From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody, and our very special guest, John Pazuro.
I'm happy to have you today, John.
It's good to be here.
Thanks for having me.
And I'm especially happy to have you because you're sharing your experience for the very
first time and I feel honored.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, the first time publicly, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, first time publicly.
And also because you're a listener of the podcast and so, hey, we love having our listeners
on and love communicating back and forth.
You sent me an email outlining your experience.
This is going to be interesting, everybody.
Hold onto your hats.
It's going to be fun.
Pretty crazy story.
Yeah, absolutely.
As you know from listening to the podcast, our listeners want to get to know you just
briefly for a minute.
And I know you've done some secret stuff.
Don't talk about anything that you shouldn't.
Tell us a little bit about John.
Yeah, so there's a reason why I haven't spoken publicly before.
And that's because, as you saw, I was a federal employee.
I held a high-level clearance in the federal government, retired in January.
And I've been wanting to tell this story because part of why I think people have these experiences,
they want to share them with other people for certain reasons.
And I've always wanted to do it, and I didn't feel comfortable doing it up until now.
I'm going to sort of get into my origin story a little bit because it does play into my
experience, I think.
That's the conclusion I've come to.
I grew up in New York, a very strict Catholic upbringing.
My father was a violent person.
He was abusive physically and psychologically to both my brother and I.
And just never had a good relationship with him growing up.
Neither did my brother.
I mean, he would take his belt off and hit you with it.
I mean, he almost knocked me out one time.
He did terrible things like that.
And then the psychological abuse, which is probably worse, really got to my brother.
But I sort of never let it really get to me.
And I always fantasized about getting out of my house.
That was my goal in life, was to get away.
And that's why I joined the military right out of high school.
I didn't have the money or the grades for college.
The Navy took me, of course.
I got orders to Hawaii.
So I got as far away from my old life as I could and did well enough in school.
I was in the Navy to pick my orders.
I was in the top 10 in my class and I was dating a girl.
We were talking about getting engaged.
We both picked Pearl Harbor as our first duty station, which is great.
We went there together, you know, after about six or seven months, I come to find out that
she was seeing a friend of mine.
That relationship ended.
And I mentioned that because I hadn't really got to know anyone else there very well.
I wasn't really hanging out with anybody, but my girlfriend slash fiance at the time.
So were you living on base?
I was living on base, living in the barracks.
Yeah, I kind of went inward.
I've always been sort of a very introverted type of person.
I think that's another reason why I haven't spoken about this publicly is it's a very
difficult thing for me to do.
I'm a private person.
Join the club, John.
So you understand.
So I reverted back to something I used to do in my childhood.
I would go to the library and that was sort of my safe place.
And I would love to read books about sharks and the war, war two and all kinds of stuff
like that.
And I would spend hours in the library and we happened to have a really good library
on the base.
So I would, I started going there and I was going through the book, not really sure what
I was looking for.
I was a very spiritual person, grew up in a religious household.
I kind of started shying away from Catholicism, but was always a very spiritual guy.
And I found this book on auto hypnosis or self hypnosis and it really caught my eye.
Check the book out.
And it had this method for how to basically how to hypnotize yourself.
It's a form of meditation.
And so I took the book and I was going through this process for a couple of months.
I lived with a guy in the barracks who never left.
So we were two people in the small room.
We had no privacy.
So I would go in the, I would take these old, you've seen these old wool gray wool blankets
with the U S written on them.
I'm sure you've probably seen those.
Yeah.
So I'm, I'm picturing you kind of made a tent around your bed with those hanging down
from his bed.
Exactly.
Right.
So let's ask one thing before you get, cause you're jumping right into it, which is, which
is great.
Did you know anything about near death experiences prior to this time?
No, prior to this time, my relationship with death was that I really didn't have one.
It was based on my, my Catholic upbringing.
So I didn't really, we didn't really talk about it.
It's one of the things that was, you know, the way, the way we handle death in this country,
I find to be a bit strange.
It's a very clinical, corporate way of handling death, but actually fit really well in with
Catholicism because the church played a part in that.
And you would have funerals at the church and then, you know, you go to the cemetery
and stuff like that.
So I had not heard about NDE's and I didn't have a really healthy relationship with death.
I would say at that time compared to how things have evolved for me at this point.
So no, didn't really know anything about NDE's.
Okay.
So anyway, you, you made yourself a private space here in the barracks.
Yeah.
So that you could meditate, self-hitmatize, keep going.
So this is 1991.
I'll back up a little bit.
So just to give you your younger listeners a frame of reference.
Are you saying I'm not?
