Hey everyone, just a quick warning about this episode of Round Trip Death.
It includes graphic discussion about a suicide attempt that may be inappropriate for children
and those sensitive to this topic.
From the time that they pronounced me dead was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my hocks, my heart had stopped,
and I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical
body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel if you could imagine absolute love and peace,
there wasn't anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody.
You have found the number one near-death experience podcast.
So congratulations and welcome.
And it's because of you.
So thank you very much to our listeners.
And a big welcome to our special guest today, Scott Bowman.
Coming to us from the middle of the continent, St. Louis, Missouri.
How are you today, Scott?
I'm doing fantastic.
Thanks so much for having me, Eric.
Hey, do you mind letting our listeners get to know you a little bit?
Tell us about you.
Well, I'm about to be 50 years old.
I'm a USMC Combat Veteran and a flooring installer here in St. Louis.
You look 25, by the way.
Oh, well, I thank you so much, Flattery.
You'll get you everywhere.
Sorry, go ahead.
You're a flooring installer.
Yeah, I'm a flooring installer for Evans Flooring here in St. Louis.
It's a family-owned company that has been very powerful in my life and just giving me
a sense of belonging.
The trades are great, brother.
People are getting downsized everywhere.
We're busy.
And it gives a man some connection to creationism within himself.
And making the world a better place, one home at a time.
It's kind of the way.
Yeah, I used to say no one ever wants to be a floor guy, but you spend enough of your life
rock bottom.
You figure you might as well spruce up the place a bit.
I like it.
And working with your hands, that's a great thing.
Does it feel good when you're done laying?
I don't know if you do carpet or wood or what, but when you're done with a whole floor,
just take a step back and go, I did that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I specialize in exotic hardwoods and all higher-end residential homes.
I do a lot of custom stairs as well.
And people want it.
There are lots of trades where it's something like, I have to get this or I have to get that.
But for us at Evans, we get to sort of be dream makers.
Or, oh, I always wanted an oak floor.
I always wanted some Brazilian cherry in my home.
Or I just always wanted to get this new, but they've been waiting their whole lives for
their kids to grow up, no rollerblading on the house.
And so being able to do that, as a combat veteran, you get people that want to thank
you for your service a lot.
We hate that.
It was a job.
It's a job that I was young and dumb and I needed something to straighten me up anyway.
And you can only walk through so many opium fields and oil fields before you're like,
maybe this isn't about freedom.
But when a homeowner shows that appreciation and gratitude for me for changing their entire
home, increasing the value, increasing the equity, I actually get to feel like a hero.
I actually did something great for this person.
That's awesome.
And you get paid for it.
And I get paid quite well actually.
There's a 70% vacancy rate in the trade right now.
Wow.
Okay.
This show is all about near-death experiences.
We're going to talk about yours.
I want a little background leading up to it because it tells part of the story.
Would you mind telling me a little bit about what your life was like growing up?
Yeah.
That's the little bit part is the most difficult.
I had a very, very challenging childhood.
My biological father was murdered a week before I was born.
My mother was just a teenager.
This was in inner-city Chicago.
My grandfather, whom she lived with, was a World War II veteran, had a bullet in his
brain.
And her brother was mentally disabled, extremely mentally challenged.
She was born, breached with a billy-coat cord around his neck.
So here she is, a little girl with a little boy all alone with no one to take care of her.
And immediately I dealt with a lot of trauma that we don't even know the cause of it, whether
it was my grandfather or my disabled uncle.
But I was found with ruses, crying upstairs alone.
A lot of neglected abuse happening before my mother even could finish college and started
taking care of me herself.
I spent my fifth to fast forward.
I spent my fifth birthday in a hospital.
I spent my fifth birthday in a Lakeshore mental institution in an abused children's unit.
And years and years of my life, I was in and out of different institutions, juvenile homes,
foster care, group homes.
None of them were terrible.
In fact, when you look at the experiences of children in today's foster group here with
similar experiences, the level of abuse and trauma they have is almost worse than when
they were in the home.
But all of that really stopped for me when I was out of the home.
I didn't have stepfathers beating me.
