avatar inhabiting a world. Now I woke up now I know that I was doing the whole thing the dream Avatar and the world. Hmm. So your dream avatars toast is dead? He has fast. Yeah, but he’s anybody mourning the death of your dream avatar. Of course not. Because you realize it, it was just a trick, an illusion, a dissociative process in your own mind. So that part of your mind is identified with another part of your mind. In other words, the part of your mind playing the dream avatar became alienated, dissociated from the part of your mind generating the rest of the dream. You thought I am the Avatar and the world is something else. But guess what it was you doing both all along? When you wake up, that’s playing abuse, and there is no problem when you realize it was really you. You are the one who was the Avatar and you are the one who continues to exist after you woke up. If people could just internalize that it’s exactly The same thing that I’m trying to say happens when we die, then it would be more than a conceptual story. But it’s very difficult to get this point across, you would have to have a major direct experience of a transpersonal state to realize that hell barn it’s really me. Yeah, it’s really near what’s going on here. It’s very, very, very hard to say. It’s so close to your core. It’s so intimate. The thing that survives it’s so close to you. So essential, so, so intimate, that you don’t see it. It’s under your nose. If you don’t see it, you miss it altogether. It’s a pity.

Brian Smith 36:39
Yeah, I think you do such a great job and it helped me because I thought, okay, if my ego goes away, then I go away. I am my ego. And you do you get some really great thought exercises. Like Imagine if you if you didn’t have your name, or if you lost a limb, would you still be yourself and you go and if you’ve lost your memories, you’d still have that perception of yourself. So what I got out of was when we when we die, our egoic structure, as you put it in this metaphor kind of unravels, but the core that’s still us is still there. And when that structure unravels, it actually gives us access to or being blocked off from now, that explains me some of the near death experiences people have when they say, well, suddenly I was one with everything, or I knew everything there is to know I hear so many people said, I knew everything there is to know. And that’s because all that information that we’re all gathering is all out there. And I love what you said, we take it with us, you know, so it’s like, we lose this when we go.

Bernardo Kastrup 37:38
In the same way that you don’t lose the memory of the dream when you wake up. Well, sometimes you think you lost it, but actually, it’s there because you may remember it days or even years afterwards. The experiential contents of our individual life. I don’t think they stay because where are they going to go? I mean, what’s going on in his mind, one mind, so where are they going to go? They have no where to go. It’s just the the narrative of self that changes during your dream. In your dream avatar, you have a narrative of self and implicit one, you identify with a part of your dream and not with another. When you wake up you realize that how it was just you well along your narrative of self will change but your core subjectivity, what Schopenhauer called the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature that is one and the same everywhere at all times. It goes nowhere because it is that within which everything happens, including birth and death, so where is it going to go? Yeah,

Brian Smith 38:43
I said I was I was I just actually finished the book up for I read it before but I was reading again, you know, getting ready for the interview to just finish it up this morning. And I just, that helped me like so much to understand that you know, not only am I not going to lose anything when I when I my body dies, but I’ll actually Gain, because all these memories, all these feelings, everything we have, it’s still there. We just don’t have access to it from the limited perspective we have. And so that that what we call death actually can open that up. And that’s been like a second kind of reinforced by people who have had near death experiences.

Bernardo Kastrup 39:16
Absolutely. I mean, the the metaphor of a life review, I think that’s a metaphor because I think it’s much more than than review. It’s probably, you’re living it again, or you’re leaving it in the only way that you have ever lived it. It’s just presents itself to you in a different from a different angle. Maybe. If we could remember everything we’ve ever experienced in our lives, we would be absolutely and completely overwhelmed by richness. So much, so that would become completely dysfunctional, where we just lie in in an ecstasy of emotions of every kind. So we didn’t evolve to experience that we have evolved to let things go. So you remain functional. But I would say that once we are dead, and these evolved mechanisms are no longer playing a function, because they evolved within dream the dream is over so so art mechanisms I think we would be overwhelmed by the richness of our of our lives.

Unknown Speaker 40:25
Yeah, that’s what

Brian Smith 40:27
Yeah, I think that’s that’s right. There are people that can actually remember almost everything and they usually go pretty much insane. People that if you give them a time and date, they can remember exactly what was happening that time of date. And it’s, it seems to be more of a curse than than it is a blessing. So there’s seems to be something about this, coming into the separateness, this this individualization, that causes this not only forgetfulness of our own personal past, but forgetfulness of where we came from.

Bernardo Kastrup 40:55
I think life is what dissociation in the universe is Wind looks like. So it’s not caused by dissociation. It’s not it’s just what dissociation looks like. And in the same way that flames are what combustion looks like, in the same way that lightning is what atmospheric electric discharge looks like. Atmospheric electric discharge doesn’t cause lightning combustion doesn’t cause flames. flames are what combustion looks like lightning is what discharge looks like. Life is what this association in Universal Mind looks like. It’s just the appearance of it. It’s the image of the process. So by definition, if this is correct, by definition, yes, life is intimately tied with a sort of a separation, a forgetting a dissociation from the transpersonal contents of consciousness. So it’s a experiences that go not only beyond your present moment in life, they span your whole life, but they span the whole life of every living being that ever existed. Plus the life of transpersonal states that have never been part of a living being that ought to be very overwhelming, and not conducive to the continuance of life. I think if you were in that state continuously, you wouldn’t even try to survive. And survival would become such an insignificant pixel in the whole image of universal experience, that you would not try to survive. Therefore, life didn’t didn’t evolve to give you access to those states. Because if it did, you would die and you wouldn’t pass on your genes. Right? So that’s the nature of the game. We’ve evolved in order to forget, because that preserves our ability to function.

Brian Smith 42:53
Yeah, it’s such a success. I read your book and you know, people talk about the purpose of life, you know, Why are we here? And, and you know, what I kind of got out of it is, you know, the experience, not only because we think of ourselves as I’m a person, I’m separate from you. I’m separate from everyone else. But this really this idea that we’re all connected to this one, you know, great mind and all having these experiences that contribute to the hall as a notional. I found in a couple of books, there’s a woman named Natalie suchman, who had a near death experience and her experience, she actually goes and she kind of reports back to this, this team of beings, it’s really interested in her experience. And I’m reading a book right now called the team. That’s kind of the same thing. So we’re all here. So I got the same theme from from your philosophy that we’re all experiencing life from individual points of view, but we’re all sharing it at the same time.

Bernardo Kastrup 43:54
You’re hinting on the notion of a to lose a purpose to this all right. Yes. I am not sure there is a premeditated purpose, but I do think there is a natural purpose. And if I look at, based on my own philosophy, if I look at what actually then should be happening is that birth is the beginning of the dissociative process sort of isolates a part of mine from the rest of mine, much like it happens during your dreams, part of you gets isolated from the part of mine that conjures up the rest of the dream. But because of evolution, the evolution of life, these dissociated segments of mind has evolved. Some mental abilities that may be were not present there from the beginning, for instance, meta consciousness, our ability to meta cognize our own experiential states to be self aware to identify ourselves as subjects of experience. In other words, we aren’t our experiences we are dead Which has the experiences, that’s a major leap. My cats are their experiences. They’re not looking in the mirror and thinking or feeling kind of bored. They know they know they are in the flow, instinctual flow of experience. And I think that’s the original state of the universe. But because living beings is neuro dissociated fragments of the Universal Mind, have had to evolve within a planetary ecosystem. And to survive, they have had to develop new cognitive skills, new cognitive abilities, that has led to meta consciousness because for survival, it’s extremely useful. If you can recognize yourself as a separate agent that has a vested interest in survival. Now you can premeditate you can plan you can coordinate activities, all those things that that have made us the dominant species on this planet. So all very nice, but there is something you get along with that. interval evolved for it, but you’ve got along with it, which is your ability to think about mind, your ability to not only be mind but to ponder mentation to form their mind to ask the big questions. I suspect these was the implicit tailors the implicit goal in all this game. And so we accumulate metacognitive insights and meta consciousness insights during life, but we are dissociated so those insights remain with us. But you know, when we die, by definition, death is the end of the dissociation, we sort of released that into a broader field. And you could think of no better metaphor, I don’t want to go there. But I don’t think any of our insights are ever lost. They are just released into a broader context, when we pass by the nature of the thing.

Brian Smith 46:55
Now, this is interesting. I found this in your book. So I want to ask the question. So we see We say at a death the death of the body we are our egoic structure unravels at least somewhat, but we still maintain our individual identity. But you said that birth is the beginning of us is that is so it does do we begin at birth or do we maybe began before birth?

Bernardo Kastrup 47:19
I don’t think what we really are has ever begun is that within which things begin and end. But, you know, one hypothesis is that there is only a universal mind that dissociates when it dissociates life happens, and when life ends, it’s the end of that particular dissociative process and then it goes back to the Universal Mind. So, there are only two levels either we are individual living beings or we are oceanic mind. it is conceivable that there are levels in between that there is a hierarchy of dissociation so when you die, you don’t become the oceanic mind in one go again, you fall back into brother left But also still individual differentiated or individuated. At some level, maybe not a single person, but still differentiated from the rest. It is possible. I don’t know whether we have strong enough empirical reasons to think that that is the case. I know very serious people who are convinced that there are enough empirical reasons to to categorically state that this is the case that you don’t cease to exist as an individual agent, even though you’re no longer an individual person. I’m open minded about that. I think the jury is still out. But if you ask me, do I find it important? Not at all. I don’t think it’s any more important than whether you should mourn the death of your dream avatar when you wake up. Because if it is the case, that there is a hierarchy of this of dissociation, then there is a hierarchy to To dream, there is a hierarchy to the illusion but what is really, really, really going on is there is only one subject experiencing, experiencing itself through multiple points of view. And it is this distinct point of view with that, that arise from dissociation that leads to the illusion of individual agency separateness differentiation, but it is ultimately an illusion. So, for me, it’s not very important, although I know that for many, many people, it is important to to think that some form of indeed individuation of differentiation, persist. And it’s very possible that that’s the case.

Brian Smith 49:44
Yeah, I think there’s, um, I’m not a philosopher, of course, but I think there’s evidence for it, you know, from from mediumship. For example, when they tell us they’re communicating with an individual consciousness on the other side, and the consciousness is still the same as they were when they were here. From their death experiences, even when people And merged into the one. They’re like, but it was still I used to have one is you right?

Bernardo Kastrup 50:05
So but the one is the AI. Exactly,

Brian Smith 50:08
yeah. But they still had that individual perspective, I guess. But you know, it’s it just got out of friend. She had a near death experience and we were talking about reincarnation. And she said, I’m not sure if there’s reincarnation or not. She said, I saw all these other people. But she said, I was so close to them, like the sharing thoughts and everything that I couldn’t tell whether they were me or I was them. There you go. There you go. Yeah, there you go.

Bernardo Kastrup 50:36
What can I add to this? I would just plant another thought in your mind if I may. I’ll try to Yeah. Along with Emmanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. I also think that space and time arm is our cognitive scaffoldings. They don’t exist out there. They are categories of perception. They are modes by which we know things, we learn things. And we can organize our knowledge we need extension, we need a scaffolding on which we can hang pieces of knowledge. So we can organize them in a way that makes sense. So I think space and time are not objectively out there. I think what’s out there is mind outside space time. In space time is something we create as part of the dissociation in order to try and make sense of what’s going on. It’s our own category of perception, built by nature, but it is illusory. If that is true, and out there, there is no space and time. And there is no sense in talking about what happened before somebody’s birth of or where the person is after the person has died. Because this is all time dependent. This is all time language, spatial temporal language. And if it’s true that this is just in our cognition and out there, there is no such a thing, then there is no sense in talking about the end or the beginning of anything.

Brian Smith 52:09
Yeah, I think that’s a really, really good point. And I think the dream analogy kind of helps with that, because we realize this world to create our dreams, we would never say the space or time in our in our dreams, but we perceive it. Or when we’re playing a computer game, you know, our character, the pixels are running across the screen, there’s no space or time in a computer game, but the character can move in space and time. So those analogies helped me because that’s a really difficult thing. When people say to me, you know, space and time we’re just an illusion because I experienced it every day.

Bernardo Kastrup 52:39
Our our way of thinking our language is our assumed space and time it is impossible to talk coherently, without implicitly assuming space and time. It’s built into language. When you talk about the separation between subject and object, that space built into it. When we conjugate a verb in different tenses, past, present and future. I was there I am here, I will be somewhere else. It’s built into language, space and time. So it is hopeless to try to reason outside space and time. All we can do is to abstract the possibility that it’s not really out there that there is no space and time out there. It’s like It’s like a record when you play a record it plays in time, but the information is all there at any one point. Yeah, so here we are playing the record because it helps our cognition. But the idea of there not being space and time, it’s like the record, everything is out there. But in the now and there’s only the now it’s like the record all songs on the record at all times. Actually, arguably, this is even one of the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the blocked universe hypothesis, because time becomes relative to an observer. You’re sort of forced into the idea that everything that has ever been easily will ever be, in fact is, it exists as the block universe and time is just how you traverse that block. It’s how you slice that loaf of bread. That’s time but the love is there at all times the block universe. I mean, at all times here, I’m talking about time again. Yeah. There. Yeah, the love exists, period. Anything else I see about it is about how we traverse the love. It’s already already has a space and time scaffolding built into it. So it’s very difficult to talk about it in explicit, literal and accurate ways. But the whole idea of the end of personal identity is associated with this limitation of our cognition, we have to think in terms of space and time. So you have to think in terms of beginning and end I want to suggest is that this may not really reflect what’s going on. Whoever was is or will ever be his, his period. Yeah.

Brian Smith 55:07
Yeah, I think that’s a great way of looking at it and putting it. I want to touch on one more point that you brought up in the book that that was really interesting about freewill. And I just watched a series on TV called devs was on Hulu was really, really interesting. These because these guys are like the universe is deterministic period. There’s no such thing as freewill, you just you start it it’s a chain of cause and effect. And and that’s it if we had a big enough powerful computer, we could predict you know, everything we could projected in the forward and in the future and in the past. And you brought up freewill and it’s just how you talked about First of all, we can never really experience it, which I never thought about. I never know but I’m making a choice until I’ve made it but also the freewill is maybe outside of our material universe.

Bernardo Kastrup 55:54
This is a nuanced subject. When we when we talk about free, we will let you know our intuition. We don’t mean by free wheel that our choices are random. Right? our choices are not random. They are determined by our tastes, preferences, predispositions, predilections, you know, things that we are. So our choices are not random, they are free. But by being free, we don’t mean that they are random. But they aren’t determined either, right? Because otherwise there wouldn’t be freewill, right. So, the problem is, there is nothing in between randomness and determination. There is no semantic space in between these two concepts. So what we mean by free wheel are determined choices, but choices that are determined by debt with which we identify, in other words, choices determined by us by that which we consider ourselves to be. The problem is we don’t identify To find with patterns of brain activity inside our scope, because that’s an abstraction, we don’t identify with that. So if somebody tells you that your choices are determined by patterns of brain activity in your skull, it violates your sense of freewill because that’s not how you see yourself. What you think of as yourself, are your felt predispositions, your felt preferences and tastes, your felt preferences and tastes, not neurons firing inside your head? I don’t think there is a contradiction here because neurons firing without within your head are just what your felt preferences look like from a perspective but they are the image of the process, not the cause of the process. So I think if there is only one Universal Mind by definition there is freewill in the sense that everything that’s chosen by the Universal Mind is chosen by itself. There is nothing beyond it. You see I’m not free free to choose if there are outside forces that impose a choice on me. If I cannot choose my favorite job, because there are economic pressures for me to pick that one instead of anything else, then I’m not free to make the choice, because there are external forces that impinge on me and force my hand on making the choice. But at the level of the Universal Mind, there are no external forces. There is only it it’s the one thing that’s going on, so even to talk about for you, loses its meaning. Because whatever choices the Universal Mind makes, they are determined, they are determined by the Universal Mind by the inherent preferences and predispositions of the Universal Mind, which arise from the fact that the Universal Mind is what it is. It’s just what it is. It can’t help being something else it is what it is. So he chooses according to what it is, according to how it fused what he prefers. First and so forth. So, yes, it’s free but at the same time, it’s fully determined. It’s determined by what it is. So the whole talk about Free Will I think sort of dissipates into a semi semantic void at that level now the question is this free will exist at our individual level? There is tricky I also don’t think that’s very important and I’ll tell you why. This your dream avatar have free will.

Unknown Speaker 59:29
No, it doesn’t

Brian Smith 59:31
seem like oh, we’ll write Yes, my well Yeah, it does. Yes.

Bernardo Kastrup 59:34
Yeah. So we your dream avatar was an illusion. How can an illusion have freewill? Right. It’s not what’s going on. It’s an artifact of thoughts. Right. So I think that’s exactly what’s going on right now. So I don’t think we have freewill. But we don’t exist to begin with a cognitive hallucination. At the same time, I could say in full confidence. Yes, we have free will. What we really really Are which is not the Bernardo and Brian and somebody else what we really, really are as free will? what we think we are doesn’t? It can’t it’s an illusion. Yeah, that’s not even there to begin with. How can it have anything? It’s not there?