Okay.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Don't keep going.
No, no, it's okay.
So I had a phone card because cell phones weren't really a thing yet.
And in order for me to call from Hawaii to New York, I would buy these phone cards so
I can call home.
Yeah.
For the young listeners, there used to be a thing called long distance.
And if you phone very far away, you had to pay for it.
And one way to do that was a phone card.
Yeah.
That's right.
And yeah, so that's how I communicated with my mother back home.
I didn't really communicate with my father very much.
Again, just, I get an example of sort of how, what it was like the day I left for the Navy,
we had to go to Fort Dixon, New Jersey.
That's where everybody's sort of on the East Coast, Northeast area goes to in process for
the military.
The day I left, my father refused to let my mother say goodbye to me or hug me goodbye.
And I can remember my recruiter actually had to come pick me up to take me to Fort Dixon
because my father refused to do it.
So I'm trying to paint a picture of what our relationship was like, what kind of person
he was, you know, what his reasoning was for doing that.
I'm still not sure to this day, but I can remember walking out of the house and him
holding my mother back and her crying her eyes out and getting in the car.
And I got in the car and this, my theme song was become my theme song was Steve Miller
band was a jet airliner just started playing on the radio.
Oh yeah.
Big old jet airliner.
Yeah.
It kind of came my song.
Coming to take you away.
That's right.
And I heard that.
I was like, wow, that's, that's funny.
Back in Hawaii, I used to make this tent with my bed just to have a little bit of privacy.
And I had a disc man again to date myself.
A disc.
We used to have CDs.
You'd listen to music on and you have a player called a disc man.
You would put the disc in and wear headphones.
That's how you listen to music.
Okay.
I've got to date myself now.
Okay.
I had an original Walkman with a cassette in it.
Yeah.
But I used to use when I was running and working out and stuff like that.
So a disc man that was like, wow, CDs.
So we're talking 30, what, 33 years ago now.
So I got it, I got in my bed and I was listening to a Japanese composer called Kataro and he
does sort of new agey Japanese style new age music.
And he's done some stuff for, for movies and I just really enjoyed it.
And I'm laying in bed, put my headphones on, finding the music that I can kind of fits
my mood at the time.
I start going through this self hypnosis process.
I'm not going to go deeply into that, but there's a method to hypnotize yourself.
And I had been doing it for a couple of months and I'd gotten pretty adept at it.
But the, the gist of it is you start at the top of your head and you work your way down
to your feet and you repeat a word.
My word was relax and you really focus on feeling your body and relaxing all of your
muscles from your head down to your feet.
And I got to the point where I could do it pretty quickly.
If you'd like anything else with practice, it, it just becomes faster and easier.
So I'm going through the process and repeating my word, relax, relax, relax.
I get down to my feet and I am no longer, this, this is going to be hard to explain.
It's hard to put a lot of this stuff into words as I'm sure you know, that, that ineffable
quality that comes with these experiences.
And I want to mention too, I know this is an NDE podcast.
The difference for this story is I wasn't near death, but the situation and the things
I experienced were a lot like a lot of other NDE's I've heard about.
So this, I arrived at this place through meditation.
It's what we call an OBE, outer body experience.
Right.
I'm no longer in my body, but I still feel like John.
Okay.
Hang on.
Was there a process where you felt yourself leave your body?
I was in my body and then I wasn't in the snap of a finger.
There was no tunnel, no traveling anywhere.
I was just in this void and I'm sure you've heard this plenty of times.
It was a completely dark void.
I was, the best way to describe it is I was pure consciousness floating in space.
And it was just this vast darkness.
There was no fear.
There was none of the human emotions we associate with ourselves.
There was no sense of time, no fear, no anxiety.
I was just pure presence, pure consciousness.
And it was the realest thing I've ever experienced.
That is a difficult thing for people to comprehend, I think, where this life doesn't seem real.
That seemed real.
So I noticed there's some light starting to come in the distance, is starting to light
up a little bit, sort of like a spotlight during a foggy day, kind of had that quality
to it, that misty kind of quality.
And I see this pinprick of light off in the distance, which would be to my left slightly.
My attention is immediately drawn to this light, and it starts getting bigger and bigger,
probably the size of a football or something, but still off in the distance.
And I was drawn to this light.
I wanted to go to the light.
I just felt this magnetic pull.
And the best way to describe the light, it was extremely bright, but you could look at
it.
So it wasn't like staring at the sun.
You could look at it and it didn't hurt your eyes, and it gave off this light like a, like
if you ever see a light shined or shown through a diamond, these facets, it kind of looked
like that.
And it carried emotion with it.