I'd been hospitalized several times for child abuse that led to these consistent out-home
placements.
But honestly, God protected me through the vast majority of these facilities and homes
where they were good homes and I just wasn't a good fit.
I had a very high IQ.
And one of these facilities, I was tested and found to have an IQ of 186.
To put that in reference, Einstein's was 169.
So my ability to create destruction and chaos around me was just very high.
I could take all these things apart.
I could escape.
I had been running away my entire life just trying to be an adult and a child's body,
understanding things of a spiritual nature.
I mean, I read Homer's Iliad in the Odyssey when I was eight years old.
And that led to a world of study of myth and religion and spirituality that just followed
me to this day.
But I never, ever felt home.
I never had a good structure.
I never had parents other than my relationship with God, which developed at a very, very early age.
Sometimes I wonder if abused children have some connection with God broken open with them
that just makes them closer, father to the fatherless, as we talked about.
Talked about once before.
And that can create a sort of bitterness.
Well, if you're my dad, why are you such an absent father?
Why are things so hard for me?
Why can't I have a home?
And just even places that I really loved.
In fact, often the place where I was like, oh, I want to stay here.
I want to be your little boy.
Can I be this?
For whatever reason, just wouldn't work out.
And then eventually, being a six foot one, 200 pound man today, I developed into this
larger child quite quickly.
And you sort of, well, here's a child with behavioral issues, child abuse, child trauma,
incredible high tolerances for pain.
And we're going to take him into our home.
It's not something you can expect a family with other small children that's working in
foster care to want to take on.
It's a heavy burden.
Yeah, that really is.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wound up, the best places for me were always like juvenile correction facilities
or sort of academies.
And some of those experiences were good, but there would always be this battle for freedom
and control that would yield me in violent situations or escape situations.
I'm just going to pack a bag, set up my timing, use my extreme intellect to know when I'm
going to leave and escape.
And once you escape a facility so many times, they don't want you back.
They just send you to juvenile corrections and obviously you don't want to be here.
So we'll find a different place for you.
So this evening that we're going to talk about, I believe you had mentioned to me before
you were in a parochial school.
Yeah.
Yeah, a fantastic one.
The thing is I'm going to name drop them a bit, let me not trash talk Norris as a facility.
A beautiful school campus, fantastic staff.
The children are broken up into different pods or wings, each with a different name
and a different focus.
So they're trying to make sure that they don't put children that have been through extreme
sexual abuse with extreme physical abuse or drug abuse.
You know, where they tried to find the best place for you.
The facility is in a very natural region in rural Wisconsin.
There's a stocked lake there and game rooms and lots of great activities.
And some of the things I learned from the staff, people there like Big Dan and Cuomo
and some of the wonderful young ladies there have held me to this day and have been a part
of creating healthy coping skills.
But the problem with all of these facilities isn't the adults, it's the children.
And when you take children out of these painful places that have some very dark coping skills,
you can share these coping skills like, oh, that cutting and drug use and all of these
things, oh, that works for you.
And in bulimia and sort of eating disorders, you'll sort of absorb one another's disorders
like a sponge because your children, you're young, you're malleable.
Child on child abuse is one of the most common abuses on the country.
And for our generation is Gen Xers.
We're all latchkey kids.
Parents weren't around as it was anyway.
So we were all self-taught.
We were all kind of on our own on the tracks, if you would.
And that led to some very unhealthy and dangerous situations for sure.
Now, initially to the evening in question, I had been a little younger when I first got
to Norris and they put me in what was called the West Wing.
It's an all-young children unit, regardless of your trauma and whatnot.
If you were under a certain age, you went to West Wing.
It's probably one of the highlights of my childhood actually because of the staff.
They were all really sweet, good-natured and gentle.
And there was a lot of structure, which I was craving, dearly, dearly craving it.
And I had never been so well-behaved in my entire life, too well-behaved so that when
I had had a birthday and I had reached a certain point, they had decided that they were going
to send me to the group home.
You know, they were like, this kid never does anything wrong.
He's always helping the other kids.
He's always doing well.
His grades are great.