Brian Smith 1:00:15
Yeah, that’s a really great point. So I one last thing I want to touch on is your book more than allegory? Because for me, you know, I, it was really interesting how you basically said, we have to have allegory, because there are some things we just can’t talk about with, with our language limits with the limits of our mind. And for you really redeemed for me a lot of these things that we say are just allegories just, you know, it’s just a, it’s just a fictional story. And I gotta give you the last part of more than allegory, you could be a fiction writer, it was really, you, you created this, this this new allegory this new, as you call it, a religious allegory that people wouldn’t recognize as religious. So if you could just finish by talking about that, I’d appreciate it.

Bernardo Kastrup 1:00:57
About to the third part of that book,

Brian Smith 1:01:00
Apart from the book and about the whole idea of allegory,

Bernardo Kastrup 1:01:02
okay. We are so used to this unexamined assumption that language can point to the ultimate reality literally. And he never stopped to think that there is no reason to believe that the cognitive apparatus of primate evolved the very peripheral planet on a peripheral Solar System probably didn’t evolve enough to pin down the literal facts of reality. I mean, we are deluding ourselves. It’s like, if a mouse would look up to you and say, I think I can solve the grand unification theory problems. I mean, you would laugh at that mouse, the mouse just doesn’t have what it takes to figure that out. I think we are the mouse in another frame, in other in another. from another perspective, we are the mice and this man. We think that we pinpointed the literal facts of reality. Of course we can’t. Language didn’t even evolve for this. I think allegories, myths are very important because they admit that they are not pointing at anything literal. They are not telling you look, this really happened. As I’m saying, if you interpret an allegory or a myth like this, you’re flattening it. You’re making it a pancake instead of the rich, three dimensional thing that it’s meant to be. What they do is they point your mind in a certain direction, such that you can pick what to pick up what is really going on with your peripheral vision. You know what I mean? Yes, absolutely. So they guide you to look here, but what they want to show you is not that it’s what you can pick up with your peripheral vision, if you’re looking more or less in that direction. And I think that’s what myths do. They they help us pick The real nature of reality, what is really going on with our peripheral vision. But for that it’s important that we keep in mind that we shouldn’t take it too literally because to take it literally is to kill it. Yes. And we should keep alert for what’s going on in our peripheral vision, when we indulge ourselves in a myth, which I think is something that we would benefit from doing a lot more than we do today. We’ve lost respect for myths, with with associated myths with fiction. That’s not what they are. It’s not fiction. It’s it’s, it’s a metaphor. It’s a symbol. It is pointing at something that is true and nonfiction, but it’s doing so indirectly. Through a what Peter Kingsley would call

Unknown Speaker 1:03:52
what’s the word he used?

Bernardo Kastrup 1:03:55
A form of incantation Hmm. It’s an incantation. And that’s the value they have, if we receive them, take them on board, as that incantation that makes make something appear within us, as opposed to pointing our eyes to something that exists out there. They turn your eyes somewhere. But by doing that something appears within you that was not in the words of the myth. It evokes that within you. And we’ve lost that ability in our society, which is a phenomenal pity.

Brian Smith 1:04:33
Well, I think most of the problems of our world and all the problems are real can be pinned to the fact that we don’t know who we are, that we have this materialist mindset that we think we’re meaningless cosmological accidents were random, random configurations of atoms and molecules. We, we were born and we’re going to die. So I really, really appreciate the work that you’re doing and I appreciate it from a philosophical question. With a scientific perspective doesn’t require me to have any faith in anything. I can just look at this and you can read yourself through it. I can only read a little bit at a time because it’s so it’s so deep. I have to like I have to sit and reflect on it for a while, but just really understand what I’ve just read. Are there any Is there anybody else is doing what you’re doing that preaching the message of real idealism? Oh, certainly.

Bernardo Kastrup 1:05:23
Okay. Certainly I’m trying to bring them together and okay becomes more visible. But you know, this message is not is nothing new. It has been around for at least what 3500 years. The the original scriptures behind the Vedas were passed on the first time. This is an intuition that has been in the human species since the dawn of our species. When we were connected to the ground of reality, we knew it. We were not metacognitive of it. We didn’t know that we knew it. We knew it. And now we got lost in a conceptual story. So now, it has become a discovery. Nothing is being discovered here. Yes, the raw, primordial reality, to which we have always been connected by our umbilical cord, it’s the ground from which we arise. So deep within, at the core of our being we all know and have always known it. But there are other people making it explicit. Some of them are quantum physicists, and they use the language of quantum physics. Some of them are analytic philosophers, and they use the language of analytic philosophy and reason logic. Others are philosophers in the continental tradition, and they use completely different language to talk about the same things and you can look at the phenomenologists at the constructivists it’s very different language. They’re saying the same thing. And then there are the spiritual guys the new advice, the non duality guys. They’re saying the same thing, Robert spyera, IBS Shanti. These guys are all saying the same thing with different metaphors, different language, different references that they substantiated differently. So it looks like a call funny, have different messages. But if we can really go past the appearances and really grasp the underlying meaning, man, everybody’s saying the same thing. It’s it. It’s all over the place. If we have the eyes to see,

Brian Smith 1:07:28
yeah, just just in the last couple of weeks, I was just fumbling around the internet, and I came across something from the Khan Academy. And this guy was explaining Hinduism. And when he starts off with Brahman and Atman, and and Maya, it was like, This is the same thing. Bernardo is saying, it’s the exact same thing and it’s Hinduism, which is what 5000 years old, I don’t even know but

Bernardo Kastrup 1:07:50
yeah, but you have to you have to have the eyes to to go where the myth wants to take you because you’ve interpreted literally you just say, oh, Hinduism is a politics. Religion many gods. No, it is not. And they’re quite clear about it there is only Brahman there is only one thing going on. And everything else is generated for Brahman within Brahman in a, in a fin tastic strike of cognitive hallucination that that’s basically what it’s saying, in mythological form in the language of the people of the time, the time when it was written today, we can’t read it in that way. Because you see, those myths were written for people who could only understand things symbolically, the idea of a literal truth didn’t exist. That’s not how the human mind worked. Originally, we sort of invented it the past few centuries, this idea of something literal, isn’t is fresh, it’s rather new. We naturally think by analogy. In other words, we think symbolically, yes. And these texts were written to be read that way because when they were written, there was no other way to read it. was the only thing the only game in town. Now we created this distinction metaphorical and literal. And it got lost in that. And we think that those were just myths, or just just fictions they weren’t.

Brian Smith 1:09:11
Yeah. And that’s a big mistake we make even with the Bible, which compared to those things is relatively modern. But people read the Bible as literal. And if you can step back and take a metaphorical view of the Bible, it’s so rich. You talks about God coming into his own creation through Jesus, and how that lines up with all the other religious allegories or myths,

Bernardo Kastrup 1:09:30
and things like the book of Job that’s rich, the book of Job, I mean, that’s subject for a lifetime of meditation, if you can read it, in the way it was meant to be read, which is not as God literally torturing for a job, right? for no reason. Right? Just because the devil dared God to do it. No, no, no, there is something much deeper going on there. That speaks to what we are.

Brian Smith 1:10:00
Yeah. Well, I want to thank you very much for doing this. As I said, it’s been a thrill for me to sit down and have a conversation with you. I’ve learned I learned so much from your books and your lectures and encourage people to go to your website. It’s Could you give your website again, please? One word Bernardo kastrup. With a cake kastrup.com. And from there you can go everywhere else on social media, videos, papers, essays, books, everything. Yeah, you’re doing fantastic work. So I appreciate everything you’re doing. And thank you for your time today.

Bernardo Kastrup 1:10:31
Thanks for having me. Brian Smith.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:33
You have a good evening. You too. Take care. Bye.

Brian Smith 1:10:36
Bye. That’s it for another episode of grief to growth. I sure hope you got something out of it. Please stay in contact with me by reaching out at www. Grief to growth calm. That’s grief the number two growth com or you can text the word growth to 31996. That’s simply text growth gr o wt h 231. 996 so if you’re watching this on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe so hit the subscribe button and then hit the little bell here and it’ll notify you when I have new content. Always please share the information if you enjoy it that helps me to get more views and and get the message out to more people. Thanks a lot and have a wonderful day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

I met Daniel about a year ago in a group for bereaved parents. Daniel was volunteering his time to help the parents out. I could immediately sense he is a sincere and generous guy with a high ethical standard. Daniel was raised as a Christian, as was I. When his mediumship opened up spontaneously in January of 2017, he didn’t know what had hit him. He wasn’t sure he believed in mediumship and he thought if it were real, it incompatible with his Christian faith. Daniel studied and prayed hard before deciding that this was a gift from God to be use for God’s purposes. Fast forward a few years and Daniel has done hundreds of readings that have brought healing and increased people’s faith in God and the afterlife.

We discuss Daniel’s journey and his new book “Why Are We Here?”

For more on Daniel, look him up on Facebook at Daniel John Medium. He does free readings every Monday night on Facebook Live.

ℹ️ https://www.danieljohnmedium.com

Transcript

Announcer 0:00
Hi there. Welcome to grief to growth podcast. Your host is Brian Smith, spiritual seeker, best selling author, grief survivor and life coach. Ryan believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Ryan says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you’ve been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Brian Smith 0:35
Hey, everybody, this is Brian Smith back with another episode of grief to growth. And today I’ve got with me my friend, Daniel, john. And Daniel’s been on I think a couple of times we’ve had conversations on on grief to growth. But Daniel is a certified spiritual medium. He’s a Reiki Master and he’s the author of the new book. Why are we here reflections on life from a spiritual medium. So, Daniel with that, welcome to greater growth. Thank you, Brian.

Daniel John 1:00
Thank you for having me. Daniel, it’s I’ve known you, I guess for maybe a little over a year now, we met through a group on Facebook that you were doing some work with voiceover angels, for Angel. And

Brian Smith 1:13
now it’s really been really interesting getting to know you and watch you as you’ve developed as, as a as a medium and as a person and with your faith, and with your book. And so your book discusses all that, and discusses like, how you came out as a medium, and how your faith has evolved and and those types of things. So let’s, let’s go ahead and start with that. So how did you discover that you were a medium? or How did you become a medium?

Daniel John 1:36
So I think I think, you know, those are gifts that are given from the Holy Spirit. So I think it’s always been there. I don’t think it was time to really come to fruition until a few years ago. And the short version I was I was sitting next to a woman at a restaurant, and

I started getting these like feelings, visions, pictures, just things started coming to me names and ended up being somehow some way even though this was against my religion or

You know, even against what I believe to be possible, her husband who had passed away six months before, you know, he had passed away right in front of her. And she was having a hard time. And I didn’t really know any of this. I knew he had passed because she was we were co workers at work. And she announced when she was introduced to our team that her husband passed, but that’s all I knew. So I sat next to her at a restaurant and a work event. And he came through and she after it, so it’s 45 minutes of just like his name and things. And I thought, you know, did I read her mind? Or did like, where did this stuff come from? And I was like nervous about all that. But I know that after the reading, she was so grateful and so full of love and was so happy to connect with him. Somehow, someway. I realized at that point, I need to figure out what that was about. And if I can help people, which is something I always love doing, then I want to figure out what that was about so I can continue to help more. Yeah, so you’re just you’re having this conversation with her and spontaneously things started coming to you that she was apparently validating

Yep. And that was my first official quote unquote reading. And I talked about that story in the book of how that was the first time I’ve ever happened in an accident, and also towards the latter part of the book about, you know, the process, because it’s not how, even though you and I are having a conversation right now, it’s, it’s very, very subtle, and you have to pick up on those things. But the main goal is to help others because some people when they experience grief, they handle it different ways. And some people lose their faith in God and my job and I’ve been told this, their spirit is to help people rekindle their faith with them. Yeah, so so you, you, you don’t believe that mediumship is possible, you actually believe it’s against your faith, but now you find yourself giving a reading. So how did how did that hit you emotionally after this happened? I mean, I was confused. I didn’t know what happened. You know, and even back then I didn’t even know they were that I mean, I just remember being told, you know, and I was raised Catholic and saved the ninth grade. And I just remember hearing that. I really didn’t then I read Scripture, but

I was more of a New Testament, I read more of the New Testament. But when I, when I finally came out this getting a little ahead, I, I looked at some Old Testament scripture and found out that wow, this really, you know, this is a really, quote unquote, against the Bible. So then I went on this journey of just praying and trusting and reading books and asking God and you’re just finally coming to the point and realizing, and this is a spiritual gift to them that I’m, like, supposed to do supposed to use to help others. So yeah, very confusing, actually. Yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting journey. And you and I were talking before we get started, I think you and I’ve taken similar journeys, where we have this kind of fundamentalist faith, for lack of a better word that says, This is right, and this is wrong. And then something comes along in our life, and it challenges that. And in my case, I had a relative who turned out to be gay. And when he passed away, I was told he was in hell. And I’m just like, this doesn’t make any sense to me, that this person who was one of the best people I’ve ever known in my life, is gay and the church wouldn’t accept him because of that.

Brian Smith 5:00
Therefore, God is going to punish him eternally. I’m like, this doesn’t make sense. So I went on the same journey as you. I’m like, I gotta find it. How do I read the Bible properly? What? Where did it come from? You know, all those things, and then we find out that there’s been a lot of misinterpretation.

Unknown Speaker 5:16
I feel that same way. For sure. Yeah. So.

Brian Smith 5:20
So you have this gift of as a media, but you’re still not really sure. mediumship is a real thing. So your next step, I guess you actually went to see a medium, right? Yeah, yeah.

Daniel John 5:31
So it was a few months of in the book, I also talked about some things of the world. I had to kind of give up the, you know, to realize and embrace this gift. But yeah, being a skeptic. I had to go see a medium for myself. Absolutely. And it was, like, you know, there’s certain things that you can like, you know, I was thinking, maybe she’s googling it, or maybe she did this, but, you know, I talked about in the book, but I tested her I limited my responses. I watched her, you know, mannerisms. You know, I listened to what she said.

Without giving her too much information, and without a doubt, I walked out of that reading with like, Okay, this is real Oh, by the way, she mentioned that this was something that I was supposed to do. And that’s that I had a feeling about that there was a part of me that thought that if I can do that, I should be doing it. And she hinted at it without me even saying anything about it. Yeah, and I think it’s really the thing about you that I’ve known you for a while now, you’re all about helping people. So you’re not a person that got into mediumship to make money or become famous. In fact, you still have a full time job. This is what you, you know, you do to help people. And I know for a long time, I don’t think you even charge for your readings. Is that right? I did, I did him free for a while. And then I kind of leaned on some other mediums and I talked about this in the book as well about why I do charge. I came across very, very reasonable, but you know, like, I have a studio and so there’s a cost to that. So yeah, free at first just to make sure that I was doing it. But But you know, that being said, I volunteer as you know, for, you know, voices of our angels. Yeah, you know, I’ve given 20

You’re 30 and I talk about this in the book as well reading. So just, you know, people who reach out to me that the Holy Spirit guides me to give them a free reading where I don’t need to collect money, but I explained it as a balanced thing. And I do keep my costs very reasonable. But I’m big on tithing, you know, typing, as you know, is in the two biggest religions in the world. And I don’t think that’s a mistake. So I love getting back and I really love helping people. It’s the love. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. I actually run a Facebook group where I try to bring parents and mediums together. And one of the questions that keeps coming up is people are like, I just think it’s unfair that people charge for gifts. You know, if it’s given to you as a gift, you should give it away but as you just touched on a couple things there what may one thing is, it’s an exchange. The other thing is you have expenses as a medium got overhead, you have a studio, I know a lot of mediums do a lot of training.

Brian Smith 7:48
Almost every medium I know does a lot of giving back, you know, free things. And our time is worth something, you know, all the time that we’re doing that you’re doing doing reading, you’re not spending doing something else. You’re taking away.

way for your family or something else. So it’s interesting to me that every other gift that people have the gift of being a surgeon, you know, will gladly pay a surgeon will gladly pay someone a plumber to come to our house and fix our pipes or an electrician. So I’m going to perform a service but there’s something about mediumship that and it’s also people even pay their pastor, right. We don’t expect pastors to do work for free. So I I do want to get that out there, you know, support you and your profession, that it’s it’s fine to charge you you have to charge you have to you have to make a living.