You could feel emotion in the light, acceptance and love and just this pure feeling of belonging.
And I was just completely awestruck looking at this light.
And then off to my right, there is this being shaped like a human.
It felt like a male presence.
I don't know how to explain, you know, that I knew it was a male energy.
I just knew somehow.
And it was shaped like a human, but completely made of light, like a yellowish golden swirling
light.
And I felt like I knew this being.
I felt like I'd always known this being.
Again, this feeling of belonging and familiarity.
And I'm staring at this being.
I'm staring is the right word because I wasn't, I was just this consciousness.
And he told me, I guess telepathically is the best way to describe it.
He didn't have a face or a mouth.
He said, in this very calming voice, your father's going to die.
And just as quick as I entered this space, I was back in my body.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's stop there.
Okay.
Because that's going to be sort of chapter two.
Okay, sure.
What happens after that?
And that is a cliffhanger, by the way.
I like it.
Tell me about the void.
I've heard people say it's dark and black and full of nothing.
And others tell me it's dark and black and full of energy and fills completely full.
What did you feel about it?
So I guess the best way to describe it in the movie, The Matrix, I'm sure you'd seen
it hopefully, there's a scene when Neo is first taken out of the matrix and he goes
to the loading program.
And it's just this white room of nothingness.
It reminded me of that, but it was dark, but I could see.
That's the strange thing.
It was this vast space.
And then it was completely dark, but I could see because then the light, I'm assuming,
was God's light.
I don't know how else to describe it.
It just felt very comfortable.
I wasn't afraid.
There was no human emotion or human point of reference to attach to it.
There was no time.
It was just this void, but it felt like there was something there.
There was an energy there that you could feel.
It's very difficult to explain.
And you mentioned not feeling regular human emotions.
See, I would think if I were in some kind of a dark void, that'd be scary.
There would be fear.
Did you feel any of that?
No fear.
Curiosity.
I would say curiosity.
Okay.
Where am I and what is happening right now?
And it's interesting to me also that it felt really big because when it's super dark, you
don't know if you're in a two by two cubicle or the immenseness of the universe.
Right.
It was definitely big.
And then I could, once this light appeared, it didn't stop very quickly.
It was this gradient of light, this white light and then this gradient kind of filtered
down through the space.
And I could see there was nothing there until that being showed up, that light.
Yeah.
Okay.
Were there any other beings that you observed or just the one?
Just the one.
And the only communication was about your father?
That's right.
Did you feel anything that was not communicated?
Yeah.
Just like I said, I felt like I'd known this being forever.
How that is, I don't know.
I'm assuming wherever we come from before we come to Earth, this sounds very strange
to hear myself say that, but I don't know how else to describe it.
I felt like wherever we were before, we were always there together.
Okay.
That's interesting.
Like there was just this feeling of acceptance, this feeling of, I just knew who this being
was.
I knew this being.
And you had for a long time, it sounds like.
Exactly.
I've always known this being, he was always part of my existence.
My last question on this part, as you said something about the feeling that you had there
was that it was more real than it is here.
Please explain that some more.
I'll do my best.
So I never said this would be easy.
You know how many times I've told myself this story and I remember it like it happened yesterday.
That's the other thing about it.
It's so clearly imprinted in my mind.
I can't tell you what I did last Friday, but I can describe this like it just happened.
So I think that's another really interesting thing.
Being able to bring that back from wherever I came back from.
It's one of the things that separates it from, say, let's say you just fell asleep on your
cot there and had a dream.
Yeah.
It would be like that real now.
You would not, I mean, I certainly don't remember dreams from years ago.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So keep going with the more real.
Yeah.
The best way I think to describe it would be if you picture yourself wearing a human suit,
taking that suit off and your consciousness releasing, there was just a clarity.
Because the other thing, aside from my sight, there were really no other human senses involved.
I couldn't feel anything.
Like there was no tactile feel.
Like right now my hands are cold for some reason.
It's really cold where I live right now.
There was none of that.
And there was no need to hear because whatever this being told me, I could hear it in my
mind.
That's another thing that's really difficult to explain.
Just the clarity of vision and being able to sense everything at once without having
the senses we have now in our bodies.
There was no need for that.
And it was just this pure, clean, exposed consciousness floating in space.
Just remember the clarity of it, the cleanness of it.
It's like looking through a, I've heard somebody say, a filmy screen.
I can't remember what book that was from.
That's the best way I can describe it is just being stripped of the confines of a human
body.
If you could picture that, that's what it felt like.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Now you were told, tell me the exact words again.
Your father's going to die?
Your father's going to die.