Let's reward him by sending him to this group home called New Beginnings.
It's right there on the same facilities.
You get access, but you get to go to town, which is kind of fun.
You can get on a bike and go to town and hang out with some of the local girls, which for
a young adolescent boy is about the greatest thing ever.
Unfortunately, this also introduces some substance issues.
Like, you've got access to alcohol.
These girls can steal from their parents' liquor cabinets, and they're hanging out with the
bad kids from the group home for a reason.
And there's fighting and whatnot.
They're rowdy boys.
We're not as washed as we were on the other facility.
And eventually, several incidents had happened to the point where I didn't have an off switch,
a really long fuse, but once it goes off, there's no off switch.
Well, if this is the limit of how we can be, I'm going way past it.
And so they wound up kicking me out of the group home and sending me to the druggy unit,
if you will, just called New Day.
And that was just a very dark place.
And here I am, where I'd finally found a home, if you will.
It was as much of a home as I had ever had at West Wing, to being moved again.
I was good, and you took me out of my home.
So it doesn't matter if I'm bad or good, I'm constantly punished either way.
It really creates conflict in a child's mind.
And now here I am in a place where I didn't have any substance abuse issues.
In fact, I had never even thought of using substances until you sent me to that group
home.
Do you remember how old you were then?
Yeah.
Yeah, that would have been 16.
So here I am 16.
At this point, I had been being shipped around the country across several different state
lines from facility to facility, some of which were far more psychiatric facilities, where
when you have an extremely high IQ and advanced psychologists and students of psychology are
experimenting on you, you're learning things that the human mind doesn't need to know as
far as manipulation and what your worth is.
And it definitely creates a sort of dark attachments in a human being.
I almost went into psychology.
But that was the first thing I studied at Mizzou here when I went to college with my
GI grant.
And I was just like, man, I don't want to make a living turning normal personality quarks
into dysfunction for profit.
And I just wanted to figure myself out.
And the young interns and whatnot that are at the whim of these psychologists that control
some of these darker facilities, they don't care.
You're just data for them.
And so a lot of that culminated in this position where here I am in another one of these cold
sterile facilities where now I don't know anybody again.
Now I'm alone and I'm kind of an outsider and nobody wants me.
And at this point, I never really wanted to kill myself.
I was talking with this to the wife the other night.
Suicide wasn't the goal.
Or was it attention?
What I wanted was freedom and control.
I felt punished.
I felt punished by God.
I felt very angry with him.
The only thing I can write that's of any value to God is this life, this temple.
And that's the only way I can hurt him in a way he's allowed me to be hurt is to destroy
this thing.
And on this night, I set out to do just that.
And how did you do it?
Well, you learned a lot of ways in these facilities on how to harm yourself and to get attention
and whatnot.
And the one thing that I found was this sort of the most successful implement was your
toothpaste packet.
This is a small, maybe one inch by five inch aluminum foil packet coated in a plastic coating.
I'm sure you've seen that.
And they're often in camping and travel kits.
And if you strip off that plastic coating, the corners are razor, razor sharp.
And so before the evening, it's early in the day and everybody's kind of getting ready
to go to their groups and their meetings.
I sharpen both corners of one as clean as I could that were on the opposite from the
open end.
And then I hit it.
So this was a very premeditated event.
I am going to break loose of this mortal coil this evening.
So I stashed that.
And now at night after bed, when they do lights out, about every hour or so, a staff person
does a walk down the hall.
And these rooms are about eight by 10 rooms with a door in one corner and at the very
opposite end of corner of your bed.
Comfy enough.
And then a small window in the door that's of a height to where only an adult would be
able to peek through.
So that way the staff person that's on shift can peek in on the kids when they're sleeping
and make sure.
But I figure I got an hour.
I got an hour to make this thing happen.
So I wait until Andrew, who was a third shifter for that evening, comes past my room.
And literally the moment he passes by my door and checks.
I pull my cover down, exposing the radial artery in my left arm.
Right.
Inside your elbow.
Yeah.
The inside of the elbow, as you can see right there, scarred to there to this day.
And I began working my way through, sort of cutting a trough.