Daniel John 8:33
Yeah, there’s a lot of a lot of points, but I think the main thing is, is one it’s a balanced thing. You know, it’s I’ve even traded with other practitioners where if it’s a Reiki, you know, whether it’s Reiki or acupuncture where I’d give a reading and do exchange or something like that. But yeah, the balanced thing is, it’s a deeper explanation. Through all my readings, I’ve understood that there is a balance that needs to happen and sometimes money is an exchange is it and the other point that you made is very valid like what

I’m doing readings, if I have some days, you know, on weekends, I’ll have like three readings in a row, and I’m not with my kids. So and I and I charge very reasonable I can I try to keep it like to where it’s not expensive. And we also have to pay, I pay all my taxes. So when you boil it down, I really don’t make a lot of money at all, when you have the electric bill, the studio, the rent, you know, I have to use those money for some readings to pay for that stuff. So it really is a balance and it helps out. But at the same time, I do think it’s important to not to play the other side of the fence is where I do give a lot of free readings. I give them away I donate them I try to donate my time so that I am big on tithing, like I said, and I try to balance that and lean on the Holy Spirit to guide me in when I should charge and when I shouldn’t. And on a human level. I don’t like charging money. I really don’t like collecting it, but it does it pays the bills and supports the family. For sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So your book. I just finished it. I got it this week. It’s a great book. It’s really interesting. I guess it’s kind of a

Brian Smith 9:57
combination of a memoir and also kind of

A Guide for life you give a lot you get some advice in there like about how to raise your vibration you talk about you know diet, which is something I haven’t seen in a in a spiritual book before. So let’s let’s kind of go through some of the things in the book in terms of some of the advice you give let’s, let’s start with diet. I thought that was an interesting chapter.

So it’s funny my I had two editors for my book and the first editor was like, why are you including a chapter on diet and a spiritual book. And number one, I’m actually a former personal trainer, and focus on nutrition. So I feel like that’s something that a lot of people need a little help with. So it’s a very basic chapters chapter 17. And it just includes things that we shouldn’t shouldn’t eat and the main reason is in another chapter in the book is that we are energy and all the things that we do to our body, including diet have an effect on us. So when we when I talk when the book processed foods and you know certain foods like alcohol and sugars and things like that, it changes our energetic vibration. So diet is just one piece of the puzzle i thought was very important to include in the book.

Yeah, like, I think that’s, you know, the thing is we are, we’re spirit but we’re also human, we’re also body. And they, the our spirit interacts with our body, I think to extent. And as you said, you know, if our body’s not feeling well, then it’s going to it’s going to bring our vibration down for lack of a better word. So I thought that that chapter was really important, even though you took away all my favorite stuff.

I mentioned that too, is like, all right. I just mixed all the good stuff. I know. Yeah. But we can. Well, yeah, I was gonna say, but I do. Like you gave me permission that moderation because I first I was like, Okay, I can’t I can’t have a beer anymore. But you said, Yeah, you can have it moderation. So yeah, I appreciate that. So.

So in the book, you talk about your faith, and I know your faith is very, very important to Union. We could tell already just you know, the conversation starting out here. So how would you describe your faith journey? Where are you now? You mentioned you started off Catholic. You were saved. You

He said, I think he’s an eighth or ninth grade. So, talk to me about your progression in your area, not your progression but your journey.

Daniel John 12:08
Through the whole life K through six Catholic, you know, pretty strict Catholics saved in ninth grade I was with an organization called Youth for Christ. And at that point, I started following the teachings of Jesus and I have not stopped that. I’ve kind of changed what I call my religion. I’m a follower of Jesus and His teachings and a Christ follower. But I’ve also looked into the teachings of Buddha and Mohammed and some other religions because I feel like it’s good to be open minded and expand. Now I call my religion love. I follow the teachings of Jesus. So could you call me a Christian? Yes, because I follow the teachings of Christ. We talked about earlier I’m, I’m far from a fundamentalist because I lean on my relationship with Jesus through my heart. I use scripture as a book to spread love. I don’t use it to judge or to dam or condemn or I feel like Jesus speaks just as much

As he does, you know, back then he speaks now just as much as he did back then. And so I read the Bible daily, I use scripture to spread love, and my religion is love, but I really follow the teachings of mostly of Jesus. So you can call my son, I relate to Christianity, but I also have a lot of, you know, and just really quick, I’ll share it. I don’t believe in maternal health.

I don’t believe Jesus is the only way you know, john 14 six says, I am the way I’m the only way to Lord and a lot of fundamentalists think that he is. I grown to accept that his teachings, my interpretation of the Bible is and it’s jhanas Is that you? His teachings are the way I also believe, like you’ve mentioned about your friend earlier that I believe God made a homosexual person that way in this lifetime for a specific reason. I don’t think that you know, on Corinthians six nine, for instance, where it says homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God and we’ll research on that. So long story short, I use the Bible to spread love. I follow the teachings of Jesus

And what he taught me is to love, have compassion for others forgive, and to just look at the positives all the time and do the best you can in this life to help other people be the best they can. So yeah, yeah, I’m like right there with you and I struggled for a long time with, do I still call myself a Christian or not? And I choose not to at this point, just because there’s so much explaining I have to do if I say I’m a Christian, well, I’m a Christian that doesn’t believe in eternal hell. I’m a Christian doesn’t believe that Jesus had to die to save me from an angry guy. You know, I’m a Christian. It doesn’t play that. You know, like, I think you kind of went through the math like I did to there’s like 7 billion people on the planet, like 2 billion of us are Christians, maybe. And so that means two thirds of the people in the world are going to go to hell. And by the way, there’s like 30,000 Christian denominations. And most of them say the other ones are going to go to hell, because when I was growing up, Catholics are going to hell, because Catholics didn’t, didn’t speak in tongues. And if you didn’t speak in tongues, you were going to hell. So all that stuff.

Brian Smith 15:00
Just just I’m like, okay, I can’t. I’m a big follower of Jesus. I think Jesus is a special master as some people would say, a special being I follow his teachings. I think he is a great example. And I think like you said, when I started doing my extra Jesus in the Bible, and I saw that verse, I’ve heard people say the same thing when Jesus said, I am the way the father, it’s like not he didn’t mean I just spoke of his teachings. So he was he was saying, My example with the life that I’m living, the things that I’m telling you it’s and it’s all about love. Like you said, yeah, it is Christ consciousness. Right? So Jesus name it was Yeshua, right. And then we call him Jesus the Christ because the Christ is the consciousness. And then when we talk about which we’ll probably talk about next about mediumship in the Bible,

Daniel John 15:46
you know, well, we’ll get to that. I know you want to get to that, but yeah, I followed his teachings, but I’ve also looked into Hinduism, Buddhism, even Judaism which is, you know, very similar with Christianity, but are some of the whole versions but also a

You know, Islam and some teachings from Mohammed. And it’s really interesting. There’s a lot of similarities I talked about in the book, there’s tithing and praying and, you know, fasting and visiting your home, you know, you know, the church, quote, unquote, there’s a lot of similarities. There people are open minded enough to to understand that there’s more than just one religion, and also to last thing, you know, Jesus is available through the Scripture, but I think he’s, and I mentioned this before, I think he’s available now. I felt like I’ve had conversations with the Holy Spirit. Wouldn’t Christ consciousness, though, now that by just what just reading a book, and I think I think things change, and I think the Bible is a book to be used to store love, and that Christ Consciousness is available to us. All right now today, it’s not stuck in a book 2000 years ago. Yeah. And I completely agree. You know, what’s interesting is I was going through my transformation, I was going to different churches, and ended up at the United Church of Christ. And one of the things was, God is still speaking, it was something that they said and another thing that was never placed

Brian Smith 17:00
Regardless place the comma. So I started thinking, Okay, well, why did God stop speaking? 2000 years ago? You know it apparently he spoke to Paul and that was it and guy just, you know, pulled away and said, You know you guys are on your own. So when I talked to my fundamentalist friends and they say I was talking to one of them about, like near death experiences and I said that, you know, I talk to people all the time and have their death experiences, etc. And it’s like, whatever, they don’t believe in those as well. I think Paul had at least a couple near death experiences. And he’s like, what, what do you mean? So I tell him about the road to Damascus, right? He sees a bright light, he hears a voice, he falls to his knees, he struck blind. You know, all these things. I’m like, it sounds a lot like the people I talked to who’ve had near death experiences. And because yeah, but it was Paul. I’m like, but why do you believe Paul that wrote this 2000 years ago, but you don’t believe john that I spoke to yesterday that had a similar experience?

Yeah, well, then it’s like, well, yeah, Brian, Brian, you know, I come down to it’s all about the it’s about the Bible. It’s all about the Bible.

Which is just such a, I hate to say it’s a brainwash perspective, because why should we think I mean this? This was written by man at some point. And as they say inspired by the Holy Spirit, okay, fine. Why did the Holy Spirit stop speaking? And I gotta tell you when I when I read Neale Donald Walsch conversations with God The first time I read it, guy was reading blasphemy. You know, this guy’s like, you know, God said, God download all stuff to me, but I read it I’m like, but there’s so much truth in what he’s saying. And then I thought, Why couldn’t it be true? You know, but we’ve all been as Christians we were taught this is that God stop speaking then don’t listen to anybody else. Yeah, it’s crazy. There’s actually Krish I’ve read a couple near death experience books that were written by Christian writers. There’s a couple of them I’ve read and they’re very good. And they speak about, you know, one of them can’t think of James garlow world one of them. He has an interesting perspective on cute spirit communication. But yeah, there’s actually Christian writers who write about NDS and how important they are

And how similar they are and how pretty much that heaven exists. Is there a point?

Well, Howard Stern was a total atheist when he had that experience and he now is a Christian pastor. He came back and he became a Christian. After his near death experience and talks about Jesus and the Bible and odd stuff, he’s a UCC pastor, I think he’s retired now. Mary Neal was the Catholic when she had her near death experience still, I consider myself Catholic, as far as I know. So I’m sorry to interrupt you. I read her book, but she the one that got in the boating accident, yeah. Yeah, it’s a good. I like yeah, it’s good. Yeah, that was a really, really interesting. As for me, being a person who’s had a child transition, you know, and she talks about, she knew that that her son was going to pass and her that her whole journey with that, that just, you know, that really fascinated me. But it’s really, it’s,

Unknown Speaker 19:52
it’s interesting why some Christians think that near death experiences are of the devil. No, because the Bible doesn’t say anything.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
About that, but for some reason they’ve made it up that, you know, I guess they say the dead No, nothing, you know, stuff like that which is, again, as we call it, the Old Testament or Hebrew Scripture kind of passage, based on an understanding that they had at the time. But I don’t want to steal your thunder, but you talk about why you think mediumship is okay. And it’s a biblical basis. So, go ahead and tell me what you think about that. Yeah, it’s chapter six is the biggest chapter in the book. It’s actually part of the reason I think spirit guided me to write the book because there there are a certain amount of people that are open minded enough to say, Okay, I was taught this, I always believe this, but there’s this, you know, and there’s not just me, there’s other authors as other, you know, mediums. They’re saying these things, and I don’t know, part of me feels like it’s true. So that’s why I wrote it. I made a YouTube video about mediumship and Christianity. Long story is a 20 minute video and it’s very compact, but a long story short is

Unknown Speaker 20:57
when I first started doing this

Unknown Speaker 21:00
You know, if I would have listened to what I thought was the truth, or what I was told was the truth before, or even what a book told me was the truth, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today. And where that is, and this is kind of this novel backwards is I get

Unknown Speaker 21:17
I’ve done over 1000 readings and the emails, the phone calls the messages of healing and faith in God and you know, you know, you’ve lost you’ve had a daughter transition, and you’ve actually made a she’s come through I think for a couple of readings we’ve done and it’s so peaceful and healing and loving. So when I gave the readings to the woman in Boston, and I realized she was so happy and thankful and then I realized after coming out when someone wrote me an email, there’s all these Old Testament scripture and you are channeling to the devil and you’re going to hell and all these things like that. I took a step back was like alright, well maybe I need to quit maybe all these like healings and loving and faith in God all this stuff is just like a hoax and maybe it really is the devil fooling me. That’s why like literally bought the

Unknown Speaker 22:00
40 hour version of the Bible, I read it, I absorbed it, I prayed and had God lead me to book after book. And during this time, just as I am now, I drive a lot for work. So I would listen to a book or two a week and absorb and I absorbed more listening than I do. Reading. Thank God for audible. And I live literally about 100 plus books in the first year and a half about mediumship, the Bible and everything in between all kinds of spirit spiritual things and ask God be those books. So long story short, you can look at Old Testament scripture, and it’s a real long story short, and you can look at some of the things that are written there and think that they apply 100% of black and white today, but I strongly feel that they don’t. And in the book I talk about and one of the one of the there’s lots of verses, but I do Deuteronomy 2222. Where you know, it says that if a man and woman

Unknown Speaker 22:48
are found being unfaithful, they both shall die. Right. Then john a three when Jesus is brought a woman from the Pharisees, what do you do with her? She was caught being unfaithful Jesus doesn’t

Unknown Speaker 23:00
condemn her. He doesn’t even he doesn’t kill her. He just asked her to stop sinning, no basis of everything that I do. And then everything that anyone should do is based in love. Are you doing because of love? Or are you doing it because of fear? And it’s one or the other. And you know what people have certain gifts. We all have gifts, and some of them abuse them. Some of them use them for not good things. It’s like any other profession. There’s people that you know, like you mentioned, doctors malpractice, you know, mediums you have some people that are charlatans and do this just to make money and things like that. That’s what I believe in john four. One it says test the spirits. Why are we supposed to test the spirits if we’re not supposed to communicate with them? You know, Jesus was a medium. If you look in Matthew 17, he channels Moses, Moses has been dead for a long time. Matthew 17 I got goosebumps is one of the biggest Bibles or one of the biggest chapters in the verse, that’s when God announces that Jesus 17 five, this is my son, this is who I you know, has come here for love. You mentioned everything like that, but so you can look it up.

Unknown Speaker 24:00
Testament scripture and see that it says in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and kings and Chronicles that you’re not supposed to consult mediums I answer to those those exists for a reason. Number one, we should not be communicating connecting with spirit. If you’re not protected in God’s light and you’re educated and you’re doing it for love. If you’re not, I highly recommend that you don’t, you can. God blessed us with freewill as freewill as souls as human beings. It works the same way. There are souls that are in the earth plane that have chosen not to return to the light to heaven, because of the free will do not want to connect with them. I have to say prayers before every reading, I have to say prayers. After every reading, I have to shine a white light on me I have to ask for his permission. These gifts are from the Holy Spirit. So am I listening to Old Testament scripture? Maybe there are people that shouldn’t do mediumship and should listen to Old Testament Scriptures why they exist. It’s not so black and white. That’s what I would say. There’s a short it’s not so black and white. There are people that have been given gifts and it says in Corinthians chapter 12, verse four through 11 gifts of spiritual

Unknown Speaker 25:00
discernment, speaking in tongues, prophecy, their gifts. It’s written by Paul in the Corinthians to say that we all have these gifts to help other people. It’s written in Peter, First Peter, chapter four, eight through 11, and talks about using your gifts, your spiritual gifts to help others. So by listen to the old dogma, right, or what I was taught before about mediums, then I wouldn’t be experiencing the love, the healing, and everything that goes along with mediumship. And like for you, for I do a lot of readings for parents who’ve lost children. And if they committed suicide, or I’m sorry, if I’m trying to work on my word, and if they were responsible for their own passing.

Unknown Speaker 25:39
You know, that’s fundamentalist not to speak for all of them, but a lot of them from conversations would think that they’re an eternal hell. They also know as a parent, am I going to be saved and spend my life in eternal bliss of all my child is an eternal damnation, or you know, is maybe that’s not true. And so when I channel these souls that have fallen on their own hand or committed their own

Unknown Speaker 26:00
After taking a case give READ WRITE wording in there on the other side in the spiritual realm, and I know not know, because I don’t claim to know anything but I believe all my experiences in the hundreds of souls I’ve connected to, that have taken their own life. There, okay. They tell me things that would just blow your mind. So you can either be stuck in Old Testament scripture and saying, nope, I don’t want to do anything with that. Or you could say that, hey, maybe what I’ve read what I’ve always believed, and what I’ve been taught may not be true. Because there’s people to your point right here right now that are telling me different things. And there’s this little part of me, this is who I want to reach those little part of people that say, you know, maybe there is some truth to this, maybe my child is okay, maybe they’re not going to interpret my uncle who was Jewish or my other person who didn’t believe in Jesus or this other religion, you know, that wasn’t believing in Jesus, they’re not an eternal hell, that they are okay. And so that will be what I do and you can to answer your question long story short, we can either look at scripture as black and white, the only truth of God

Unknown Speaker 27:00
Or we can say, hey, maybe God still speaks today, the Holy Spirit still still speak today, Jesus actually still speaks today. And there are other things that may be a reality, or a possibility that may be different than my, my thoughts and beliefs and Old Testament scripture. Yeah, I think you made a lot of excellent points there. And some of the things that I went through, you know, a one of the things that I went through when I was going through my transition, I guess, is that I was reading the, I hate to use the word Old Testament because it’s actually in the front, two people who are Jewish. So it’s, I call it Hebrew Scriptures. But when we took when we talked about the Hebrew Scriptures, those are written for the Jews, first of all, and we’re Gentiles. So it’s like, we were never under the law. We read those as if they applied us. The other thing is in the same book that says where you know, you shouldn’t consult with mediums, or you shouldn’t be homosexual, and also says you shouldn’t eat shellfish. And it uses the exact same word that it’s a quote, abomination. And it was these were, these were dietary things. These are restrictions that were put on the Jews to make them separate. So

Unknown Speaker 28:00
There’s there’s so much that we could talk about there. But this is why we really have to dig in and understand, like even the concept of being a homosexual there was no concept of homosexuality back then. So it was they didn’t understand that there were there were some people who just had that orientation. So when Paul talks about when Paul talks about a man lying with another man, he’s actually talking about

Unknown Speaker 28:21
pedophilia, where men were like, grown men were boys. So it was it was a different thing. So that’s my whole point. We got it, we got to really dig in and understand.