You had a bad relationship with your father.
I did.
So did you feel anything from that?
Like oh no, or oh yes, or?
Yeah, I was terrified.
When I, there's a lot more to this in chapter two, but at that moment when I woke, I think
woke up, when I was back in my body in the stream of consciousness, I currently am in.
I freaked out.
I didn't know what to make of it.
It was just, and I'm a pretty pragmatic logical human being.
So to experience something like that and not have any way to explain it, it did, I was
scared, but fear isn't really a good way to describe it.
I just, I was confused.
I didn't know what had just happened.
Well, that makes sense.
This has never happened to you before, or anybody that you know.
No.
Okay, proceed with chapter two.
So I jump, I pull my headphones up, I jump out of my bed, my roommate kind of jumps back
and looks at me.
I start just kind of incoherently babbling, looking for my phone card, because my first
thought was I need to call my mother.
I need to warn her.
Like I need to warn her, you know, you need to hear the story.
You need to do, take action, because I fully believed what I was told, by the way.
It wasn't like, ah, that, you know, I believed what I was told was true.
Did you have any idea how long it would be before he would die?
No idea.
So he's going to die, could be in five minutes or five years.
Right.
Well, and that's the one thing all human beings share, no matter how poor or rich you are,
how famous or anything.
The one thing that bonds all people together is death.
And birth.
The fact that you are going to die someday, I am going to die someday, it is, you know,
it's the not knowing when, right, that's the key, is not knowing when you're going to
die.
And I had no idea when he was going to die, but I knew it would happen.
But there was more of a sense of urgency, I'll say that, to being told this, you know, like,
hey, you know, I need to do something about this if I can.
Well, and you wouldn't get that kind of a message if it was 40 years off.
That wouldn't make any sense at all.
It was obviously going to be a short time.
Right.
Of course he's going to die.
Yeah.
Right.
But the word that was left off was soon.
But that's what you believed.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we can get into the nuances of that here in a little bit, the why behind it and how
did they know?
How did these beings know this was going to happen?
So we talked about that in chapter two.
So I find my phone card and at the end of the hall, it was the call of Allah and I and
why it's like a porch that ran around the whole building.
It was a three story building.
It used to be a hospital in World War II.
It was now a barracks.
I run to the end of the hall where there's a bank of pay phones.
Again, to date myself, not something you see anymore.
And the way the phone card worked is you would pick it up and there was a code.
You'd punch this code in the state code, then the phone number and luckily my mother
picked up.
So you have to imagine what she was experiencing.
They were in the process of moving to Pennsylvania.
They had the house half packed up.
So she's busy.
The phone rings out of the blue and it's her son who's a few thousand miles away in Hawaii
in a complete mode of panic.
And I said, mom, something just happened and I told her the story the best I could.
And she didn't know.
I mean, in all fairness, how do you respond to something like that?
She tried immediately started trying to rationalize it.
Well, you probably was just a dream or bubble.
I said, well, you need to tell dad.
He needs to go back.
He just had to check up.
He's fine.
Don't worry about it.
And she just immediately started talking me down and blowing me off.
I said, OK, is dad there?
And she says to put him on the phone.
I got on the phone.
I said, told him the same story.
I said, you need to go to the doctor.
So I just was at the doctor.
I'm fine.
Don't worry about me.
And they just didn't want to hear what I had to say.
What else can you do?
Nothing.
If I was to tell you the same thing on one on one hand logically
as a logical human being, you know, you're going to die.
But, you know, of course, you know, just the when that's that's what we don't know.
So we talked for a little while and I hung up.
And I had a friend there named Jerry, who is a very spiritual guy,
was a Christian, a boarding and Christian, but he was very open minded,
very spiritual kind of person.
And we'd gotten pretty close.
And I said, I need to talk to you.
And this is going to sound crazy, but I have to tell somebody who will at least
be open minded enough to hear me and maybe make some sense of it.
So I told him the story and, you know, he was amazed.
And he said, you know, God spoke to you and he put it in a Christian.
Sent in a Christian sense, which is what he understood.
You know, he packaged it and they're nothing against religion.
I am not a religious adherent to any religions anymore.
But that's how he he put it into the terms that he could understand
and relay those back to me.
So I said, OK.
And I tried to.
Understand what had happened and integrate that somehow into my experience
and into my life, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.
It was always there.
And I still I think about it all the time still.
And this is in nineteen and eighty one.
It's I think about it all the time.
There's probably not a day that goes by.
I don't think about it because it has changed my life.
About a month goes by.
I got to know some guys that I was working with.