Now, you know, for a child that's been through extreme levels of child abuse, this little
stinging pain with each sort of, you know, little cut, because you got to work your way
down.
It's not a real razor blade.
It doesn't open it up at once.
It takes some time.
And you start as you start going through, you know, the different dermal layers, it
gets a little emotional.
You start sweating.
Your blood starts pumping through your veins.
Kind of have to take little breaks, you know, and you keep going on.
And the pain starts getting a little bit more intense as you get through the initial dermal
layers and you start kind of getting hung up, if you will, on the meteor tissue and tendon
tissue, the stuff that's in the way of that arterial sort of tissue.
The sound, the sound is awful.
It's kind of sickening, you know, but you just keep working.
And there's not a lot of blood at this point either.
It's just all really superficial stuff.
Now, mind you, I'm laying down and then doing this laying down in bed.
I've got my like, my knee up and my arm kind of stretched across.
I'm just working my way down as much as I can.
And it kind of opens up.
The wound opens up a little bit more, a little bit more, you know, until eventually you can
you can full seed the artery there.
In fact, it's almost until this point until I had exposed and opened up that arterial
cavity, if you will, and I can I can see in there.
It wasn't like I was attempting to kill myself.
I wasn't crying or saying why God, because it's so premeditated where I was like, if
this is the end result, if this is the course of my life, then this is the plan I'm taking.
It was more so like I was attempting to break out of a prison with a spoon, you know, like
I'm just scooping out this tunnel and I'm very focused and I want to be quiet.
I was more apprehensive and had more anxiety about getting caught by the staff person than
I was apprehensive about my mortality, about ending my life until this moment.
Once the the the arteries exposed, and I can see it, you know, I can literally see the
artery pulsing in there.
My heart is beating.
You know, there's a ton of sweat on my brow, the sort of gravity of what I was about to
do really sets in.
And tears started to come.
I couldn't say I was crying, but I couldn't, I definitely the tears were just flowing down
my face or it's like, this is it.
And I set my eyes on the ceiling and I turned around the toothpaste packet to the unused
sharp side and I held it against that artery and I just really fast just ripped out.
And I could immediately feel this like just warmth just like began pulling down me and
I still hadn't looked at it.
And then I did it when I did him feel fear.
I felt relief.
I felt like like a construction worker that is just put his last board in on a big flooring
project.
And I laid my arm down flat along my side with the wound filling up.
I could smell this sort of metallic coppery smell in the air, hold the cover up over my
chest and close my eyes just relaxed.
And I had to think that I didn't pray.
All this time I spent talking to God, I felt like I had said everything I wanted to say
to God.
I just figured I was going to go to sleep for the last time.
I listened to my heartbeat normalize because I'm calming down.
And I listened to the hum of a facility whenever you're in one of these facilities, they all
sound kind of the same.
There's a hum of the fluorescent lights in the hall.
Some TV plays in the distance.
A phone rings.
It's just the same.
The same sound in a hospital.
This sort of buzz because it's building as a live itself.
I just listened to that.
And eventually it was different than falling asleep.
I actually began to feel like I was sort of sinking, sinking into my covers, into the
bed.
Right.
I guess I kind of couldn't tell anymore where the bed began.
I ended and then down further and further.
And that continued for some time.
I couldn't even tell you how long that continued.
But eventually something changed.
I felt like I was being sucked down.
Like I was being pulled out.
And even this was just a very interesting experience.
This is until a sort of pulling.
I can't say it was hands or claws or anything, but it was a thing or many things that began
pulling me down.
And that is when this laughter began, a sort of slow motion laughter.
Like if a laugh track was playing on a TV and you put it on like one tenth speed, except
every crescendo of the laugh impacted me.
Like I could feel it in the sort of fiber of my being and myself.
Something I heard in my ears.
It was something I felt.
And I became overwhelmed with a powerful sense of dread that I had made a tragic mistake,
a permanent tragic mistake.
But yet even then, as I was writing about this in my journal the other night, I just
kind of accepted it.
I didn't beg for God's forgiveness or for anyone or anything to come save me.
I just kind of accepted that this was the choice I made and what was suffering if it
was eternal anyway.