Unknown Speaker 28:30
And it all comes down to love. That’s all what it means. It’s the only English word to explain is love. Are you doing something based in love? or fear? Like for instance, marriage, you know, you can look at certain scriptures it says, Man and Woman forever, whatever. Or, you know, from my experience, I’ve had souls telling me that they were supposed to be with this person for a chunk of time, and then there was supposed to be with another person for a chunk of time, and that would if you looked at it, to Scripture, that’s like wrong, but in reality is it love If two people can mutually agree

Unknown Speaker 29:00
They’re gonna separate and then they end up being happily married. I have friends that are friends with the new husbands and wives and everyone’s happy and full of love, but it’s against scripture. So like, Is that wrong in God’s eyes? I highly doubt that. And that’s just one small example. Is it love? Or is it fear? And that’s what it and I talked about that in the book. It’s one of either other in which one are you choosing? Yeah. And when people talk about mediumship, as being from the devil, I like okay, well, the devil is doing a lousy job then because he’s bringing people all kinds of peace and love and understanding and expanded view of themselves and a better view of mankind. And I’ve seen people heal through medium readings. I’ve seen people heal through reading near death experiences, and just just lighting up and say, Wow, this is really true. And it confirms what the Bible tells us, right tells us we’re eternal beings, that we you know, that we that we live forever that we’re not we’re not just our bodies. I mean, all these things are brought out from the work that you do. So it’s just amazing matter. It’s like you said the Bible says testicular

Unknown Speaker 30:00
BY the SPIRIT, what’s this? What’s this producing? What’s the fruit of your of your work? Right? Then you can have someone who’s given this gift, who chooses to use love and help others. And you can have someone who, with free will has a gift and chooses to charge too much. You know, makeup stuff, you name it. It’s love over fear. And I will talk about Have you ever, ever, ever heard of Rob Bell? But I just read his book, and I really enjoyed it. And he talks about, you know, it’s almost like a logical explanation. And he talks about does God get what he wants? Because you see, I asked you to, you know, Does God get what he wants? Yeah, of course, God gets what he wants. He’s everything. Right? So does he want all of this children to return home and be in eternal bliss with him? Yes. So if God what he wants, wants what he wants, and gets what he wants, and he wants us to return to an eternal life with him and you know, live in bliss, then how in the world is anyone supposed to be able to go to hell because if it even exists, because if God gets what he wants, then

Unknown Speaker 31:00
He’s not getting what he wants. And that’s not even possible. So it’s just he goes through that there’s a big chapter in his book talking about like, that’s not even possible that this eternal hell exists. Because it God always gets what he wants. That’s to return home with him. And I firmly believe no matter what religion, no matter what you do, even if it’s the worst thing in the world, it’s self judgment. And eventually, according to, from what I’ve understood, time doesn’t even exist on the other side, but from our human perspective, we will all return home to with him. You know, I mentioned the book Jesus called the heaven Moses called the promised land. The Buddha called it Nirvana. Right It’s all the same thing. We get to all return home and it’s not just the Select elite few that choose Jesus, that some of them right I choose Jesus, you choose Jesus, but there are other people that the 1.2 billion Muslims and the 5 billion other people religions in the world they get to go home to to God and be with Him forever. Welcome back to grief to growth and just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach, if you’re grieving or know someone who is grieving his book,

Unknown Speaker 32:00
grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know, people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers at www grief to growth com www dot g ri e f the number two gr o w th calm or text growth gr o w th 231996. If you’d like to support this podcast visit www.patreon.com slash grief to growth www.patrn.com slash g ri f the number two gr o w th to make a financial contribution. And now back to grief to growth.

Unknown Speaker 32:51
You know

Unknown Speaker 32:53
yeah you know it’s interesting you when you met your rod ducks I remember reading his book years ago when he first started kind of going down this path and I forgot that

Unknown Speaker 33:00
The title The first book he kind of came out with where he kind of hinted on what we call Christian universalism, which was my first step away from that eternal health thing. And the Christian Universalist believes that Jesus sacrifice saves everybody, I don’t believe is a sacrifice saves anybody at this point, but that’s that was my first step out. But when Rob kind of hinted at that man, they that he talked about fear, they just, they just hammered him. And there’s a guy named Carleton Pearson, who was a pastor, Pentecostal pastor came up under Oral Roberts, and had this mega church and was just super popular. When he started talking about universalism. I mean, everything just went away. I mean, he lost, he lost everything. And I followed him as he went through that that thing, and it’s just interesting to me how this this idea that everybody can be saved for so many Christians is it’s so it’s filled with fear to like, you can’t tell people that. And I read a guy, William Talbert wrote a book called The irresistible love of God, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Unknown Speaker 34:00
He talks about Calvinism and arminianism. You know, these two basically branches of Christianity. So one says that guy gets whatever he wants. Calvinism says, guy gets whatever he wants, but God only wants to save certain people. So God is predestined, that these people are going to be saved. And these people aren’t guessed. All the Calvinists are predestined to be saved. So God has irresistible grace, you can’t you can’t resist it. But he selected you. And he has incited you by the way, there’s total depravity and you you’re just done. It just created you so he can throw you to hell. And the other side is arminianism, which says, Well, God wants to save everybody, but he just can’t, because you have freewill, and he gave you free will as a gift. So you can choose to send yourself to eternal damnation, right? And I’m like, these are the two major branches of Christianity. If you think about it, almost all Christian churches fit into one of those two paradigms. And this guy chooses a third way says, Yes, God gets whatever he wants, and God wants everyone to be saved. And that means you’re going to be saved.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
If you want it or not, that doesn’t mean that he precludes your free will, but you will eventually return to God. Now, that brings into things like, you know, maybe there’s reincarnation, you know, maybe there’s multiple lifetimes that we take to get back and the Bible hints at that as well. Mm hmm. Yeah, I included a chapter on reincarnation in my book, and I’ll see ya there. But you know, Matthew, there’s a couple verses in john three, three, when he talks about, you know, born again, by the water birth, I mean, you know, or even in Matthew 17, where he says, john, Elijah is is john the baptist, you just don’t know it is his soul came back. And so to your point about reincarnation, I never believed in that, that God made me for me and I talked about this in the book. Yeah, he made for you. But he also made the higher part of you that’s living many experiences lifetime and I’ve actually channeled people that have told me, they’ve lived other other lives of people. They’ve, they came back I did a reading last month where I was channeling and this has experienced some weird things that are against logical thinking. But I was doing A reading for a while.

Unknown Speaker 36:00
And it was her, it ended up being her grandmother’s soul living as her. And the way she validated was a lot of a lot of things. But I was like, Does your mom tell you that you act and look like you’re like her mother? And she’s like, all the time. And it was actually her soul coming. It’s crazy to think I mean, most people hear that and think, no way, because it doesn’t make sense. Her mother came back to live as her daughter in this lifetime to experience all kinds of things. And she back like she literally validated that with things that I wouldn’t even know something about a cop and something about things like you know, boggle your mind. But yeah, so there’s, there’s these, you know, I don’t want to call them truths because I feel like I would be ignorant to say that I know or this is the truth. You’ll never hear those words come out of my mouth. You’ll hear me say I believe I think I feel because there really is no way to know so if I feel like for someone to claim they know the truth. I feel like it’s you know, the word often gets misused, but it’s ignorant. It means lack of knowledge. If you don’t know none of us know if anyone can say No, you don’t. That’s Yeah, you

Unknown Speaker 37:00
The thing is, Daniel as we go through this, but I encourage people because as I said, there’s a lot of fear. I think this ties in Christianity and I was I grew up in it right? So they taught you don’t trust your own heart, your heart is evil above all things. So basically trust us, right? Listen to what we tell you. Don’t listen to your heart, which I now know is the opposite. We all we’ve all been given intuition. We’ve all been given a heart and we all have, we know the truth. When we hear we get you and I both been getting these goosebumps, right? We get these God bumps, some people call them when we hear the truth. And when we hear someone speak the truth, it’s like, it’s not like we’re learning it. It’s worth remembering it. That’s why it resonates so deeply with us. And I would always tell people, like, understand your Bible, don’t just read your Bible, that’s fine. But understand the bible history. Read different translations understand like for right now, example, the word hell, there’s the report, it’s disappearing from the Bible. Because most of the places where was translated hell was a mis translation every place in the Old Testament.

Unknown Speaker 38:00
It’s a mistranslation because I use the word Schiele, which is the grave, but when you read the King James, you think everybody who’s dead goes to hell. And even when you read the New Testament, Jesus uses the word ohana, which was an actual physical place that that Jews knew. They knew he was talking in parables when he said it, but it got translated in our Bibles as hell. So this this takes a lot of work to dig out.

Unknown Speaker 38:24
Yeah, the gahanna, which Rob Bell also talks about was like a trash area where they burn trash and like the gnashing of teeth is the animals that were trying to eat the food from the trash. It’s not, you know, in my opinion, is not an eternal hell. And it’s funny you say that because, you know, listen to your heart, because the first chapter in my book, so and I literally am not kidding, I had the conversation with this friend of mine who is a fundamentalist, you know, by the book, Christian who doesn’t really understand or believe that what I’m doing is right in the eyes of God, and he said, verbatim, I don’t listen to my heart because my heart tells me all kinds of bad things. I only listen

Unknown Speaker 39:00
To the Bible, and I just, it’s the opposite of what I’ve always been taught of love is God speaks through your heart. He knows you. And I always mentioned you know, it’s a semantic, physical, you know, body part thing, but is to not listen with the ego mind with all the things in the world that we know we shouldn’t do, and to listen with our hearts and to trust what God is telling us in the book. I have a couple experiences where, you know, one of them was I’ll give a little hint towards the book because I was going to go on this all inclusive paid vacation. Yeah, I actually turned it down because my heart was telling me and through spirit was saying, You’re not supposed to go, there’s going to be this is just not meant to happen. So as soon as I listened to that and gave it away, my heart led me down a path and has always led me down the path to, you know, of this of my highest, you know, to help others. Yeah, I have to be really careful because I don’t want to condemn anybody else’s path or anybody’s faith or anything. But there is a branch but let’s say at least of Christianity, that’s basically cult like right? Anybody that tells you not to listen to yourself and to listen to us or listen to you.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
book are our interpretation of a book, by the way, not just the book, but our interpretation of the book that someone has taken away your freewill and someone’s taking away your power. And so I, I will say this that I will say I think is true. We all need to listen to our own hearts. And I think that God speaks through us and we need to turn inward and say, What is the truth? And so if you’re looking at something, and it’s good, right, it’s bringing people peace, and it’s bringing people joy, and it’s bringing people love. And someone says, Well, no, that’s, that’s, that’s not a good thing. You know, listen to yourself, listen to your intuition.

Unknown Speaker 40:35
And that was the hardest thing for me to do, because I would have I still get them about once a week. Maybe someone will tell me, I’m going to hell they know better. Jesus is the only way I’m channeling the devil. And they don’t know the parent who

Unknown Speaker 40:52
messages me and says that I was going to mention it earlier. I gotta never forget a woman. She lost her son. And I think

Unknown Speaker 41:00
It was so it was a while ago and she messaged me and said thank you for my reading. Thank you for bringing him through. I have not left my house in a year since he died. And I been going back to church I have faith in God again and I left my house I can smile now. Right? We pumps so that was and I think that was even a free reading which is the basket I love doing that with not taking any money. And I said that last week I got an email from someone saying I’m going to hell and channeling a devil if they could just see the peace and love and healing that comes from these readings. I’ve done over 1000 of them and I by blow my own mind. I’ve actually gotten full names before, but it comes from the Holy Spirit I credit the Holy Spirit. If it wasn’t for God, I wouldn’t be I wouldn’t have this. So yes, it for anyone who is watching and you have whether it’s mediumship or any kind of spiritual gifts and someone is telling you different I preached this all the time on my my, my show and everything is you need to listen to your heart and what’s God telling you in your heart. Even though someone else is telling you different we can’t get caught up in what other people

Unknown Speaker 42:00
People feel believe and think we have to listen to God because He speaks to our heart or listen to our heart because he speaks through it. And I feel like a lot of people get restricted ahead of just 20 minutes before we get on here. I had a woman say that because of my teaching site, we were saying, because it’s me, but my teachings and the book is letting her to embrace her gift. And her life has been amazing because of it. It’s like, Oh, that’s the devil doing work. And she’s healing other people. And it’s all love And so yeah, it takes a lot of stepping outside your comfort zone, and you gotta deal I got to deal with some people like that. And we know what I do. I send them love. You watch my you see on YouTube, I posted the mediumship first Christianity or someone who gives me a negative review on Facebook, which isn’t from a reading it’s from, you know, the only one I gotten 150 was someone leading Old Testament scripture. I send them love and I respond with love because that’s what Jesus taught me. I think that’s great. And I you know, I interview a lot of people that have near death experiences, I put them on my YouTube channel and every once in a while I get all these people say, this is so great. This is

Unknown Speaker 43:00
Maybe feels so much better. I know my husband’s still here I know my child so here etc and then you get those people and I look at them and I feel sorrow for them because they’re they’re living in bondage you know they don’t understand that we’ve actually been set free because the way I look at it we’re loving in love we’re following our hearts and so I don’t let them get me down at all I feel sorry for them and I will I will engage with them and I’ll tell them you know, like we’re just saying you know, tests of spirit. what’s what’s the fruit of this what’s the fruit of this person coming back to saying that all as well I can think of this woman Heidi Craig interview. I was well I will be well and your unconditional love You’re never alone. Those are the three messages she brought back from the end. I don’t I don’t think Satan has given us that message. Right now. In the in the interesting part about that is it all comes from either and I talked about this in my YouTube video either comes from a book that was written 2000 years ago which is a great book and it has a very valid a lot of great stories in it. I miss it a quote unquote what I

Unknown Speaker 44:00
yield to the misinterpretation of Old Testament scripture, or it’s what you were just taught at one point I talked about it in my new YouTube video is a lot of people that feel that it’s against the Bible, you know, against, you know, it’s the devil’s work. They just heard it, or they were told that and so people hear things and we’re, you know, we get things and we absorbed them. But did we really figure it out for ourselves, or we’re just coached or taught back? And I think about half of my guess is I talked on the videos about half the people. They don’t even really know there’s Old Testament scripture that talks about it. They just heard from their church or from their family, or from whoever they heard it from someone else, they’re from someone else, that it’s wrong. That’s it. They don’t have these experiences with over 1000 readings and spirit communication where I’ve experienced the amount of love would would boggle some of these people’s minds that are just so closed off to it. If they would just take a second and reconsider what they’ve taught what they believe. You know, you have a 50 year old man always believe that, you know, as an MD and his whole life changes

Unknown Speaker 45:00
My role in the world is to take those people that are in the middle that are a little bit open to this, even though they may have heard that or feel that, to reconsider based on what I have in the book, what I’ve talked about the video and what many, many other teachers and mediums and preachers talk about, because there are some preachers that talk about, you know, the experience of spiritualist churches, they were supposed to connect with spirit, the Bible is full of prophecy. So we’re open minded enough to be open to something that may be different than what you always thought to believe in that is kind of like this whole chunk of conversation is what you and what I experienced to kind of get us out into true experience true love and operating a high vibration. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, we talked about churches, and I was doing my research and coming out, you know, I feel like I kind of made an exodus out of that that bondage that I was in. But I was doing my research there like over 30,000 Christian denominations. It sounds crazy, but the number is, it’s really on calculable, but it’s 10s of thousands. So if you’re going to a church

Unknown Speaker 46:00
Just says this is this, this is this and this is the only way it is you can literally walk across the corner to another Christian church that saying something very different. I ended up as I was, I went to a UCC church for a while now I mentioned music. I went to a Unity Church for a while. And the Unity Church, actually, there’s a medium that was attending the church and was out and said, I’m a medium and the pastor talked about it. So there are there are churches that will say, and they read the Bible, but they also read other spiritual texts. And they’ve kind of they’ve kind of said, you know, it’s not this restrictive. And this is a good thing. They would do Reiki healings after service that like every once a month, they have healings, healing Sunday, and people healers will come in and do healing. Okay, in the Bible tells us so many hands on people. How is that not Reiki? I mean, that’s, that’s Reiki. Jesus, Jesus performed healings. That was a form of Reiki, you know, talk about in Revelations 120. When they say the seven candlesticks, the scene, it’s the seven chakras. He’s showing up as an

Unknown Speaker 47:00
energy, which is what he is. So it’s so much needed so much to it. But yeah, it’s if I had to, you know, say one thing to someone who’s watching your podcasts or someone who’s gone through grief and even questions of whether they should consult a medium or do it because of Old Testament scripture or what they were taught, reconsider all because there’s people like me, for instance, like you who are spreading God’s love and sharing a word of something that may be different than what they believed in. And the amount of healing that comes from a reading is, you know, and last thing the guy had a conversation yesterday was so close minded to what I do, didn’t even want to hear about it. If he would just be willing to listen and hear what I experienced because he’s stuck and thinks it’s the devil. He doesn’t want to hear it. He would be shocked he would be. If you could use his human heart and understand that what I do is from him from God and for love, then I think more people would be open to something like mediumship because it’s so healing, so healing, and I would encourage people

Unknown Speaker 48:00
To study other faiths not to, not to convert, but when you do, as you’ve done, and as I’ve done, you’ll find out the same basic truth underlies all of them. And I could I could take a Christian and give them the Quran and take the cover off of it. And most of them cannot tell me whether it’s the Quran or the Bible, because the truths are the same. And I remember there was a congressman, I can’t remember his name, I wish I could. But he was he hated Islam. He was he was a fundamentalist Christian. So Islam is of the devil, that Allah is the moon, God be believed Allah was not God and all this stuff. But then he actually studied Islam a little bit and understood and he wrote a book as it’s called something like a deadly misunderstanding. But he ended up writing an entire book on the on the Islamic faith, and how it parallels Christianity. And most people don’t know that the Muslims believe that Jesus was a prophet. They believe that Jesus is the Son of God, not in the sense that he was forgotten by God. Because they said God doesn’t big yet, but they believe that Jesus is of God, they expect a second return.