We decided we were going to rent a house out in Ewa Beach in Hawaii.
And there's a process there for doing that because you have to get approval
from the military.
They give you money to live off base.
So it took probably another month for us to find a place and get all the paperwork done.
And this was in March.
My birthday is in March, which is another reason it's it seemed interesting.
So it was my first weekend moving into this place.
And I didn't have we didn't have any phones yet.
We didn't have any of that stuff set up.
The only people who knew where I was was at our personnel department
because that's where I filed the paperwork.
Because you have to put an address on it with the amount of the rent
and what would have been my portion of the rent.
So we go to the place and it was you know what twenty, twenty one years old,
something like that, a young guy living in a house with a bunch of other dudes.
And it was like a dream come true, you know.
And I went to work.
So this is about two months later.
That's my best recollection of the time frame.
I go to work on Monday and my supervisor.
As soon as I got there, he said, hey, I need to talk to you.
So OK, what's up?
Because come here.
And he took me in this back room and there were two chairs there.
It was the only thing in the room with these two chairs facing each other.
I was like, what's what is going on here?
He said, I need to talk to you.
Sit down.
And he said, I got some bad news for you.
And I looked at him.
I said, my father died.
He said, yeah.
And I immediately started to cry.
This was two months after your experience?
About about two months.
Yeah. OK.
To me, too.
Yeah, it's hard to remember exactly the lot going on at that time.
Two to three months, I would say.
Nobody could get ahold of me because I didn't have a cell phone.
I didn't have a phone at the house yet, like a landline.
And that was another thing from when you were.
Most older older guys, you know, you'd have a phone in a room.
That was the phone, right?
It had a cord attached to the wall.
Not a cord. Yeah.
Look, hopefully it was long and you could take it in your room,
have a little bit of privacy.
So he looked at me like wondering if I had already known.
I didn't go into that with him.
I started crying.
And I was like, man, you know, this is it immediately hit me.
The weight of this experience.
It blew.
I don't know how to describe.
I thought it blew my mind.
And I immediately started thinking, what?
This doesn't make any sense.
What happened?
How did this happen?
I just started going crazy.
I didn't know what to do.
So obviously I get my mom on the phone.
Yes, she died the other day.
And he'd been dead for a while.
I think he died on a Saturday and I didn't find out until Monday.
So, you know, she's like, we couldn't get ahold of you.
I'm sorry.
And I said, well, what happened?
He was bringing an outboard engine for a boat to his friend's house.
And he's sitting at a stoplight.
He had his old station wagon.
And there was a police officer in the lane, not next to him,
but sort of the lane that would cross where he would have gone.
Sitting there at the red light, he just happened to be watching my father.
The light turned green.
My father started to go, slumped over on the steering wheel
and hit a telephone pole.
Not at a high speed.
He just kind of bumped it and he was dead.
Come to find out it was the widowmaker.
He had a 95% occlusion of this widowmaker artery.
And he died instantly.
It was instant cardiac death.
You know, so I'm just feeling dizzy.
And, you know, if you could imagine, my father just died.
I've now got to get go to the personnel office.
I've got to get orders cut.
I've got to get plane tickets.
I've got to fly home and bury my father.
And in that time, I had been, I started going to night school,
working on my degree.
I would write letters home to both my parents.
And I wanted my, I really wanted my father's approval
because I never felt like I had that.
I never felt like I could be the person he wanted me to be.
I had this thought that everything I had been doing in my life up to that point
as an adult was to try and please my father.
And I realized I wasn't living for myself.
That was a realization that I took from that.
And I kind of felt lost because I needed to figure out what it is I wanted to do for myself
and not to try to please.
Because, you know, even if you have a bad relationship with your parent,
you still want to please your parent.
You want your parents' approval.
Every child does.
Is this one of those weird coincidences?
I was walking to the personnel office and I had to go through this gate.
And who is coming from the personnel office but my friend Jerry,
the guy I had told about this.
And he could tell I was distraught and he said,
you're all right, man, what's going on?
I said, I have to fly home.
My father died.
And he didn't say anything.
He just stared at me with his mouth open.
And I said, I have to go.
And I kept walking.
I looked back and he was still staring at me with his mouth open
because he was now sharing this experience with me.
And as much as he thinks he could rationalize it through his beliefs
and Christianity, you really, you can't.
Right.
There's no, there's no nothing you can learn.
I don't think your mind is just blown.
Totally blown, totally blown.
So I get on the plane.
I had to go through Chicago back to New York.
I don't remember that.
That time was a blur.
I went to the funeral and he was a veteran.
So the VA came out and he had a veteran's funeral.