This would just be it forever, except that it wasn't.
And I don't know when it stopped or where it stopped.
All I remember is the coming awake in a very fuzzy hospital room.
That I can remember the hospital room, but I can't remember anyone that was present there.
I can't remember anyone coming and talking to me.
I don't remember when my arm was bandaged.
And I also don't remember leaving the hospital and being back at Norris.
My next memory, in fact, is sitting in a chair in front of one of these little tables that
they have in every hospital next to a window on a beautiful sunny day.
I had 72 hours locked down where I wasn't allowed to leave the unit and I was on intense
observation.
And different doctors and staff people would come and talk to me regularly.
And I remember this woman coming and telling me how Andrew, that staff person, it wasn't
even time for him to do the walkthrough yet, but he had seen this weird dark substance
like near the door in the hallway.
And had came to investigate and the blood, you know, about 10 feet, because it's an 8
by 10 room, had poured all the way and because of the slope of the room, had poured all the
way under the door and my arm was hanging off the bed.
So I guess at some point it had slipped out from the covers and it had been able to wick
its way down my arm and down the room.
And Andrew had screamed for help and rushed in and with his fingers had pinched that arm
artery to stop the bleeding from anymore and had held it the entire way to the hospital,
which was white some ways away, right?
Like this is a rural facility.
So it was several hours.
I guess he had had nerve damage in his hand from holding it for that long because he'd
cut off the circulation to his fingers in order to save my life.
This man saved my life, I never got to thank him, I never even saw him again.
He was a third shifter and most of the third shifters were students, you know?
So who knows what path his life took after this incident.
As for me, I did not stop self-harm.
It only happened again when I was really, really trapped and it definitely happened
in a much more superficial way.
That laughter, sound, the very fiber of my soul stuck with me throughout my entire life.
One would think that it would have a more pivotal effect, but for whatever reason, when
I have absolutely everything I want in my life, I forget that sound and what it means
is waiting for you.
And I take glory away from God and I forget all the blessings and protection that's been
there in my life.
That's kind of ancient history for me now.
Let's take a breath.
Yeah.
I know I need one.
I don't know about you, but man, that is rough.
On this show, we hear from so many people have these beautiful near-death experiences
that are lifted up at opposite of you, up out of their body.
They can see down on it.
Some people go through this tunnel to the light and see rainbows and, you know, I'm
almost said unicorns, nobody sees unicorns, but the idea of this wonderful, beautiful,
loving experience.
And yours was not that way.
Let me just make sure I've got all of this.
It really consisted of a couple of things.
One feeling like you were pulled down.
Well, initially, it was just a sinking.
It was just like I was floating down, if you will.
Anyway, it's down, sinking, and then something pulling you down.
Yeah.
There was like a three, sorry to interrupt, there was like a three-stage process, right?
Just an initial sinking, like losing buoyancy in the water.
And then a sort of gravitational pull where I'm accelerating in my sinking, and then a
sort of things grabbing out.
I wouldn't say hands.
I don't, at least I don't recall any fingers, but I definitely felt a thing grab onto me,
like a hand with mittens, if you will.
It's hard to describe, but like something with intelligence grabbing me, and I had gone
within its grasp, where it was almost telekinetically pulling me down.
And then when I got to a certain point, and there were many of them that were grabbing
me and pulling me down.
And it was that moment, like I felt panic then, but the terror, the dread, then started
to laugh.
What was the laugh like?
It was like it was mocking.
It was a very mocking laughter.
That's so terrifying.
Oh, yeah.
It gives me the chipper's out.
I've got hair standing up right now.
Do you think you were out of body at that point?
Or was this just more of a, I don't know, a dream that happened while you were dying
and you were unconscious?
Or what do you think was going on?
Yeah, I thought about that.
Was the laughter of TV playing in the distance?
And because I'm going, I'm losing blood flow to the brain.
I've thought about that.
It's possible.
But I don't know.
Because there's been one other incident in my life where I felt like God spoke to me
or some other being spoke to me and he yelled at me to get up.
And I told you about this, the other thing.