Unknown Speaker 49:00
A lot of people don’t know how similar the two faiths are. And Jesus has a tomb right next to the two founders of Islam. He’s right. When he comes back, it’s the third tomb, which is Jesus. So that’s why I’m saying to people, I just encourage you to kind of break out of these these chains that you’re in and do your own studying your own exploration. And don’t be Don’t be afraid that it’s going to lead you away from your faith.

Unknown Speaker 49:25
Mm hmm. And it’s okay to keep the faith. I’m telling you, I through readings, and I know, I don’t know if we’re going to get to this, but in my readings, it’s the most subtle impressions, feelings, it’s not conversations, I don’t see them. I don’t hear them. I just feel them. And they often say keep the faith, you know, and I have had people returned to their Catholic groups, to their Christian roots to their Muslim roots, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, religion they are and spirit encourages it. And you know, I don’t know if you ever heard the Course in Miracles, but I feel like the teachings of Jesus can be channeled or learned at all times. It didn’t just stop there.

Unknown Speaker 50:00
thousand years ago, and I’ve listened to a lot of that. And they he often says that there there is no religion. That’s right. And there’s no religion to draw it just so I feel like if someone is Muslim in this lifetime, that’s what they’re supposed to be if you get someone who wrote that book and convert, that was what he’s supposed to be your that is what faith is going to bring you to God. But it’s not just the pigeonhole because of the one verse because I don’t know anything other than john 14 six, and I couldn’t have been ignorant to that. But it just says that I am the way I am the light. I don’t think there’s many other scriptures that says he’s the only way. Many scriptures talk about all everyone. I mean, it’s throughout the whole Bible. It’s not just the followers of this one. amazing, wonderful who you and I choose to follow. So yeah, all in the same time. So you did you touch on this, let’s talk about this. How does mediumship work because I think people have a misunderstanding. They think that okay, Daniel sits down, the spirit walks in, sits beside and he looks at him the spirit just starts talking to him. So how does it actually work? Yeah, and I think that’s what my next book is going to be about. But I do hint at it too. In this

Unknown Speaker 51:00
book, but it’s not how you think I don’t. I don’t know the future. I don’t predict the future. I don’t know. You know, I only allow people to come to me one time because I feel like they’re supposed to build that relationship of God. You don’t need a medium. I say you do need God. But it’s subtle impressions. And I’ll just give one small example. And it’s my favorites in the book. I was doing A reading for a woman and I hear the summer of 69 by Bryan Adams. It’s just It’s a song. So I asked her Do you like Bryan Adams? Do you like 60 minute plays in my head? It’s not like an audible but I feel and I haven’t heard that song in years. And now she had previously told me that her her. I had to first talk about the name J. Who’s the J. And she said and she said I was married to a Jeffrey, but my current husband is Jody. So I mentioned some things about her dad came through and about, I validated some things about her divorce and her husband’s her dad’s passing long story short, so then the song comes in my head. Do you like Bryan Adams does the song mean anything to you?

Unknown Speaker 52:00
69 anything is at June 9, because we have to, it’s a game of charades. So we have to figure out what the spirits trying to say. So we can’t figure it out. She doesn’t know June 9 has nothing to do like Bryan Adams. So I asked if my mind can I move on on and I get this firm like, No, it’s just like this feeling. And I’m like, okay, your dad won’t let me get past this. So I’m thinking, you know, I’m thinking of the song and I’m like, to me quit. Jodi got married. I go, Jody, I go, that’s your husband’s name, right? And she’s like, yes. get goosebumps. And I’m like, Did your dad miss the wedding? Was he already passed? And she said, Yes. And obviously, you could think that because her ex husband was around the time he passed. And I’m like, well, he’s telling me to tell you that he didn’t miss the wedding. He was there with you.

Unknown Speaker 52:40
And that’s the way he chose to do it. And then so then we’re all like, emotional, whatever. I’m like, why am I seeing a star? I just see a star. She’s like, well, it was nighttime. And I’m like, No, that doesn’t feel right. She’s like, Michael, were there stars out? And she’s like, yeah, I’m like, No, it doesn’t feel right. And so we’re sitting there and like Star Star, and she goes, Oh my gosh, I cut a star out of his story.

Unknown Speaker 53:00
jacket and put it on my wedding dress so that he was with me. So like I there’s no way I would know that she couldn’t figure it out. So spirit uses all kinds of songs names groups of letters to communicate with with us. And I have to figure out what it is we have symbols, right so when I became that’s my symbol to talk about that the Spirit knows that the person I’m getting the reading to thinks that they remember how they were towards the time they passed and doesn’t remember them how they were in the healthy times. And it’s too much on their mind when they show me raisins. I’ve talked about California for whatever reason, and all kinds of symbols. So you’ll watch like 360s all the major mediums, but we all do have like a like a dictionary, you know, and this means this because it’s not as good as you may think. And and one of the last things before we go I know we’re hitting on the hour, is I always worried about reading other people’s minds. I didn’t ever wanted to do that. I would never want to like bring your daughter through and have it be some information that somehow is getting from you. So through so spirit over time has shown me things

Unknown Speaker 54:00
that a person does not understand. They don’t understand what I’m saying. And it takes a little bit of research to validate whatever it was. And it will be all kinds of crazy things. But it took a lot of those to help me realize that I wasn’t just reading your mind. And this was actually coming somehow, some way from the soul of your loved one. And that that was a huge thing for me. And I’ve had hundreds of validations stuff, something like that where you didn’t Dan would have met at the time. Yeah, you touched on so much really important stuff there. But for people that aren’t familiar with mediumship, I want to kind of emphasize what you said, and I’ve got a few minutes if you do so.

Unknown Speaker 54:34
The mediums are reading I think it’s kind of interactive thing. And it’s like an interactive game of charades. Because I you know, I won’t tell the story because you just did but, you know, it’s like you get a symbol and you give it to the person like Well, I don’t get this and then they give you some feedback and you kind of figure out together what that’s what that song meant. Right? But it takes a little bit of work. It’s not like it’s like Spirit came in and said yeah, I was there at the wedding you when you marry God

Unknown Speaker 55:00
So I think that was really interesting. But this was a question I was gonna ask you kind of brushed by it pretty quickly. You said you only have like clients have one private paid one on one session with you. It’s really unusual because I know people that go back to the same medium over and over again. They’re medium hopping, they’ll have medium readings over. So why is that your policy?

Unknown Speaker 55:21
Some people have snuck through. But it’s my policy because I feel like we’re, I feel like we’re supposed to navigate our path with God. I don’t feel like we’re supposed to be stuck on, you know, mediums or people to rely on certain people to connect to our loved ones so as to connect with God directly. But also be you don’t need a medium to connect with your loved ones. Like I said, Jesus was a mini channel of Moses and Elijah reading the Bible. And it was for a very big reason. So if you lose someone you love in physical form, and they’re still around, because eternal life exists, as Jesus showed us, and you want to connect with them, you don’t need me. My job is to help nudge you and push you on that path so that you can connect with them yourself. Why would

Unknown Speaker 56:00
Why would you have to spend time and pay at someone when you can connect with someone? all on your own? You don’t need to meet us. I’ve had I’ve had spirits Tell me through me. You don’t need him. Literally you don’t need Daniel, come through my mind. Thank you for doing the standard. You don’t need him. You can connect to me all yourself. Yeah. So

Unknown Speaker 56:18
go ahead. Well, I want to ask you is you talked about, you know, you don’t want people to be dependent on you or mediums at all. And I’ve seen people have a reading from a medium like a group reading setting. And they’ll say, Well tell Bobby I love him. And it’s like, what they because they don’t realize they can tell their loved one themselves. So in the book, you talk about an ongoing relationship with your father and you actually call the dialogue that you have with your father. So explain to people what that actually means and how they can have that with their loved one. Yeah, it’s all about trust Brian, it’s it’s even as a medium when I connect with my dad. It’s not solid. It’s not strong. It’s just I have to I almost feel like I’m making it up. But you know, I talked about in the book of a story I had on an airplane and they were

Unknown Speaker 57:00
Use things, whether it’s an animal or a situation or a group of words to validate what they’re saying, in other words, so when I connect with him, and I talk to him, and I feel like he’s talking back, I don’t hear him. It’s almost like you’re making it up. But when you trust that it’s really coming from his soul. And, and you really believe that not only will you become to believe it’s true, but once in a while you get these validations. Right, like, well, I don’t want to go to the story, but you’ll get something to wear something like it doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible. So it really had to be I couldn’t have made it up myself because it came from somewhere. So we all have that ability. It’s just it’s all about trust. And you know, I talked about with Jesus and connecting with Moses, right? I mean, it says it right in the Bible. If you look at john 1412 and Corinthians 11. One it says that we’re supposed to do the work that Jesus says, obviously we’re just talking about connecting with spirit. And I feel like if I allow people to come over and over again and we get stuck in the addictive, you know, I had to quit gambling for my gift but I there are people that get so

Unknown Speaker 58:00
so caught up with going to mediums and want to connect with our loved ones, when they realize they can do it themselves, there’s so much value in that.

Unknown Speaker 58:07
And I do have people that come to me and say, I connect to my child, for instance, all the time, but it’s just nice to come to you. And so I do allow repeats, I’ve started to like, go back and forth with this. Cuz I did two weeks ago, I had to repeat it in a row that kind of snuck through because I have a process, you know, yeah. And the readings were great. It really helped them. So it made me like, reconsider. So I stick with that. But if someone you know, not to promote someone sneaking through again, but I just I feel like God in the Holy Spirit shares with me to share to others, that you don’t need anyone here in physical form to help connect you with source with spirit with your loved one in spirit. And that’s why I kind of like felt that. Well, I think that’s a really important point. That’s why I wanted to really bring that out. Because I feel like I have not I’m not I feel like I have an ongoing relationship with my daughter. But it’s not it’s not a dialogue. I think people would think like well, damn,

Unknown Speaker 59:00
You can just sit down and talk to his father all the time. But it’s it’s it’s subtle things. You we talked about signs, you talked about coins and feathers and Cardinals. And I’ve never heard anybody talk about fruit flies before. But you said one of your signs of your father’s a fruit fly. If it’s okay with you, you know, really quick last year I was the number one rep in my entire company, I was the number one of 100 plus reps. And it was something that I talked about in the law of attraction and having a reality. And so we’re in a sales meeting. I knew I was number one. And the CFO of our entire company is just the CFO. We’re just one small division, this guy gets up and starts talking to the group. And so I’m sitting there watching this show, it’s early in the morning, and

Unknown Speaker 59:42
I see a fruit fly just crossed right in front of my face. And you know, it’s in the hotel, and I don’t even think it was in February, right. And I get this feeling. It’s a feeling of like, I’m very proud of you, son. And I was like, Wow, that was like that’s crazy that he did that was and then thinking was that real like when the cheers

Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
They’re, well I look at my phone and the time is 941 Not only is 41 always been my number, it’s always been a number for me. I don’t know why I’m gonna be 41 a couple months. I think it’s a big year for me, but my dad was born in September 41 to 940. Okay, well, I see a fruit fly go across CFOs there, but I look at my clock and it’s 941 41 then, if it doesn’t get any credit, you know, just I didn’t include the story in my book. Please don’t think I did. Then he goes, he goes like this Now it’s 150 people there he goes. Where’s Daniel? JOHN? Right, john different last thing, but I am like 150 people, there are managers and I raise my hand it goes back guy up in Syracuse. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Like and I’m thinking like, like So not only did the fruit fly come across as 941

Unknown Speaker 1:00:48
and then this guy calls out my name in front of everyone. Yeah. And my dad was saying how proud he was of me. Yes, validation. You get so until I had those validations with the time and the call out from the CFL.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:00
I would have thought I was just making it up because that’s how subtle it is. Right? And, and you as you know, probably eight or nine or the 10s Is she really, you know, she really connecting with me, you know, wasn’t really her. But once I’ve every 10 maybe or so I won’t speak for you, you’ll get this thing was like, Oh my gosh, it really was her because there’s no way I could have made that up. You can’t write stances. So yeah, the majority of time as you got to trust, you know, you’re not making it up. But you’ll get these validations if you pay attention and trust. Yeah, I think that is an excellent story. And I like the way because that’s the way it works for me anyway, because I’m an engineer. So I was calculate the odds of something. No, not literally, but like, Okay, well, I see a cargo you know, I live in Ohio. It’s state Burke. Carter is a fairly common here. But if you see a car No, and it’s 1111. And then your mother calls you or something, or, you know, it’s when these things tie together that that you realized and that was, I think that was a perfect story as to how it’s like someone could suppose it’s a fruit fly in a hotel. Okay, there’s lots of fruit in the hotel, but it’s the timing of the thing. Yeah, and all the validation

Unknown Speaker 1:02:00
Just want to share one more happened the other day, my family my in laws they lost we lost our my father in law or their husband and their father and they went to a medium last Tuesday so we went out to dinner on our way home from dinner. We’re talking about you know, the little bit of the reading and we’re just you know, in celebrating his life and thinking even just thinking about him in the car in front of us. Now my in laws owner of a restaurant and 86 is in the name. The license plate ahead was 8686. And the license plate was from Ohio, which made me think of this. And Ohio is actually where he passed away even though he lives in New York. And then 686 is not only

Unknown Speaker 1:02:38
the name of their business, but it’s a lot of their like past codes and things like that. Nobody said that. names are there but 8686 is a lot of their past codes. So like all of their family and it’s on the license plate and the car front as well. We’re going out to dinner the night that they have saw medium for the first time since he passed with a male license plate which is where he passed away and oh by the way, the white car which all their family has

Unknown Speaker 1:03:00
Being an agent, you can’t make that up. So we’re all looking for like, what are the chances of that at? Yes. And that’s the thing that people need to keep their eyes open for because just real quick, I gotta tell you this story because Shana It was her anniversary date a few weeks ago, June 24, was five years. And so you know, it’s a rough day. So I didn’t ask for science. Other people ask for science and I didn’t want to be disappointed. So a drive driving my wife to therapy, and I look up in front of me and there’s a truck on the back of the truck. It’s not a bumper sticker. It’s like stencil on the back of the truck. It says I am right here, exclamation point. And then my wife, I didn’t even catch it. My wife goes, it’s a sign it’s from shade. It says I’m right here. And I look up in the end. There’s a sticker on the on the back windshield of the truck. That’s you know, these things that say home and it’s the outline of the state for the letter O people were on the T shirts and stuff. It’s a sticker and it’s Ohio and Shana was born in Ohio. We live in Ohio. So I’m like, you know, how can you that that was aside from saying I made like right over right over the head. And then the next day I’m on my walk and I see