And I had to go back.
I had to go back to Hawaii.
I was in the military.
I was an adult now.
People relying on me back there couldn't just stay home.
And I was only home for a few days, four or five days maybe.
Got back to Hawaii and just tried to integrate this the best I could.
And I had a really hard time with it.
Because like I said, I didn't know who I was.
I didn't, living a life trying to show my father I was worthy.
So I had to reevaluate my entire life.
And I kind of went off the deep end for a while.
Started drinking heavily and partying and kind of going crazy
until I kind of figured things out and straightened things out.
OK, let me ask you a couple other questions at this point.
Yeah.
You had told your mom a couple of months earlier, hey, dad's
going to die when you got back and were with family and stuff.
Did she ever bring that up again?
Was it rough emotionally for her to deal with that?
So you have to remember they were in the process of moving.
So now her husband's dead.
And they've got a house picked out.
They've got to continue.
She's got to continue.
I have to continue with my life.
She's got to continue with her life and carry on by herself.
And she had no help.
So that never came up.
There was just too much stuff going on, too much stuff
we had to do for the funeral and all this other stuff.
So that never came up.
It was always in the back of my mind.
And maybe that's better, because I
would have hated for her to feel some guilt.
Like, hey, I was warned and I didn't twist his arm enough
to get him to go to the doctor or something.
Yeah.
And the same with you.
You did all you could do.
You couldn't make your dad go to the doctor.
So if I could, this thought just occurred to me.
After I had this experience and talked to my father
after I heard about it or told him what I had heard or
experienced, we started talking.
And we had a terrible relationship.
And he told me, I'm going to try not to get emotional.
I called him back a little while later.
And he said, I had these pictures taken
when I was in boot camp of me in my uniform.
And he said, sorry.
He said, I have coffee with your picture every morning.
He apologized.
And I'm sorry.
I knew this was going to happen.
He apologized for how he treated me my whole life.
And we were able to reconcile to some extent.
And I think that was the whole point.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
We were able to finally have a relationship of some sort
that was positive.
Because he told me when I left, you'll be back in six months.
You will fail.
And that just made me want to do better.
That made me want to be even more successful.
We did reconcile.
We talked a lot in that time period.
The only thing that really makes sense about why this happened,
and this is the tough part to really logically think through,
would I have had this experience had I not
taken that book out at the library,
had I not taught myself how to hypnotize myself,
would this have happened?
Would I have been in the time and the place,
in the mental state to enter this realm, had I not done that?
And if you want to go even a layer deeper,
was I drawn to that book?
I don't know.
It all seems a little bit too coincidental.
And if I think about it over the last 30-something years.
And of course, the question I have still that I can't answer
is these beings, I don't know what to call it, God, my spirit
guide, whatever, I don't know what to call it,
without sounding too like, you know,
crystaly hippy woo-woo kind of thing.
Because you saw my background.
You know where I've come from.
What I did for a living.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I live the life you want to live if it makes you happy.
That's fine.
Well, you did criminal investigations, right?
I did.
Yeah.
OK.
That lends a lot of credibility to what you're talking about
here, because those people deal in facts.
They don't deal in hearsay and woo-woo and whatever.
That's right.
Yeah, I went to law enforcement after the Navy.
I met my wife and didn't want to be a military guy anymore,
because I wanted to be with my wife and started applying
for jobs.
And Baltimore Police Department was the first one that took me.
And I wasn't itching to be a cop.
It's not something I always wanted to do, but I needed a job.
And it went from there.
I did that for 27 years.
I wound up in the federal government eventually after 9-11.
But yeah, like I said, a very pragmatic, serious kind
of existence, professional existence dealing
with I did digital forensics for a while.
So I did a lot of child exploitation work, very serious
work, very logical, very fact driven.
That sort of was my mindset over the last 27 years.
But the question remains, how did these beings know?
Was God taking my father at that time for a specific reason?
Or did they know he was clogging and he was going to die
no matter what?
Somehow these beings could see either into the future
or that was his plan.
That was his path.
He was going to die at 47 of a massive heart attack.
And that's the question I can't answer,
is how did they know?
And could it have been avoided?
I don't think so.
I don't think that was the reason I was told this.
I think the reason I was told this
was so I could have reconciled with my father before he died.
I agree with you.
Yeah.
Earlier you mentioned that in that void,
you felt no time and space.
No time.
Right.
No time.
Now you just now you referred to how
did they know something in the future?
If there's no time, you see where I'm going here.
Yes.
How hard is it to look into what we call the future?
How, why would that be a problem for them to know?
Just because it's our future doesn't mean it's theirs.