And I definitely believe in otherworldly voices, right?
And that sound, and it's not something you hear with your body.
I want to make sure I'm clear.
You didn't feel like this was God mocking you, did you?
Oh, no.
No, definitely the other guy.
Definitely the other guy.
The other guy.
That's a good name for him.
Yeah.
Definitely the other guy.
Or some minion of his or of who what it was.
I felt like putting a child in this sort of position, right?
It's not on accident.
I've always felt like you make the agreement before you come here.
You sign a sole contract towards the sort of blessings you're going to get and the sort
of challenges that come with them.
Maybe I wanted hyperintelligence, right?
Let me have a bring up some two, two brilliant minds here that are great example of super
intelligence.
Einstein and Tesla.
One time, Einstein was asked what it was like to be the most intelligent man alive.
And he said, I don't know, asked Nikolai Tesla.
Einstein died, loved, family, in a nice home.
And he was probably just a patent thief, to be honest with you.
Tesla was a truly, truly brilliant man who's still affecting all of our lives today.
And he died alone, penniless, miserable, destitute in a hotel room.
He'd shortly had everything he'd ever worked on taken away from him and split up by powerful
cover.
What is intelligence?
What are the consequences of overthinking everything in life and allowing your mind?
Great tool, horrible master, to kind of take over your life.
Even now, where I truly, truly do have a love for Jesus.
I truly have a love for God.
I feel his inner workings in my life.
I'm often brought to a point of discomfort when I'm comfortable because I have to overthink
sort of everything.
How does this look to God?
How am I doing right now?
It's a very challenging place to be, especially as a child when you don't have the capacity
to just surrender.
You're always helpless.
So tell me how that experience back then with the other guy led to your belief in God now?
I don't know that I have a good answer for that.
Okay, let me ask something else then.
Did your life immediately change after this?
No, it's always bothered me.
You know, especially when you do hear about other people's stories and they have this
like powerful turnover.
I would say if anything, it made me a better father.
The reason being is because I know that negative reinforcement just doesn't work.
It's just very unsuccessful.
Look at all the people that have these experiences and they come into the beauty and grace and
glory of God and they turn their lives around.
It has powerful, powerful changes in them.
There I went, the worst possible outcome and eternal of suffering.
I was right there at the door and I still lived a very, very difficult childhood after
that.
In fact, you know, continue.
I attempted to escape from Norris multiple times.
I mean, I did escape from Norris multiple times after that.
I got into trouble.
I chased girls like no tomorrow and drugs.
I went really deep into the narcotics world.
You know, I only enlisted because I was facing an incident where I had 15 charges and nine
of those were police endangerment felonies.
I had to go to a boot camp, complete that boot camp successfully and then be accepted
and the only ones that would take me were the Marines, Ura.
You know, and even that experience and, you know, I had near death experiences with retours
under my belt too, but they weren't like this.
I didn't go anywhere.
I just got pushed me out of the way of getting blown up, you know, like, oh crap, that just
missed me.
And even then you think, oh man, if I died, I would have gone back to that place maybe.
It just, if anything.
I do have an answer for your first question.
All right, go for it.
If anything, it made me feel invincible.
Well, I went to Devil's door and came right back.
That probably wasn't a good thing at that age.
Definitely not.
I don't think it's ever been a good thing.
In fact, it's only the loss of a love, only the loss of a woman's love and disappointing
a woman's love has ever really initiated substantial change in growth in me for whatever reason.
You know, all of my biggest growth and development in my life that made me a good human being
were because of meeting some woman I was unworthy of.
By the way, I just want to interject something here.
I want to make sure that we don't ever cross a line on glorifying suicide in any way, shape,
or form.
What do you have to say for anyone who may be contemplating taking their own life?
You know, it's never about that.
I don't think anybody wants to die, brother.
We all want to live.
We all want freedom.
We all want control of our own destinies.
Especially if you're young and you're trapped in that place, the best tool for that is surrender,
to understand that there is a higher path out there and to breathe deep and to find
a path to stoicism.
You are not your emotions.
You are not the situation.
You're not even here in this body.