Unknown Speaker 1:04:00
There’s a big home sign and one of the houses I walk by every single day that I never hadn’t been there before, or just came, it just appeared that day. So those are the types of things. And I tell these stories, so people know what to look for. Mm hmm. So, yeah, that’s, that’s a great. I love that example in your book. And I share a bunch of other examples like that in my book, like when I found my spirit guides and things like that. So those I think those people have messaged me already, it’s only been about a month. They’ve started they’re starting to get their own signs just by reading the book and exactly, that is why I did it’s not I don’t you know, as an author, you know, we don’t make a ton of money on books. It’s more about helping others and what kind of impact you can have on everyone that reads your book, right? I read your book, the grief to grow it to help people understand and cope with grief. Yeah, me. It’s me, Chip. How does it work? How can I connect with my loved ones? And I think people read these stories and it opens them up somehow. And I had a girl just messaged me yesterday, she started dreaming of her grandma, and she was very close with her and she never dreamt of her until she started reading the book and like the book

Unknown Speaker 1:05:00
opened up to that and it’s just it’s so awesome. And you know, this is not there’s someone breaks you something about how you, you know, you wrote a book and you help them there’s nothing greater than that. Nothing. Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s talk the book is, why are we here reflections on life from spiritual medium by Daniel, john and Daniel, where can people reach you? what’s your website? That’s Daniel john medium.com. And you can actually buy a book off the shop section. And the book is 30 $30 but includes a 20% off coupon for a future reading. So it’s ever zoom reading it’s actually makes the book free and all the shipping and everything free. So but also includes my autograph includes shipping I have to pay sales tax on it.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:43
In the book itself, that you or you if you don’t really care about the coupon or you only need an autograph. You can buy it from Amazon for 14 bucks. Okay, cool. That’s great. That’s a great offer. I appreciate that. Daniel, it’s been good catching up with you again, I know I know you got to run.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:58
I appreciate you doing this.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:00
Thanks for having me, Brian. I really appreciate it. It was fun. All right. Enjoy the rest of your day. Much love. Bye. Well, I hope you enjoyed the episode, I want to make it really easy for you to reach me. So just send me a text 231996 and simply text the word growth gr o w th. In fact you can right now just say hey Siri, send the message. 231996 and when Siri asks you what you want to send, just say growth. You can do the same thing with Ok, Google. Thanks a lot. Have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to grief to growth. Brian hopes that you find this episode helpful, and we’ll come back for future episodes. Brian’s best selling book grief to growth planted not buried is a great resource for anyone who is coping with grief or know someone who is if you enjoy the podcast and would like to support it, there are three things you can do to help. The first is to share the podcast with someone that you

Unknown Speaker 1:07:00
You think it will help. The second is to go to iTunes rate and review the episode. The third way you can support the podcast is by becoming a patron. Head over to www.patreon.com slash grief to growth. That’s pa t ar e o n.com. Slash grief, the number to growth and sign up to make a small monthly donation. patrons get access to exclusive bonus content and knowledge that you are helping to spread the message of grief to grow. For more about Brian and grief to growth, visit www grief to growth.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Chris Kito, B.S. experienced an NDE at the age of 24 due to an allergic reaction to a food allergy.

In April of 2012, 22-year-old Chris Kito went into anaphylactic shock due to a peanut allergy, leading to his near-death experience. He was young and just starting a career.  Chris feels that a transformation took place, changing what had been his previous youthful outlook on life and mindset as he was entering a new career.

The NDE created challenges and opportunities which Chris credits to his newfound spirituality and extraordinarily successful career at such a young age.

In this interview, we talk about Chris’ experience and the blessings and challenges that come from an NDE. Integration of an NDE experience into one’s daily life can take years, even decades.

Transcript

Announcer 0:00
Hi there. Welcome to grief to growth podcast. Your host is Brian Smith, spiritual seeker, best selling author, grief survivor and life coach. Ryan believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you’ve been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Brian Smith 0:34
Hey, everybody, this is Brian Smith back with another episode of grief to growth and today I’ve got with me and near death experiencer His name is Chris Quito. I’m going to read Chris’s bio, which is very short and then we’re just gonna have a conversation about his experience and what he’s learned since then. Chris has a BS degrees experience and an NDA the age of 2422 Chris, I got two different numbers 24 you’re 24 at the age of 24 is due to an allergic reaction. food allergy. And Chris is going to talk about the changes that he found necessary in order to integrate his and D. So it does indeed happen in April 2012. He wouldn’t anaphylaxis shock due to a peanut allergy that led to his near death experience. Chris was young at the time and just starting your career. And he feels that a transformation took place after the changing would have been his previous youthful outlook on life and mindset as Chris was entering a new career. So that indeed created challenges and opportunities with Chris credits to his newfound spirituality and his extraordinarily life’s journey of feeling and purpose. So Chris, welcome to great degrowth it’s good to have you here.

Chris Kito 1:37
Well, thank you for having me, Brian. I’m excited to be here. I’ve heard a lot of great things and glad we could connect on this Monday morning.

Brian Smith 1:44
Yeah, appreciate you doing this. I know you’re still in some pain, you had an injury and you’re soldiering through so I appreciate you sitting down and doing this with me.

Chris Kito 1:50
Yeah. Well, you know, you hit the age of 32. And you sleep long on your shoulder and you’re out of commission for two weeks. So you know,

Brian Smith 1:58
given never for 20 years

Chris Kito 2:02
I want you to be able to get out of bed as Millennials are a little fragile.

Brian Smith 2:06
Yeah, that’s the thing about living these bodies, man, they’re fragile. Exactly. So tell me about your start wherever you’d like to start with your story if you want to give us some background if you want to start with the night that you had the NDA whatever, wherever you’d like to jump over?

Chris Kito 2:18
Absolutely. Well, it’s a it’s been about eight years and a little background I this is the experience what happened I did not speak about it or really discuss my near death experience or any of the after effects or any of that story for about, oh, I would say almost six and a half, seven years it never came out. But you know now after you know really processing it and having about an eight year journey with it, I’m more and more comfortable almost it seems monthly and every year actually discussing what happened fully and for myself. Also just understanding the integration And then what exactly happened for because for a very long time, I had no idea what really went on. And it was a kind of trial by error and just every day and understanding and over the years really putting the pieces back together. So I grew up in Long Island, New York, I went to school in Connecticut, and I studied business. And many of my friends and all my family stayed in the northeast. And it never really resonated with me to be working in Manhattan and doing that, that grind of commuting. And I ended up deciding the summer after I graduated to move to Los Angeles originally wanted to have some sort of business career within entertainment, maybe along the lines of like an agent or something on the business side. That was my degree in my interest at the time. So I moved to LA went out there with that. And within six months, I was you know, on interviews, I was meeting people I wasn’t getting involved in a lot of local organizations and groups and a friend of mine, within about six months of me moving out there was out there October. So by April had a birthday party at a hotel and you know, very clearly in a key, you know, detail and so many, you know, the devils I always say devil or gods in the details of any story and her birthday party was on a Sunday night, which is kind of an odd night to have a birthday party. You know, right before our work day. Yeah. Which would prove to be very important for Little did I know at that moment or any other time and in my story in the arc of what eventually happens. So when did the birthday party was having a great time it was a Sunday night. Loki was at the lobby of a restaurant and they served cake and all of that and just to backpedal a little bit. I was born with a peanut allergy. I’ve been allergic to peanuts and nuts, all tree nuts and lagoons for my whole life never had any severe reactions or any need to ever take an injection of epinephrine which would be the common epi pen, I would just avoid them. You know, I was cautious. I was definitely very, very careless in the sense of epi pens having to be replaced every 14 to 16 months and I just wouldn’t replace them and maybe two years I checked the expiration label and I didn’t care and you know, I’d have some Benadryl with me or it was always in the medicine cabinet. But I avoided it if people knew me knew I had a peanut or nut allergy wasn’t something that was really discussed, I would just avoid it. And I wasn’t, I would say to now I wasn’t that respectful of the allergy because I never had anything severe and I was very fortunate. I was able to avoid it very simply. And it was not something that came into my world. But I did have that be pens with me.

But they weren’t always that some points they were more than half the time either expired or maybe not in the full capacity of how they should be working with that. So then fast forward years later, I kind of developed more of a CAD cavalier attitude towards it, not that it wasn’t super Cavalier, but again, I was going around with it times expired epinephrine, which would have been a life saving medicine for me. So we’re at the birthday party, everyone’s around, they start cutting up cake. And I get a piece of cake. And I just take like a little bit of it. I mean, it was like a half the size of fork. I put it in my mouth. And instantly I could tell there was peanuts or something in it. And my first thought was, oh, she’s What is this and I ended up swallowing. Because I didn’t know it was peanuts. I really don’t know what peanuts tastes like. If that sounds odd. But I’ve never actually ate them. I know what the smell is. I kind of configure Okay, this is the smell. This is what it is, but I really didn’t know. And then I thought to myself who would ever have a peanut butter cake? Is this cake really have peanuts in it? That was so odd to me. I’ve never come across a peanut cake or a peanut butter cake. And it happened instantly within the fraction of a second. Because you’re thinking you’re talking you’re in a group of people and you boom in you just take a walk and I didn’t want to spit anything. I didn’t think anything I thought oh my god, maybe this was just a trace of it and I’m not going to have a reaction and I’ll be okay. And then I immediately just thought oh my god, like what happened? It happened so quick. It was just I it was just an unconscious you’re just eating you weren’t expecting it because it was a chocolate cake. Yeah, it looked chocolate. It was the frosting. It was that and the next thing I know I swallowed something with peanut I thought okay, all right. There I thought okay, let me let me just get something to kind of wash it down my mouth, a little itchy. So I get like a little spread I washed down like all right I’m fine let me just you know go home later tonight it’s around 11 o’clock on a Sunday right now and I’ll just take two three Benadryl asleep this off and we’ll get on with Monday morning no big deal. So I go home I do just that and then you know, it’s like a half hour later and I’m laying in bed and you know, I’m like, like, Alright, how is the reaction going down and yet these moments I can kind of be like I’m like self checking my breathing and my feelings and like I still don’t feel well now My stomach hurts now like, I’m still kind of rad. I’m getting warm as the blankets wrong with the air conditioner and on on what’s going on and then you start to race in your head. Alright, is this going to get better is this not going to get better? And in that that’s when things start to change over from Alright, maybe I may not just sleep this off with three Done a drill, and this could be something more. So, here I am laying here like midnight 12 3011 like right around that time in bed and I’m like, Alright, it’s getting a little harder to breathe. I can tell it’s kind of getting like a timeouts, kind of like that like a little heavier. Not that I couldn’t get the air in, but it was heavier sets that are learning maybe take another Benadryl and just go look at myself in the mirror and see if my eyes are bloodshot. So then I wake up, I get out of bed, I wasn’t really sleeping, and I go into the bathroom, I flip the light on, and I’m red. My face is red. My body’s red. My arms are red, my armpits, my chest, my neck. Everything is red. I’m starting to break out hives. hives are head to toe right now. I go Okay, this isn’t good. Then I remember thinking I like to start breathing in front of the mirror and see what happens. I’m like, maybe you’re just going to settle down. Take another Benadryl. So I think I took another Benadryl So I’ve had like four little pink tablets that don’t seem to really be doing anything at this moment. Then I thought all right, well, let’s take a step ahead here. And I gotta see what I’m going to do here because this may not stop and I’ve never had a reaction before that I can remember where I knew what was going to happen I was kind of making up like alright, is this stop? Does this go does it get worse? My breathing and stuff? I don’t know. I’ve never gone into anaphylaxis. I’ve fortunately never had an experience like that. So it was Uncharted. I didn’t know what decisions to make and or I didn’t know timelines for what was really happening. Like I didn’t know now like, you know, there’s there’s phases of the reflective reaction that I didn’t know I was just like, Alright, I’m covered in hives and I’m uncomfortable. You know what now I now know within a very short period time things then escalate very quickly.

So I’m seeing your breathing I sorry, let me look for my epi pen. Let me see what I can do. Maybe I’ll just inject myself with this. And I go grab the epi pen and shocking it was expired by about six months. So a side note on that, epi pens and epinephrine may or may not ever work, there’s no guaranteed and if it was a brand new epi pen, there’s no guarantee at the level work. And a lot of times it has to be administered before you’re in a full blown anaphylaxis to stop it. And that’s why they always give you packs of two because one many times does not work. So there’s no guarantee with that. And that was kind of running through my head and I thought, well, this expired and then I thought all right, I may have to call an ambulance. I said, Well, the ambulance gonna get here in time. Is the ambulance going to have epinephrine? I mean, I don’t know what they do or don’t carry. How are they going to take to get here? It’s Los Angeles, you know, yeah, Sunday night, but I don’t know it’s la they might just not pay attention or What do I do in this situation? That’s I’m starting to run through scenarios in my head. While my breathing is becoming more and more labor labeled. It’s more and more labored. And I’m thinking, alright, I can take the epinephrine but then once you take the epinephrine, you can’t really move. That’s one thing I knew, like he can’t do so he can’t take and then just go about your normal actions, because of the adrenaline going through you and just can’t really function. So I thought, well, if I do this, I can’t go anywhere. I don’t know if it’s gonna work. And I thought, well, I can call an ambulance or I thought I could just drive to the hospital because it’s Sunday night and there’s no one on the road and I can just zip there if I want. And I’ll go and I’ll, maybe I’ll just take the fnf epi pen with me I’ll get as far as I can. And then I can just, you know, white knuckle it so I get to the hospital. So I’m like, Alright, I need to do something here and something needs to happen. And my thought was All right, I’m gonna just drive myself to the hospital I that was it. I don’t think I wanted to call an ambulance. I thought that wouldn’t make sense because for some reason I thought they wouldn’t be able to help me. So I got in the car, I grabbed the epi pen, and I put it on the passenger seat and I just started zipping down the road in Los Angeles and living in West LA at the time and I went to Cedar Sinai Hospital, and I’m driving and it’s Sunday night, thank god late there’s no one on the road. And I just remember thinking how much time I have and I’m watching the GPS and I’m breathing I like just focus on breathing and like

it’s harder and harder to breathe and less and less oxygen is getting into me. And I’m thinking Alright, I don’t know how much time I have and read everything hurts. I’m now running on like a treadmill and I’m like this is getting close to the wire. I had the epi pen I Had it out of the cartridges. I’m like, I’m gonna get as far as I can if I have to, I’m going to inject it. And then I’m just going to, you know, hope I can get to the hospital. So I end up getting to the hospital like Paul in and they take my car and a lot of this is very fuzzy muster because I just got out and then I kind of stumbled into the emergency room. And I walk up to the nurse at the desk and she looks at me and just kind of like stares at me, and I go, I’m having an allergic reaction. I need help and I pulled out my and she goes, I need your ID and I pulled out my wallet. And it was in my pocket to give her my ID and said here’s Here it is. And I couldn’t physically with my arms, get my my ID out of the little slot. I was so off and I then started to like kind of fall into the table. And then really at that moment, all I remember is that her and another nurse come in Running, grabbing me and they carried me back and like kind of held me up to the back room and put me on a bed. And at that point, I was really out of it. I had, you know, and this is when I’m in the hospital and I had about seven doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants working around me and they pulled my shirt off and I was covered head to toe in just red welts and hives, and my breathing was minimal, and they’re, you know, holding my mouth open and they’re talking to me, and they’re trying to see what happened and they’re sticking needles in my arm and, you know, they’re putting Benadryl shots in my wrist. They’re putting me on oxygen to get me to breathe air. They’re rating my oxygen levels, which were at that point, which a lot of this I found out later, was about 10% was my oxygen consumption. So I wasn’t taking in any oxygen at that time. And I was really Kind of just fading I at that point. I remember just kind of thinking like, with everyone working around me I’m like, why are they rushing around so much like what’s going on and they’re all moving and they’re so panicked and they’re like moving me in this and they’re that and they’re they’re looking at me and they’re frantic I’ve never seen you know, it really was just like the TV shows you’d see on er with everyone frantically moving and then to like D laying there and just kind of watching this show unfold around you. And you know, I didn’t I didn’t feel anything at this time and then I started to, you know, pass away and I went into this extreme and a lot of the Spirit you spoken and in the end Spencer’s experiences, the there’s no language, we have to really describe a lot of experience. So it’s very hard. So I mean, do my best I can describe the sensations, feelings, and really what was going on consciously around me. And I remember I went into this euphoric state of being that I can’t even I couldn’t attain any, any, any way in this in this dimension, this physical space and it was just this beautiful euphoric feeling of laying there. And I remember consciously like these waves of thoughts and ideas coming to me that I was like, Oh, yeah, I remember very clearly like moments of this. of Oh, I’m dying. That’s it. And I was like, I’m dying like that is it? This is death. I’ve been here like this is it I am dying. I am leaving this physical space this body, like on it. That’s it. I knew I was done. Like I’m not breathing. The app, the epinephrine which they were injecting into my shoulder into my neck was not working. And they were panicking. And then I remember them doing that. And I remember the doctor, like holding my eyes open and my mouth and saying, Chris, we’re going to be you know, have you ever had a tube down your throat, we’re going to put a tube down your throat. And I so clearly, so much of this was a haze. But then there were so many moments that were so vivid, it’s like it happened five minutes ago. I remember the doctor looking at me and him up in him saying, he goes, I’m so sorry, I can’t save your life. And I didn’t have any response to that. And just, just see just said it to me. And I think I just looked at him and I didn’t say anything. And then he’s like, he said, I’m just sorry, I can’t save your life. And it’s not that they weren’t able to stop or get me to breathe or stop the anaphylaxis and with anaphylaxis if it’s too far, that’s it. It’s too far. I’m just nothing was working. The oxygen was wasn’t getting pulled in. They couldn’t, you know, they’re going to try and put a tube down my throat. The epinephrine the Benadryl it wasn’t stopping anything. Yeah. And when that happened I remember I, I’ve always grew up in a, you know, very spiritual and you know, both my grandfather’s more so now I know are two of my main spirit guides and I remember them I remember them being there and saying, All right, take it easy. And you know, I was laying there and I had the lights and the commotion and again, it was the most euphoric feeling there was zero pain zero physical sensation. Like nothing

Brian Smith 19:44
they just ask you were you still you’re still in your body at this point right so you’re in your body and your but you feeling this euphoria? Is that correct?