Yes.
The thing is, when we're in these bodies,
we're constricted to three dimensions.
We think in three dimensions.
We live our life by our senses, what we could see and touch
and feel.
And I think that's something that's really difficult
for people to grasp is the possibility
that there are beings that exist in more than three
dimensions.
If you've just seen the movie, what was the name of that movie?
With Matthew McConaughey, where he goes to space.
Can't remember the name of it.
But yeah, they talk about that where these beings existed
in five dimensions, which allows them to not control time,
but see through time.
So I don't know the answer.
I'm not saying that's what I believe or that's the answer.
All I'm saying is somehow they knew.
I don't know how.
And they gave me this message, I think,
so I could reconcile with my father before he died.
I think this is why this whole thing happened.
But it completely changed the trajectory of my life.
I did suppress this, by the way, for a while, probably
about 10 years.
I forgot about it.
I willingly forgot about it.
I didn't want to deal with it.
I didn't have time for it.
And one day, it just kind of reared its head again
and said, you're going to deal with this.
And for probably the last 20 years,
I've been reading everything I hands on about NDE's
Dr. Moody's stuff, podcasts, YouTube videos, you name it.
I've been just ingesting it for a long, long time.
And it's become a part of my life.
And like I said, in my email to you, I actually,
this is what got me to contact you.
You had somebody on Cali on your show.
And the similarities between her experience, not just the NDE,
but her life experience and mine were so similar.
I thought, I've got to try and reach out to you.
Was it Cali or Brie?
Brie?
Was it Brie?
Yeah, maybe it was Brie.
I'm sorry.
I don't know why I came up with that.
I believe it was Brie that you're thinking of.
OK.
Just recently, yeah.
It was recently, yes.
It pushed me to get involved in hospice work.
So I became a hospice volunteer.
Now, I had an experience with my grandmother.
She was 93.
And when you're that age, she got sick and decided
that was it.
She was done.
Basically, that's what it felt like.
She stopped eating for about three days.
And my mother said, this is it.
So we brought a bed and a apartment built on the house.
We brought a bed in and a hospice nurse.
I got to spend the last two weeks of her life with her,
which was an incredible experience.
Because she said and did things that were equally
as intriguing and interesting as what I experienced.
And I can tell you about that.
And she was a little, she was from Wales,
just a little tuffled lady lived through World War II,
lived through the Depression.
They don't make people like that anymore.
And we were very close.
I really love my grandmother.
And I remember she was about a week into it.
She was in this bed, was not eating solid food.
She was drinking ginger ale and taking morphine, which
is a common thing that I learned about people on hospice.
The goal is to keep them comfortable as they die.
That's right.
So she had this big hospital bed.
It took up a good portion of the room.
And I remember one day I was standing at the end of the bed.
And at the end of the bed was the bathroom.
And she said, don't stand there.
So, oh, OK.
And she was very adamant about it.
I said, why not, grandma?
She said, my brother Dennis is in the bathroom.
He died like 20 years before.
He'd been long dead.
He's in there and he's wearing a funny hat.
He keeps poking his hat out, smiling at me.
I said, oh, OK.
Sorry, I didn't know.
So I went around the bed and I sat on the end of the bed.
She goes, you can't sit there either.
I said, well, why not?
So that's where the angel sits.
He's waiting for me.
And had I not had the experience I did have,
I probably would have said, OK, grandma, you're just high
as a kite and you're dying, which
is why you think you're seeing this.
But I didn't think that.
I realized that she had one foot in life and one foot
in death.
And that happened a long time ago.
It was probably 13 years.
And I'd always wanted to get involved in hospice,
and I finally did.
And I come to learn that that's a very common thing,
that people who are dying see these things,
they experience these things.
It was an incredible experience.
I'm glad I got to go through that, share that with her.
Because it's also a very intimate, personal experience
as well.
And I wanted to be closer to death,
because like I said earlier, I don't agree necessarily
with the funerary business, the way it's made into a business,
the way it's very cold and impersonal.
Death is ugly.
To see somebody waste away when my grandmother,
the day before she died, she lost her ability to speak.
And I remember looking down at her chest
and she looked like a baby bird.
You can see her heart beating in her chest.
And I remember, and I hope I don't start getting choked up,
even though I was in law enforcement for 27 years
and in the military, I am a very sensitive guy,
prone to cry now and then.
So the last thing I said to her, she grabbed my finger
and I was talking to her in her ear.
I said, grandma, it's OK to let go.
She squeezed my finger.
And I knew because I knew she could still hear me
and her mind was still sharp as a tap right to the very end.
Her body was just, she was 93.
It was time for her to go.
And that night she died.
So I'm glad I got to experience it with her
and be there with her.
And it gave me a completely different outlook on life
and death, what happens when we die.
I have no doubt in my mind that you don't just die.
The lights go out and there's nothing else.
Obviously, I think we continue on.
After death, our energy, our soul, whatever you want to call it,
goes to wherever this place is, whatever dimension it is.
I can't tell you those things.
I don't know.
But that's what I believe.
And another interesting note is there
is nothing religious about the experience.
I have heard NDEs where people say they mean angels or Jesus
or whatever religious figure they're comfortable with.
I didn't experience that.
It had nothing to do with it.
Except for the love I felt, the peace, that sort of thing.
So like I said, it changed my life.
And I do not fear death.
I mean, obviously, I don't want to suffer.
Nobody wants to suffer.
If I had my way, I'd go quick in my sleep
or something like that.
But I'm not afraid of what comes next, not at all.
And this experience has been a blessing and a curse.
And I'm sure you've heard this before.
I'm going to try not to make this sound strange.
But when there's really tough days in life and things are hard,
I think I know what's waiting for me.
And sometimes I wish I could go there now.
I wish I could go to that place.
And that's just also based on other NDEs I've heard.
People actually going to places, going through the tunnel,
going into the light and experiencing this world.
It's very intriguing to me.
And I don't have faith that this will happen.
I know it with every fiber of my being.
I know that when we die, we go somewhere else.
This is not the end.
So yeah, it's really completely altered my outlook on things
and changed my life completely.
And I wish I could share it with more people
and give them comfort is my goal.
And I'll tell you, about 10 years after this happened,
I remember I took a 10-year break from it
because I just couldn't deal with it.
I set a meeting up with my mom to get lunch one day.
She had remarried, become a fundamentalist Christian.
And she was the only person I knew,
aside from Jerry, who I still can't get a hold of for some reason,
that knew this had happened, that was involved in the process.
And we went to Applebee's.
And I bought her lunch.
And I finally decided, OK, and how's the time?
I said, Mom, I want to talk about this.
Because we didn't talk about it for years.
And she broke my heart because she told me, well,
you have to be careful because the devil plays tricks on people
and went through that whole thing.
And I was like, oh, man.
I really wanted to have a meaningful conversation
with her about it.
And she just couldn't do it and just told me
that it was probably Satan trying to trick me.
And you have to be careful with stuff like that.
And that was the last time I mentioned it to her.
We never spoke about it again.
I'm sorry that happened.
Yeah, me too.
Obviously, that's not what it was,
because good things happened because of it.
Right.
And it wouldn't be of the devil if something good came of it.
Exactly.
That's my belief.
Yeah.
And that totally makes sense to me.
Jerry, if you're out there someplace, reach out to John.
He wants to talk to you.
Please do, yeah.
John, now that you've had a chance to finally talk
about this publicly, how does it make you feel?
It makes me feel like a load has been taken off my shoulders.
It makes me feel a lot freer.
It's something I've been wanting to do for a very long time.
And I felt like I couldn't do because of my job.
It took a lot of courage, especially for somebody
like me who's an introvert who doesn't very person.
I'm a very private person to share this experience.
But I feel a lot better.
I feel if you can imagine something
you've been wanting to do for a long, long time,
finally getting it done, I feel relieved.
I can tell by the smile on your face.
Yeah.
You look relieved.
You look like.
I really am.
Man, I just carried a camel across the desert.
Now I'm done and I'm getting a big drink.
It's good to talk about it.
And especially to somebody who I'm assuming you are a believer,
I'm assuming you do this because you believe it.
And I've told this to people.
And I just, you know, they don't know it.
They don't know how to handle it.
So to talk to somebody who believes it and understands
it to be true is helpful as well.
Well, thank you for sharing with us.
You bet.
And we do need to wrap up.
And thank you so much for sharing.
You did a great job, John.
I really appreciate it.
Is there anything else that you wanted
to leave with the listeners?
No, just I would say try to be open-minded about
the inevitability of what will happen someday in your life
and have hope that this is not the end
and that what you do in this life matters.
And try to treat people with as much love and respect
as you can and realize that we're all the same,
no matter what somebody might look like or believe
or your sexual orientation.
You know, you treat people how you want to be treated
and try to be good to people and try to love people
because I feel in the end that will come back up
and you'll have to deal with it at some point
and feel those feelings.
Excellent.
Thank you, John.
You bet.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button
and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience
or if you have questions or comments about the show,
send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good
that you're looking for in this life and the next.