That is probably the greatest lesson that freed me from self-harm.
I'm not this man.
I'm not Scott Bowman.
That's just a name.
I'm not this body.
Something else outside of it bearing witness to this all unfolding.
And cutting that story short is robbing you of what might be the most epic and incredible
journey ever.
Because some of the darkest, most painful, worst things that have ever happened to me
led to the most beautiful, wonderful experiences.
My ability to be a parent and to love a child and to be infinitely patient with one, and
they're grown now, came from my own suffering.
I remember when one of my boys was stuffing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into a VCR.
And in his defense, it did look like a face with the dials and whatnot.
And his mother was really agitated about it.
And I was just like, I can go to Walmart and buy a new VCR.
It's not worth raising my voice at this little boy.
And getting to witness the creation, to be a part of summoning a new soul into this world
and be ashamed to miss that just because somebody took your childhood away.
That's awesome.
And if you need to talk to somebody anywhere in the US, you can call 988-SUICIDEHOTLINE.
There's somebody there.
Yeah.
They're surprisingly helpful.
And if you're a fellow combat veteran, we have a special one.
We have a number of their own.
There's a veteran's hotline out there.
And it's fellow veterans.
And so they get it a little better.
I've definitely been talked down from some situations by some of those fantastic people
that are sacrificing a big part of themselves to help others.
All right.
We don't have a lot of time left.
Let's find a silver lining in this whole thing.
You know, I love my life.
I love my relationship with God.
It was difficult as a child to understand how free will of all things good and evil
are required for the beauty of creation.
And as an older and wiser man, I can see that.
You know, if what I wanted, if what led to my struggle was a desire for freedom and control,
I have to accept that that needs to exist in all things and that all things want that.
And learning that lesson and that there was, there was God's love out there.
That was the best silver lining I have.
That in surrender, you don't need to control yourself because there is a greater being
of infinite love out there, just waiting for you to embrace it.
I don't have any powerful esoteric wisdom that can be attributed to this experience,
but there is a lot of love and joy in my life.
My ability to work through pain and struggle has allowed me to climb to the top of my industry,
the top of my company, and it's been very fulfilling.
You know, everything I've suffered from has given me some sort of strength and insight
that has made me loved by all the people around me, the fantastic friends I have, and the fantastic
woman that loves me despite how difficult I am.
So it's a beautiful world out there.
I'm glad God saw fit to send me out through the rest of it.
All right.
Thanks a ton.
Your experience is so different than most people that I talk to on this show that I'm
going to ask you the question that I ask a lot of other people, and I don't know what
your response is going to be.
Usually, I know what everybody else's response is, and that is that I ask them, how much
fear do you have of death?
None.
Why is that?
Jesus, brother.
You know, if the other guy is real, you know, I don't believe in God.
I don't believe in the Messiah.
I believe whether or not my daughter brushed her teeth like she said she does.
I have conviction in a creator and a divine source in the Son of Destruction and the Messiah.
Conviction.
I see it in how it works in my life and every little thing I do and how God uses me in my
life and His plans to reach other people on the daily.
With every minute that ticks on the clock, with every age I open in a book, with every
interaction I have, even with meeting you, Eric, I see God's plan unfolding.
The ancient Egyptians don't even have a word for death.
The term is Westing.
And so I don't see that as a thing.
None of my behaviors are going to, sort of, attempting to take my own life.
I think are capable of sending me there because I've accepted this relationship with a father,
a friend, and a king that loves me, despite how awful I've been, you know, including with
how awful I've been.
And so I look forward to my next homecoming, but not because of my will, because it has.
It's not as good as I can do, brother.
Well I appreciate it, Scott.
And I appreciate you being so vulnerable.
This can't be easy to talk about.
It was brutal and awesome at the same time, Eric.
It was brutal and awesome.
We got to heal these things, you know?
We've been talking about a lot of opposites today, so that just fits perfectly.
Awesome.
Thank you for the experience.
I really appreciate you, brother.
You've definitely got a fan for life.
I'll be listening, brother.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
If you've had a roundtrip death experience, we would love to hear from you.
Send an email to eric at roundtripdeath.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.