Chris Kito 19:51
Oh, yeah, I was still I would say I was in my body. I wasn’t out of my body looking into it, huh? I feel anything. It was this euphoric feeling that’s undescribable. Okay, waiting there. And I like in the scene around me too. If you ever saw the movie Saving Private wine when they’re landing on the beach, and there’s the explosion and chaos going around, but there’s no noise in the cat context is just looking around. That’s what it was like, I was just there, and I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t sense anything. In this physical world. I was somewhere else. Hmm. And I was just in this euphoric being realizing and understanding that I was dying, and with spirit, and I just thought to myself, I was like, you know, none of these material things really matter. Like, cares about an iPhone. It’s funny, I took an iPhone and just kind of like, had these thoughts wash over and I was like, you know, none of these anger matters. I guess it’s just love and He says and that’s all nothing else matters at the end here I am, you know, now I look at and say, you know you’re dying alone and suffocating to death on a hospital bed. Those material things don’t really have no meaning and nor do any any negative or hurtful emotions. That life gets very, very clear when you’re suffocating to death.

Unknown Speaker 21:24
So

Chris Kito 21:26
I then had I then had those passing feelings run through me of those messages and then I was with my grandfathers. And I remember them very clearly saying, you you can’t die like it’s not and I remember thinking myself, Oh, that’s it. I’m dead. I’m dying. I’m dead. I’m dying. And then very clearly being like, No, you can’t die. It’s not time. You have work to do. That’s it, you know, you have work to do can’t die. And I thought, okay, in myself. All right. And then I remember kind of there was no fighting at up until that point it was just kind of a passing through and then when they said you can’t die, you have work to do you need to fix relationships you need, you have to do you have to do things and there was no there was no more it’s just fixed relationship you have work to do is very clear, very direct. And there was no misunderstanding, there was no it was just there and it was a wash through me conscious message. And then I thought, Okay, and then I remember thinking, I don’t want to die, I can’t die and I remember starting to then fight in any way I could fight to start breathing again. And I remember just coming back, and it was like that in that movie Saving Private Ryan on the beach when they cut the music and then it comes back and the bombs explosions and chaos. And that’s what I came back to. I came back to like that. I was like, Oh, and I started breathing. And they’re like, Oh, he’s moving. And I immediately just came back in and felt pain and everything and I was back, and I was gasping and I started talking. I said, I need, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I need to breathe. And they’re like, you’re breathing, you’re breathing, everything’s coming in. And I came back and my body was responding. And I was under this immense and intense pain, grasping and scraping and fighting for oxygen. And that’s what I, I went back into, I knew I was back when I felt everything, okay, and I had so much epinephrine running through me and they were holding my legs down because I was shaking so much. And I was breathing and kind of clawing and they were holding me and I started to breathe. And then you know, time later I started to come down more physically and I was breathing and that that I was back and I started to stabilize. And then I was I found out later I was there for about six and a half hours, but I only felt I was there for about 15 minutes. And that was the physical situation with the near death experience. And when I left, the woman goes, I go how I said, She goes, Oh my god, she goes, you’re unrecognizable from when you walked in. And then the main nurses she said, You know, when you walked in, you were, you know, out of a one to 10 you are a nine and a half. We didn’t think you were going to survive. And now you’re like, you know, you can leave and they’re like, well, you can leave they’re like, we can’t do anything. You’re breathing. The reaction stopped. You’re okay. You just walk out of here slowly. They gave me like the little socks with like the rubber on the bottom. Yeah. And they’re like, you’re unrecognizable. Like I you want to go home and I sleep in your own bed. I go up. Okay. So I, I just had I mean, I had no idea what was going on. I mean, I like none of this. I didn’t think This all this story had, you know, I didn’t really realize it at the moment, I’m still just coming down from the experience, right? It was being pieced together days and weeks later, and I said, Alright, I’ll leave. So I kind of got my stuff I walked out with like a little bag and a doctor’s note and my my blue socks with the rubber bottoms. And I went and, you know, I always say it’s a joke. I said, I really knew I was back when I then laughed, and I had to pay like $18 for parking. It’s la right. So I said, Well, welcome back to it. Welcome back to the world. So I paid for parking. Yeah, and then I drove home at like, you know, 5am in the morning and I just slept and I mean for the next few days I was in unbelievable pain my body was was cramping aching hurting to breathe. I remember laying there breathing was so hard cuz everything just heard my body was jacked up of every possible chemical. You can imagine. That was just a minute. And then the then within a few days once all the medicine wore off, I then started to think like oh my god, what actually happened do I then have then the mental and emotional aspect once the immense pain and physical shock wore off? I was like, Oh my gosh, what what happened? So

Brian Smith 26:21
crystal, let me ask you about your your experience, because I know I know it’s hard to put into words and I have interviewed you several years and there’s like, it’s it’s kind of hard to describe, but did you physically see your grandfather’s did? Did you ever go to another place? What was that? Like?

Chris Kito 26:36
I don’t, I didn’t physically see them. I don’t physically see them in the sense. I get images of what I know. They would look like Mm hmm. I don’t think I went to another place physically. Well, that’s all I don’t have the language to describe it. I knew I wasn’t on this physical realm. Yeah. And I can’t say I was somewhere where there were, you know, rainbows and rain. But I was not here that was and that was a conscious state of being I was gone.

Brian Smith 27:06
So it was a it was a feeling or knowing that you were someone actually

Chris Kito 27:09
it was a conscious knowing that I was not here that I was dead. I was in the process of dying. And I was surrounded by spirit. And I got my messages and I got kicked out.

Brian Smith 27:23
Yeah. So your messages were? Yeah, you had work to do, right? It’s out the message was

Chris Kito 27:28
okay. And

yeah, and I got kicked back. So, you know, a few days later, once all the pain and physical, you know, reactions stopped my eye then I you know, fortunately I’ve always kept a journal since I was like 13 1414 years old. And I was journaling. And I remember I’ve gone back years later, and I looked at some of my journals within a few days or weeks or after the NDA, and I clearly I’ve had a change in consciousness, like I am literally a different person, I’m a different makeup mentally, physically, emotionally, consciously. And in the weeks and days and months and years after, you know, I always say in my opinion, and I can be totally right or wrong. The NDP is like 1% of what actually happens. The 99% the NDP is the mechanism what what really comes out is well what’s the integration? What’s the change? What’s the after effect on yourself, your community from from that incident, I mean, the end D was really intense for you know, getting the most timelines later, was about 15 minutes and an eight hour ordeal in total. And now we’re sitting here eight hours, eight years later, and we spent eight hours on the incident and eight years on the integration, the understanding Development yeah and you know moving through that process it takes it takes 1015 years or a lifetime to fully integrate and understand a near death experience and and go from there so it’s a very small spots just like that initial it happened and then it’s, you know, it’s it’s not over you’ve got a lifetime to go. Yeah. And there there’s its own set of challenges with with having a near death experience and integrating and really a process of healing and understanding and so many so many levels to it.

Announcer 29:37
We’ll get back to grief to growth in just a few seconds. Did you know that Brian is an author and a life coach? If you’re grieving or know someone who is grieving his book, grief to growth is a best selling easy to read book that might help you or someone you know, people work with Brian as a life coach to break through barriers and live their best lives. You can find out more about Brian and what he offers. At www grief to growth calm www dot g ri e f the number two gr o w th calm or text growth gr o w th 231996. If you’d like to support this podcast visit www.patreon.com slash grief to growth www.pateon.com slash g ri f the number two gr o w th to make a financial contribution. And now back to grief to growth.

Chris Kito 30:37
And I’m sorry, I was

Brian Smith 30:39
Yeah, let’s talk about that because you bring up a really important point and for I have spoke with a lot of nd ears and studied Indies. I’ve interviewed pmh Atwater and one of the things a lot of people don’t realize is a lot of people say I love to have it in the You’re so lucky. You got to have that but there’s a lot of challenges that come along with it. And so what were your thoughts before you You had your MD and explained to me how you felt coming out of that experience.

Chris Kito 31:06
Yeah, I you know, it’s um, I don’t I think I don’t think anyone wants a near death experience. I think they just want to find a path to spiritual spirituality or enlightenment or an understanding or find peace or healing. I don’t think anyone wants to purposely die or

Brian Smith 31:24
Yeah, I think we might we wanna but we don’t really want

Chris Kito 31:27
Yeah, you know, it’s like everyone wants to be in great shape, you know and look great naked but no one wants to do the work in the gym. That’s it. I don’t get MD and other ways to reach enlightenment and peace and healing and, and all of that. But you don’t want to, I don’t wish an NDP on any human being in the world. Because it doesn’t always work out. Well. I am so fortunate. I’m alive. By all accounts. I should be dead more severely brain dead. Yeah. So it’s an absolute miracle. I walked out of their absolute like, in that sense.

Brian Smith 32:03
I’m sorry, but what would you What was the question? I was saying so you come back from this and I guess it explained to me what the challenges are. Okay. I’ve talked to some people that have explained something, but explain to our audience what are the challenges?

Chris Kito 32:16
So I remember coming back and you know, I’m 24 at the time and you know, you’re entering adulthood and you’re building your life. And you know, fortunately I can look back now over eight years and look at journals, you know, you nothing changes more than your past and what your relationship is with emotion and understanding say, Well, I thought this or I thought that I had that feeling. And then you can actually look back and say, oh, wow, on May 15 and 2012, two weeks after this is really what I thought and felt I wrote it, so I can go back and see exactly what I was feeling and going back, you know, but there were there are so many challenges everything from I remember, you know, start from the top down for the first six months. But really, for the first few months, I had no idea what happened. I didn’t know the term nd I didn’t know any of this, I just had this full blown experience. And pieces were coming back over days, weeks and months, over this time. For the first six months, I remember writing and every day I would wake up and I would have to think to myself, and I would feel I had no idea who I was, um, in the sense and that’s a very hard thing to to put into words, I would wake up and I would not know my emotional response to situations I would not know how I thought because of what I would have done or how I would have felt was not was different from after that. nd and I didn’t realize what was happening. I just woke up and I was thought, oh my god, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t know my own emotions. I remember walking and smelling roses one day and just breaking down crying and having no explanation for that I you know, I didn’t I didn’t have a sense of smell. I always had a very bad sense of smell. Now. I think came back from my end and I can smell flowers. I remember my vision reset a little bit I remember being able see clear, I remember, you know, the physical attributes where I stopped eating meat for six months, I couldn’t be in the sun, I had to wear a hat and sunglasses every day and I was away from big life. I didn’t have any loud music. So I had these physical changes. Now, I was like, Oh, no, I can’t do that. Or I was going to go do something. I was like, No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to eat that. And, you know, really four or five a week days ago or a week ago, I was different I function differently in the world. Now my functioning is totally different. In my thought process and my emotions and every day I woke up and I remember thinking and writing, I have no idea what’s going on. Okay, no, Lou, and it’s the weirdest feeling now looking back on it cuz now it’s been, you know, more integration eight years later, worked within and figured a lot of this out, and I knew what was going on. At that point. I never heard the term near death experience. Didn’t know what anything was I just woke up and was like, I have no idea what’s going on. In any aspect physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, I was just this last puppy just kind of like along for this weird ride with no language or no direction. I didn’t know any of this was so I couldn’t even grounded and say, Okay, this is happening. It was just I have no idea what’s going on.

And that continued for six months pretty strong. And then somehow and I don’t know, this was just by the Grace, Grace of the universe. I was online googling, like after effects. I’m like, I’m trying I have to figure out what happened. There’s got to be something I said this, someone else have had has had to have something like this happen. And I started looking around, I came across ions. And it had a list of, you know, after effects of an MD like 35 and I had like 33 out of the 35. All right, well, that’s a pretty good indicator. So I called them I said, Hey, I live in Los Angeles and I took your little tasks. And I had 33 out of the 35 Is there anyone you can connect me to, to speak to I need to talk to someone? And they said, yeah, we have this woman up in Santa Barbara, give her a call. Here’s her number. So I called this this woman. And we spoke and she goes, Oh, honey, within two months, she goes, Oh, honey, you had a near death experience. I go What? And she goes, Yeah, and she’s like, Listen, I haven’t proved me once you come up next week, we’ll talk and that that’s really what started the process of understanding what happened and, and and the heavy work in every aspect of my life of integration and, you know, in accepting and evolving into who I who I became instantly, and it was an instant flash with the end but that’s a journey is decades and a lifetime of fully integrating and understanding and developing that consciousness of where you grew into. And that that’s how I found I ns and groups or community and I, I started to then piece together everything that happened and I said, Well this happened. Oh, well that yeah, that’s that and this and then they said, Well, what else is kind of trickling out is like things were getting worked out over days, weeks, months, even years. And you know, even at the seven year mark of my NDA, which was last summer, it was like the other shoe drop of me changing my life and everything and, you know, looking at the crossing, okay, this is a 15 year process. So this is a 30 year lifetime process and understanding that because there’s always something that kind of comes up more. You know, I never spoke about this for six and a half years. I never talked about my near death experience. I mean, people that knew me, I just said, Yeah, you know, Chris had a peanut reaction and that was that was it, you know, it was more to it. If I ever did speak about it, I probably only spoke about 75% of the story, and it was very filtered and edited down out. Now, now I speak pretty freely about it. I don’t I don’t I disclose everything. There’s 100% disclosure with my story. But yeah, a year ago that was you’re getting the, you know, the 75% version.

Brian Smith 38:14
Yeah, I think that’s, that seems to be a common thing that people have the, you know, there is this process of reintegrating back into the world feeling maybe out of place out of sorts. You know, what? The sensitivity so I’m glad you took the time to explain that to people that may not really understand all that’s involved with it’s not just that, that 15 minutes or whatever that you were on the other side, it’s coming back and just being like, a fish out of water, I guess.

Chris Kito 38:42
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I still feel like a fish out of water eight years later. So I think I think any MD he or anyone that’s had a severe experience or a spiritually transformed experience has the, you know, forever Forever your changed and the key Whereas integrating the experience will never leave you and it always is constantly evolving and you know we have to live in this world and function and do the best we can for ourselves and family and community but but your it there’s always going to be a rift in like the paper of life because you have had that experience and there’s many ways to look at it and a lot of and I’ve I’ve taken the path of okay I understand that you know, I’m gonna think operate and function very differently than some people there’s going to be people that agree with me they don’t agree with me and I don’t impose anything on anyone I could be right I could be totally wrong. It’s that’s none of my there’s no judgment. It’s none of my business what other people think it and you kind of find your tribe of people that that are in that same MD world. That’s why it’s such a beautiful niche niche community. Yeah, we all kind of have this understanding of anyone that’s gone through something or grief or, or a big transformative experience that

it changes your life forever. Yeah, yeah.

You’re in a interaction with a baseball bat, um, really, you know, just moments of, not of just having to really, to be it’s hard to put words to it, but to be uation where you just don’t know how to respond or you don’t understand and and knowing that, okay, you know, a year ago or six months ago, this is how I would have handled it or done it. Now you’re like, I don’t know, like you’re learning to rethink you’re learning to reuse your brain. You’re learning to reuse your your mind or emotions and your understanding of what’s going on and all of that shifts. It’s like everything you’ve been locked thought everything you believe thought learned was just thrown out the window. He know we’re going to start this over a different and you’re like, Okay, all right. I can’t even go back to that. No, no, no, it’s gone. Like you just don’t think like that anymore. And like, you can’t, it’s hard to explain because you have to kind of be in that position to understand how to, like really just turn over your life and it wasn’t like a process of Oh, we’re going to spend 20 years of meditating and then you’re slowly going to gradually it’s like No, just like that. And D everything’s turned over and gear it out. Because it’s so severe and so intense so quickly. It just blows your it’s like a hurricane ripping a roof off roof off a house. That’s what it’s really like and then you got to kind of put the shingles back on one by one but the roof looks completely different. rebuilt so I’m rebuilding my house in my everything. And that process still goes on Eight years later, I still deal with that. And, and then you also have the little other things you know, I remember you know, I’ve always you know, from that You know, the the, you know, something so simple as the candy that’s on the checkout aisle. When you go at a grocery store, one peanut m&m will kill me in a half hour. You know, I can’t touch food on an airplane I have to be super careful. There were moments where I remember after my en d A year later, I remember just sitting there and I cooked pasta and I was like, there’s peanuts in this pasta. And I took the pasta, I threw it all out. I wouldn’t touch it. And I’m like, well, there’s like any peanuts and spaghetti I don’t know why I just thought there was and so there was moments I had that word challenging to really trust food and even now I don’t I only eat anyone that knows me knows I only eat at a few restaurants there select restaurants I won’t go near them. I won’t touch anything new I I don’t eat anything that I don’t prepare myself. I go to a bar Keystone has cookies. This cake. I don’t touch it like it’s just You know anyone that knows me know that even bother asking they know the deal. So I had to adjust my life physically from my allergies significantly all my epi pens are up to date I can’t even have it show on my wall we we don’t need to make the same mistake twice and so there was that there was a lot of little things that came up so there was a bit of a reintegration and understanding with food something that people eat and snack and is healthy can kill me and I’m surrounded by that all the time. And you know I someone close to me once said you know they had a very severe allergy to tomatoes. And they would whenever they went to the grocery store they put it tomato in their basket to just to kind of understand it and like to develop less of a fear and an understanding it so when I go to groceries, sometimes I’ll put hmm Peanuts, walnuts or something that safely contained in my basket. Just a habit with me and say I said Listen, I remember talking to peanut butter. Listen, I will respect you, if you respect me, and this is how we’re going to be I come in peace. And I walk around Whole Foods with nuts in my basket. And that really helped a lot. And I said, I’m not going to have this adversarial relationship with food that I is going to kill me all the time. And that was a big issue. I mean, I, I don’t you know, I’ve never met anyone that reads labels as much as I do. And as many times as I do, I’ll read it five times, and scan it and look to make sure you know, no nuts, no nuts, no nuts. No, you got to check is it you know, facility that had that. So there are so many effects that come out of it. And

it’s been quite the process. It’s been a blessing. The journey has been an absolute blessing. I’ve met amazing people and I, you know, now I find it very healing for myself to be speaking about this. And that’s really been very transformative because for six years, I wouldn’t talk about it. It just didn’t come up. It was like No, we just don’t talk about it. I was really I didn’t feel it. And then all the sudden I said, You know what, I had this opportunity to speak last May. And then I said, you know, I’m just gonna do it, I don’t even care anymore. And I did it and then everything started changing. It started lightening up. And it’s been an unbelievably healing a moment for me and I still don’t necessarily enjoy talking about it. But I made the decision with myself and I said, You know what, I’m so fortunate to be here. And there are so many people that aren’t that passed away from food allergies, and I walked out of there when I should have been dead, or I should have been permanently brain damaged. I was oxygen starved. And there was a woman a few months after my incident that had that happen, and she is in a vegetative state and I always had that like up there. So I read those articles. I see him girl dies on an airplane kid bites a Snickers bar on a playground. He’s dead. 20 minutes later, that that was me, but for the grace of the universe, I’m here now and healthy. And I said, You know what? My service back for that is going to be to speak about my experience and my integration and healing and the path I’m walking now. And if I can bring healing, peace, comfort or understanding to just one person, anytime I do an interview, I speak I talk to anybody. It’s worth it to me. And I’m going to put my own self aside and do it. Because I don’t I don’t need to talk about this. I don’t have a burning desire, but I forced myself to say, you know what, anyone that calls or texts or asks or I put myself out there, I’m going to do it. And I’ve found that to be very rewarding. And that’s my, that’s my repayment for being back alive. Is is helping

Brian Smith 47:01
Do you think your indie was planned or wasn’t an accident?

Chris Kito 47:05
Question? I thought about that. But you know, it’s like, is there Free Will or pre determination? I don’t know. Um, I? I don’t know. I don’t think it really matters at this point. I mean, I put it in my mouth. I’m here now. Yeah, I think life is a combination of both. And I don’t know how my life would be different or it could have I mean, it could have gone anyway. I don’t know that answer. I’m sure it would be probably

Brian Smith 47:33
the message you got the message you got from your grandparents who was your grandpa’s It wasn’t your time. I mean, so it sounds like you I mean, cuz Some people say they were given a choice i’ve i’ve heard most people say they weren’t

Chris Kito 47:45
really a choice. And once I heard that I remember fighting to go back. And that that was I fought I fought like, and that’s it. That’s usually when you’re fighting to breathe. That’s a variable primal like there’s nothing more primal and natural in this universe when you’re fighting to breathe for oxygen so and someone’s like I mean when you really want something like that you know and you’ve been to that level of you know I’m fighting to read that is there’s there’s nothing beyond that I was on that edge and went over it a bit so I yeah I found my healing and my integration has significantly been accelerated and I’ve come to more peace with this being open and speaking about it and I find it very rewarding to speak to others about it and you know, every time I talk about my story, it’s it’s never a canned story. It just kind of comes out and flows out and everyone I’ve ever spoken to groups or you know, I will do an interview and then a very easy to find on the internet with my email and cell phone so I get random probably like since since Probably the last five months I get at least one or two people randomly calling texting or emailing me that saying, Hey, I saw an interview or your video and I just googled you and I got your cell number. So I get random calls and it’s from all over the world and it is really beautiful experience for someone saying, Hey, you know, I lost you know, child I lost you know, a spouse I had this happen I there’s no one I can talk to, but I saw your video and you said something that resonated with me. And I was like, and I you know, and I just say sure I’m here to listen and that that was it. That was my repayment plan for given an opportunity to to live and be healthy and come back. Really, Yeah, fine. And in many ways, 1000 times better than I was. I that that’s that’s how I looked at it. It’s like alright, that’s my, that’s my job. I have to do this now. I’ve had six and a half years to not talk about it. Now. I’m going to talk about it and and be absurd. Service yeah to others. And that’s that’s my that’s my give back now. And

Brian Smith 50:08
so let me ask you what’s your connection Now you mentioned earlier that your grandmother, your grandfather, your primary spirit guides, what’s your connection to the other side Now do you have mediumistic abilities Do you know I am father but

Chris Kito 50:21
I’ve always been fairly intuitive my whole life you know, I can always say now now I’m very, very intuitive. I have very good mediumship ability very good psychic ability. I am. I don’t, I don’t read really through other people. I do it sometimes for my family, I do it a lot for myself. Um, and I use it as my guiding way to make decisions in life or business or anything like along like that, but I can use mediumship I use psychic ability I I can pick up energy exceptionally well with someone like meeting them and just kind of knowing and, and it’s been interesting. So I’ve done that. Some work with it more over the last few years with actually working with coaches and trainers that are mediums and psychics and really developing it one on one and it’s been really great. It’s a tool. It’s It’s It’s interesting, I don’t I don’t really talk about it outside of the indie world no one really knows I have that that ability or that sense, because sometimes, you know, you have to know your audience with this. And it’s a very heavy topic and ease and spirituality and consciousness and death and dying. And then you bring in mediumship spirits, angels, you know, listen, there’s a community that loves that and you can let it go. And there’s other people that not so much and I’m very respectful of everyone. And I go from there, but I do and, you know, it’s interesting, my all my grandparents have been deceased, but I don’t feel that there are moments where I’ll think like, oh, someone’s so still alive and it’s a cold night. They passed away eight, nine years ago and it’s really odd. Because physically they’re not here but like being able to kind of tap into it and feel it or I can see signs or little things here or there or like it’s still energetically around. So there’s the blessing of having that or even in business or life where I can meet someone and I can kind of know what they’re thinking or I could see I always say you know, I you know, I can kind of see through most people instantly of what it is what’s going on what’s really happening and all of that it’s great you know, the downside is I have to be very very cautious and aware of energy my surroundings I mean salt that’s grounding I mean I have crystals and bracelets on right now and beads to go through this interview and grounding myself so it’s been a challenge and being you know hypersensitive, and that takes a long time to develop you know, personal boundaries and grounding and energy and, and all of this it’s a really a double edged sword when you’re new to it, and eventually, anyone that does any of that energy work or spirits I mean, if they understand how best But they can navigate because it can be very challenging to walk in or be like, I gotta get out of here. You know, you pick up on something and you know, there are countless times I’ve said to someone I said, I’ll call him I’ll be like, I got to get away from this person. That’s not good. There’s nothing there’s no, no, no. And then, you know, six months later, I’m proving 100%, right? It’s just a challenge to because you’re hypersensitive to everything around you from how well you sleep to. Okay, I slept weird on my shoulder and my shoulder then explodes for a week, where, you know, I’m just hypersensitive with everything or food, obviously, for me is a major point, food, weather climate. You know, the interesting moment a storm comes in, I feel that in my body, so it’s great when you can harness that properly, but it takes there’s a little bit of a bumpy road, integrating those skill sets and the sensitivity. Yeah,

Brian Smith 53:53
well, I could I could understand what you’re saying. I mean, this this world, you I’ve taught people like it’s like yourself, to have this sensitivity to different energies and stuff that we might not as normal people kind of filter out. But for you, I guess it’s a kind of learn to protect yourself. I want to ask you, I mean, you’re obviously you’re embracing life, you’re happy to be back, have your second chance and all that. What’s your relationship with death flight? Now, you’re still a young man, you probably have a long time to go before you see your grandfather’s again. But what are your thoughts on death? Isn’t your

Chris Kito 54:27
question I have no fear of death. I think it’s as natural as being born. I think it’s the most euphoric and peaceful experience for anyone that is facing that at the moment. It’s not something to be feared. It’s a natural progression. It’s inevitable. And, yeah, I want to add this to that question. I’ve I’ve spoken to people and I’ve met other people that want to die and they want to and even other nd years I’d say no, I really don’t want to be back. I’m just waiting to go. And I don’t judge anybody but what I feel is life is so precious and there’s so much beauty in this world if you want to find it and see it and there is chaos, but there’s also beauty. It’s a balance everything in the universe, just you can choose what you want to see him focus on. And I, I there, I feel just living with gratitude and understanding the beauty and the preciousness of life because you can’t go back. It’s final, in the sense that like, a it’s over, this life’s over, it’s over there may be another one, but this one’s over. And there’s gonna be people that miss you and there’s gonna be moments and there’s so much you don’t know or things that can happen, or that we can do as individuals that can make life so rewarding and rewarding for others. So I look at life as I would my message. If I had to sum that up to someone that asked, I would say you learn to live life every day with gratitude and look at it as a blessing because you There’s so much opportunity out there and there’s so much beauty and we tend to overlook that. And as humans, we look at the bad we look at the negative, we look at the moment and not the whole arc. I mean, if I was in there in that moment, I was laying there the day after my end, and this is awful. This is painful. I just want to die. Because I can’t figure out how my mind’s working or anything I would have missed out on the rest of my life, which is another 70 years 80 years. So I feel we get too caught up in the moment and we don’t look at the big picture and say, yeah, there might there’s gonna be some rainy days it happens there but there’s gonna be some bad moments. bad moments bad this bad relationships, bad, whatever. But you know what, if we look at everything, you got to go through this storm, guess what, it’s gonna be beautiful and amazing. And it’s there if you want it. And I fall on the side of you know, you got to live life and it’s a prayer it’s a gift. And when you’re not looking at as a gift that shows you’re not in gratitude in my opinion, and you’re not embracing You’re not evolving and you’re not serving or helping or sharing. And that’s really what I find so beautiful. And yeah.

Brian Smith 57:11
Yeah, I think that’s really, really well put. It’s what we choose to focus on. As you said, life is life is good, there’s good and bad and every bad thing. There’s some good that comes out of it. So we have to look at the entire arc and, and I see another thing you said it was really excellent. You know, we, if you believe in reincarnation, that’s great, but you’re never gonna have this life again. This This life is unique, and it’s not very long. Yeah. So Chris, I understand you’re speaking at the ions conference is going to be a virtual ions conference, let our listeners know it’s going to be online August 14 through 16th. And I answered the International Association for near death studies and people want to know about it. That’s a virtual conference that I ns.org so virtual conference dot i ND s.org. And you’re going to be speaking in

Chris Kito 57:58
battle. This is my second time. Speaking This is my third time now this will be my fourth time attending, which is an amazing conference. It’s been life changing for me to to meet other experiencers and people and researchers. It’s my favorite four days out of the year. And I’m so disappointed. We’re not in person this year. But I’ll take the virtual conference, amazing experience amazing people. Second time speaking, fourth time visiting, we are going to be discussing integrating near death experiences after having experience. As you know, like we said earlier, the experience is like 2% of the pie. The other 98 is okay, integrating it evolving, understanding, sharing, growing and living your life in the best possible way of taking that and really, you know, you have an ND in a circle back, it’s what you do after what are you going to do with it? Are you going to make yourself better? Are you going to meet with community and people are you going to share and grow you’re going to be a better human being You know, what are you going to do? And I think that’s a big question that you want to ask yourself. I found for me that, you know, having that purpose or understanding and least sang, again, I is not something I is, it’s not easy for me to talk about a year and a half ago, this would have never happened even a year ago, it still would have been, maybe is, is, you know, saying, alright, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to share and I’m going to put myself out there and, you know, evolving along. And so a lot of the panel we’re going to be discussing is bat and some advice and our personal stories and experiences and how to continue that journey because you know, I’ll be saying something different a year, two years, five years from now, it’s always evolving. And being aware that it’s never it’s never going to remain the same. It’s always going to change and being open to that and I think, you know, people say they want an N d there are other ways to find that alignment or under And I think really what people want is a way to find healing and peace and substance in their lives and to go through something that’s difficult whether it be Greece, Greece, gratitude, grief, or change or transformation. That’s it. No One No one, no one wants the pain. They just want the after effect, and someone can discuss it and say, Hey, listen, I went through it, you don’t have to suffocate to death. Let me save you that and this is what I’ve realized. And this is what I felt and you know, take it leave it take what you like, don’t like or what may resonate or might seem authentic to you, and work with that. And if that could bring healing peace transformation or harmony, take it and run because I think that’s what everyone wants. Ultimately, in the end. It’s just someone needs to find something they think the end ease the quick shot. It’s not it’s it’s painful, violent, intense, and then you still got to do decades of work afterwards. And anyone that says they don’t i mean i for my own experience, it’s going to continue forever.

Brian Smith 1:01:02
Yeah, I think what you just said was was wonderful. I think it’s excellent I and I applaud you for what you’re doing, because I think it’s very, very important. I attend our local ions meetings here in Cincinnati and and I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people that have had Andy’s a safe. From the outside, it seems like it’s your fourth thing, you know, you get to go across the other side, you get to see loved ones and stuff. But people don’t realize all the work that’s involved, you know, when you come back from it, and I’ve seen people in that community struggle to integrate it. And for people like you that have been through it and gone through your six years. It’s like I work. I work with grief. I work with people who mostly have children transition. So they can look at me and say, Well, I can get to where, you know, Brian is hopeful I could be example for them. You’re an example for someone who just had an NDA that might be going, which has happened to me, you know, I can’t deal with this world anymore. So I applaud you for what you’re doing. Chris, it’s been really great getting to know you, I appreciate you, you By being yourself and putting it out there and doing the work that you’re doing in the world, I look forward to that.

Chris Kito 1:02:06
We’ll do another zoom in a couple of weeks. Maybe next year we’ll meet on earth to do this year, so

Brian Smith 1:02:14
that’d be nice. All right, it’s good. Thank you, Ryan. day.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:17
Take care. Bye.

Brian Smith 1:02:21
While I hope you enjoyed the episode, I want to make it really easy for you to reach me. So just send me a text 231996 and simply text the word growth gr o w th. In fact you can right now just say hey Siri, send the message. 231996 and when Siri asked you what you want to send, just say growth. You can do the same thing with Ok, Google. Thanks a lot. Have a wonderful day.

Announcer 1:02:48
Thanks for listening to grief to growth. Brian hopes that you find this episode helpful. And we’ll come back for future episodes. Brian’s best selling book grief to growth planted not buried. is a great resource for anyone who is coping with grief or know someone who is. If you enjoy the podcast and would like to support it, there are three things you can do to help. The first is to share the podcast with someone that you think it will help. The second is to go to iTunes rate and review the episode. The third way you can support the podcast is by becoming a patron. Head over to www patreon.com slash grief to growth. That’s pa t ar e o n.com. Slash grief, the number to growth and sign up to make a small monthly donation. patrons get access to exclusive bonus content and knowledge that you are helping to spread the message of grief to grow. For more about Brian and grief to growth, visit www grief to growth.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai