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 a special welcome from way out in Long
Island.
Jacob Cooper, good morning, Jacob.
Good morning, Eric.
You know, it's a pleasure to be on your podcast.
I love the work that you do.
Well, thank you.
And I had a friend, a good friend once upon a time from Long Island only.
He pronounced it Long Island.
Yeah, there's a lot of heavy accents around here.
I hope I don't come off too strong within any conversation.
My hope is to come off as neutral as possible, but you know, you could take the man out of
the Long Islander, but I guess the Long Islander can't come out of the man.
So some of that always comes out.
Don't pretend, let it all out.
We love it.
Hey, before we jump into your near-death experience, I would love for our listeners to come out
and get to know you a little bit.
If you would just take one minute and give us a little bit of background, who is Jacob?
Oh, wow, gosh, that's a very deep question.
It's an evolving answer by the minute, by the day, but I try to stay as someone who
is here to hopefully help others remember who they are.
I'm always asked how I want to be remembered, and I think myself it's not that important.
It's more so, I guess, through the work that people are able to remember how unique, special,
and hopefully eternal.
We all are, and certainly having a profound end to E at a young age.
Put me in that pathway, but I also work in the mental health field as a therapist.
I do a lot of hypnotherapists, and I'm sure we'll discuss some of the particulars of hypnosis
that I utilize as well as a lot of public speaking, and I've written two published books.
At the right, around the age of 32 years old, both books were published, and so I'm working
on a third book to come, but I guess I'm someone who just likes to generate the hope past the
pain and to derive inspiration as much as I can in times of need and hopefully more of
a unity and empowerment to those that I come into cross with.
Well, you're being very humble.
I know you're a best-selling author.
Go ahead and plug your two books.
Give us the names.
Well, sure, and maybe I could try the visuals.
Well, the first book that I wrote is Life After Breath, and the second book is The Wisdom
of Jacob Slatter, and both are available on Amazon, Paperback, Kindle, as well as Audio.
My first book was endorsed by my good friend Dr. Ima Moody.
He was one of the individuals, if you don't know who coined the term, near-death experience
in his best-selling book, Life After Life from the 70s.
The Life After Breath is more of what I call my karma or the story of my near-death experience,
and The Wisdom Jacob Slatter includes some of the karma, but it's more about the dharma,
which is to me the meaning, the essence of the lessons of my near-death experience.
So they're both helpful for a lot of viewers, a lot of readers, rather than I've gotten
a lot of nice feedback and emails for the most part.
So again, it's just a pleasure to give something back.
And I don't know about you, Eric, but I think there's a big correlation between pain and
purpose.
And when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I probably lived mostly in the library, or
at least reading books, that anything I'd get my hands on that was inspiring, that was
uplifting, I'd want to delve into.
And it came when I was just at a lot of times moments of uncertainty and when I felt very
low and I said, to my thought to myself, geez, I don't want to be buried in a cemetery.
I want to be buried on these shelves with these authors and my books to be there.
And hopefully down the road, they'll still have libraries when I'm at that old age.
But I think really we're here to make a ripple effect in our lives.
And you're doing that every time a podcast comes out.
And just by being used, thank you for the great work that you're doing, getting this
information out to the public, you're really making a ripple effect.
Well, and I'm glad you mentioned Dr. Moody.
He's been on the show.
He is awesome.
He's getting up there in years, but he still has plenty of energy.
He was rocking so fast that the microphone almost couldn't pick him up.
And I know Ians is doing some kind of a documentary about him this year.
So we're looking forward to that also.
Is that right?
Yeah, new news to me.
I didn't hear that, but well deserved for sure.
Yeah.
Well, this is the 50th anniversary of the book and him coining the term near death experience.
So anyway, let's jump right into it.
And your experience happened when you were very young.
And one of the things I'm going to be asking you in a minute is how do you even remember
it from three years old?
So lead us, tell us what happened, what led up to it?
Absolutely, Eric.
Well, September of 1993, to give my age away.
I was just the young age of three years old.
At this time, I didn't know this or none of my family knew this.
I had a condition called whooping cough, otherwise known as pertussis, which for those familiar
with it medically, I mean, it could be fatal or very detrimental to one's health, particularly
if you're an infant or child or even in an adult years, you know, if left untreated.
I had whooping cough, didn't know this, went to a playground with family friends.
And this is kind of the short of it, the more extended versions are, I was included in my
books, but I climbed a ladder, going to a slide, just began to suffocate due to this
coughing spree.
Everything in my brain and my body just shut down.
As if you're in a basement and if you're a homeowner, you can understand, just shut
off one unit at a time and there's nothing you can do.
The units are just shutting off.
You're very powerless to it.
And then all of a sudden, my body I just knew was not working.
So rather than being in a car that's not going to start or not going to work, you know, I
just was able to leave my body and I was able to have awareness of it physiologically.
Then all of a sudden I felt my brain and I just saw that it was deprived of oxygen,
just felt it just slowly just going away.
Then all of a sudden I felt this large crack within my brain due to the deprivation of
oxygen.
And there's a saying in the English language that says, my brain cracked open and God came
in.
And this literally happened to me.
This wasn't some euphemism where I felt my brain just completely crack open.
And that's when everything opened up.
I had a lot of the classical, euphoric, near-death-experience, mystical experience that Raymond Moody highlights
in his book, including tunnel, feeling euphoric, you know, rising up, feeling vibrations.
Things around me, spirit guides that I was able to see, soul family members, awareness
of past lives, premonitions of the work that I would do.
So it was a tremendous panoramic viewpoint of the life that I lived that included past
lives as well as this potential journey that I was going to continue on, you know, in my
life as a three-year-old moving forward.
But it certainly is profound and obviously if you get more and some of the finer details
of it regarding, you know, one of your first questions as to how this is able to be remembered.
There's several points of reference that I could point to.
Certainly within my credibility as a mental health therapist, I could point to the traumatic
conditions at play for those who might have competency of trauma, they'll understand that
trauma has a disassociative component, meaning that something is so profound for your mind
or in this case spirit to hold on to, that it just kind of shields itself from remembering
it due to protection.
But eventually that could come out within the right timing.
More trauma could have the clearest of recall, you know, as if there hasn't been any time
and space from that event.
And certainly I don't want to sugarcoat it as beautiful and euphoric as my ND was in
crossing over to the other side.
It was as equally as scary and traumatic through suffocation and losing all of control of my
own human breath.
But I think that was a gift in a way, that was a gift beyond the trauma, the ability
to remember it, as well as this was an experience that went beyond the production or the storage
of my finite brain.
As I said before, my brain was totally deprived of oxygen, had zero functioning whatsoever.
And so this was really a subconscious experience of my higher mind and soul.
And so there are people that I work with now, we'll get into this, who have memories that
go far beyond this lifetime.
You know, so too many memory does not have an expiration date.
Oftentimes kids in fact are able to remember a lot more of events prior to coming to this
body because they're less in their, I would say analytical minds or linear minds in the
more in tune with their spirits, which just gets here from the other side.
But yes, there's a certain cut off of amnesia that a lot of people have usually around age
five or six where they forget a lot of things.
So I know I impact a lot over there, but yeah, be feel free to fire away with questions
or any of the skeptics point of view will do the best we can.
I don't necessarily cynics because that's nearly that's almost impossible to move, but
skeptics is a very healthy place to start with.
Well, I don't want to jump into skeptic mode.
I rarely do that anyway, because I tend to believe the people that I have on the show
here, but I do want lots more detail.
You gave a great summary, but start from the beginning and I realize it would probably
take hours to fill in every detail, but you mentioned the classic things like the tunnel.
Is that the best place to start?
I want much more detail.
Yeah.
You know, Eric, to answer your question, the tunnel, I don't know necessarily if the best
place to start, I would say the power or the pathway of surrender is the best place to start.
I at this time was suffocated during my NDE and you could imagine like you're drowning
and there's nothing to hold on to in oxygen.
Being able to breathe in oxygen keeps us going in this body without it.
What are we unless we're on some type of breathing machine or ventilator?
That was totally deprived of me.
There was nothing to hold on to.
I kept on trying to struggle to breathe.
I remember this very clearly and there was nothing to hold on to.
It felt like I was drowning and there wasn't a log or anything to hold on to.
All of a sudden, I just felt myself just surrendering to something else.
In my books, I call that the breath of eternity, which to me is a light of the other side.
It's just this power that we all have, this spark of eternity that we all have.
Rather than trying to struggle against what was, I surrendered to this infinite power,
this eternal power that we all have.
Once I stopped the struggle and I surrendered, that's when I was able to really let go of
the struggle and then euphoria opened up once I got out of this darkness of the tunnel
and really entered the light.
I felt my spirit rising at infinite speed and rate as if you're on a roller coaster ride
and there's no beginning, middle, or end or limitation with how fast you're soaring on
this ride.
I could sense vibrations and frequencies, but the feeling that I got was, and this is
kind of hard for viewers to understand, you see in our reality, the colors, for example,
are limited by the rays of the sun and that's the reference that we have.
When you're on the other side, you're not physical, you're dealing with the non-material.
A lot of the factors that are over there are nearly impossible or very difficult to articulate,
but I do the best I can at each dialogue or conversation that I have because that's the
task at hand.
But I felt this incredible euphoria and when I was able to feel this euphoric vibe, in
our world, for instance, we're used to something happening, but we almost have a cap with how
good we could feel because of bio-neurochemicals still.
On the other side, there was no limitations with how euphoric and good that I felt.
There was no limitations of that and that's hard for many to conceptualize or understand.
We're used to like, all right, I have that great situation, but there's always seems
to be a cap at that.
On the other side, there was no ending of how good I was feeling.
Like I said moments later, I was able to really get a sense and feelings on the other side.
It was just this beautiful euphoric light realm and this high vibrational frequency.
This earth is a lot lower of a density, a lot lower of a frequency.
When you cross over to the other side, the vibrations are a lot more intensified.
I think it was Albert Einstein who said, we are all just energy that could never be created
or destroyed.
At the end of the day, the other side is just a higher energetic frequency.
There's a frequency of the afterlife and it's just right above this reality.
moments later to provide a little bit more context, I felt to the right side of my brain,
which I now know corresponds to creativity.
I was able to see this immaculate palace behind me and this light was so bright.
It was so bright and powerful that my spirit just almost had to shield itself because it
was so powerful.
I think when people think of the other side, they think you just kind of go there and you're
already there and that's it.
From my experience, I could say that there was a bit of an adjustment phase to crossing
over.
It took some time to really get familiarized with it.
And yes, it was home, but it was such a profound transition that it took some time for my
spirit to really get used to just in terms of its beauty, its potency from this physical
reality.
We're used to limited and you get to the unlimited.
It's familiar yet at the same time overwhelming.
When I was looking at this beautiful palace, to me, it just, I just had this knowing that
it was a representation of the eternal creative force of all of life itself, which some people
denote religious terms to it.
They call it God.
Others will call it the universe.
Some just creation, whatever you want to label it as, your words are limiting because it
doesn't do justice to what I saw.
Words are almost powerful to what we have in this reality, but they cannot possibly conceptualize
how beautiful and profound that light was.
And instantaneously, when I was in that light, when I was looking at this palace, I was able
to see angels around it.
I was able to feel unconditional understanding and a lot of things dissipated all regarding
a lot of fears that I had.
And all of a sudden, on the other side, I felt I was able to see this, this eternal horizon
of a sky that was in my awareness.
I was able to feel this incredible frequency of vibration.
And I think of reality.
We think of reality, think of levels of vibrational frequency, think of energy.
And this frequency was one of the highest octaves of frequency on the other side that
was accessible.
And this frequency was what I call the Christ frequency or the Christ consciousness that
I was able to be tuned into.
Bear in mind, I grew up Jewish, so certainly Jesus was Jewish as well.
But three years old, it wasn't something that I was educated at all, ever in my background.
So some of the things that happened in my end to go way beyond any exposure that I had,
which isn't congruent with a lot of people who've had near-death experiences as people
who are visually impaired all of a sudden could see or people who are auditory impaired
could hear, I wasn't exposed to any of this stuff in my early life, but there was a deep
familiarity.
And then all of a sudden, I just had questions, what would my life look like and how would
my parents deal with a kid crossing over?
And I just wanted to know, like, this story didn't seem complete and I wanted to know
what it would look like.
And a lot of those fears dissipated.
And when I was in this frequency, I had this inner knowing of all is well, was well, will
be well, and there was no conceptualization of time.
And this is very congruent with what Lao Tzu said that he said in the past, there's a
lot of promoted sadness in the future, there's a lot of promoted anxiety.
But in the present, you know, that's where you could find peace.
And in this moment on the other side, all I felt was this infinite wave of eternal
peace with no in this timelessness that many near death experiences talk about.
And I just was aware that no matter what happened, there is a point where I and my parents and
all those who knew me in this life would meet, it would be that same point, regardless of
what happened if I decided to stay or go my near death experience that all cells would
connect, but then I just was curious as to what my life would look like and what I why
I'm here.
And all of a sudden I felt my guides with me, and they came down with me and I saw it
to the right in the left side of me, a male and female guardian angel or spirit guide.
And it's the one detail my near death experience for whatever reason that I seem to have a
blockage of just in terms of their members, their names.
At the time I knew their names instantaneously and they were the most beautiful beings that
you could ever imagine.
But when my two primary guides were with me, I felt a sense of exhalation.
I felt a sense of, wow, they are with us all the time and sometimes we have our blinders
on, but life is a lot more wider and panoramic than we give it credit to.
And my guides were with me this whole journey, you know, being, you know, this young child
and they were there with every step, but I just had my blinders on.
At times in my life that I forgot that and just thought that I was alone.
Then solely I had people surrounding me at the playground that I was at and they kept
on calling my name, but I felt to the side of myself, I felt my spirit form, my body
was just there, irresponsive and lifeless.
And I wanted to shake everyone from the other side to let them know that I was okay, that
I'm fine.
It was just a little bit of torture where I could see them and they couldn't see me,
but then I was able to see right in front of my eyes these infinite array of angels
that were floating right in front of me.
And these were different than the guardian angels or spirit guides.
It's like kind of like England, whether you want to call it England or the UK, it kind
of describes the same place just different terms, but the angels that I saw were very
young, very youthful.
They're almost like infant looking in their presentation and they had a lot more uniform
ality, whereas the spirit guides had their own distinctive characteristics.
The angels that I saw were just the thin veil right in front of my eyes and I almost had
to pinch myself because they were right there.
And it's as if we have this reality and you just tune up the frequency of this reality
a little bit.
Angels are all around us all the time and this thin veil separation, they are with us
all around us.
Hundreds of thousands of angels were there and they were kind of like a golden like color,
whereas the guides were very micro focused on myself.
The angels that I saw were just looking in the distance.
They weren't looking at me, but they were sending warmth and energy and love to the
planet in the situation and they were all around us and it's just looking right at them.
And I just had to like pinch myself because it felt too good to be true, as familiar as
it was.
Slowly, I was able to see a lot of beings from that came into my awareness from the
other side.
Some would call this the soul family, others would call it nuclear family.
I think we're all a part of a soul family, but we all have a caste that we're a part
of in terms of different acts, but it's all just kind of different plays that we're contracted
to.
We'll get into a bunch more questions later.
I just one quick thing I wanted to ask about that.
Did you recognize any of the people from this family?
Did you feel like you knew them?
Absolutely.
And even there were individuals that I was very much, because I think people think of
soul family as just biological people that were in your nuclear family, but a lot of
the soul family that I was in contact with came through when I was a teacher on the other
side and I was able to see a lot of students in that life that came through that I was
really had a profound soul connection with in that last lifetime.
So yes, a lot of these beings were ancestors that I knew in this life and beyond, but also
they came from that prior life, but there was a sense of familiarity.
But there was also a degree of shame and embarrassment to a degree because this wasn't their judgment.
The other side, there's no judgment.
I didn't feel that I felt they were looking up at me rather down at me.
That's more of a human construct.
There's a lot of dichotomy and difference between this reality and that reality where
that reality you are loved and almost looked up to for who you are, not what you do, which
could change minute to minute and you're constantly judged over here, but we're constantly loved
over there and there's no limit for that.
Your love for your being rather than your doing in a sense.
But in terms of what I was able to see from that scene, I was also able to see spirit
guides and angels in aura colors around all the people that were around me.
And bear in mind, a lot of people that were with me on that day were not like the Dalai
Lamar on face value or Gandhi.
They were just regular CPA type people and working people.
Looking back on that, it just reminded me that all is spiritual.
At the end of the day, that's our core, that's our phylus.
Remember that some are emboldened in that, some maybe forget that, but you take an orange,
you squeeze it out, you get orange juice and you take who we are, you squeeze it out, you
get an infinite spirit beyond a lot of the separations that some may be connecting to
in their current life or lives.
But there was a point in time where I just asked a simple question again, which is, why
am I here, which is the most common question that I'm asked in any presentation that I
do.
And if I do stay, what is my purpose?
What will my life look like?
And all of a sudden, I was given what's called a life review, which many people are familiar
with.
I'm sure a skeptic, I'm feeling that listening would say or anyone would say, geez, that
must have been the shortest film of all time, you're just three years old.
What I would counter to that is, the other side is much different than this side, where
in a sense that it's not a matter of the chronological years of our life, but rather the degree of
life within those years.
And so it felt like I chronologically lived through years, but those three years felt
like a long time, just in terms of the experiences that I had, the love that I shared, the connections
that I had.
And so time over there is much different over here.
There are people who have lived 100 years, but barely lived one day over here.
So it's all about the experiences that we have and the love that we are able to have.
But this life review was more so from the perspective of the people around me and just
understanding the love that we shared and had.
But it also transcended this life and it went to other different incarnations that I had,
other different lifetimes.
So this life review included other past lives.
And I saw myself spanning the globe, traveling a lot of different cultures and countries
and civilizations.
And the most distinctive lifetime that has a lot of parallels to my NDE, which I'm sure
may bring up some sense degrees of sensitivities for viewers, given the subject matter and
how it all went down, was a life that was actually evidentially read for me by different
intuitives and psychics prior to me ever becoming public with my NDE.
And this has been evidentially read for me, but a life in which I completed suicide.
I don't use the word commit because I don't criminalize that decision nor does the other
side.
That's more of like a human judgment of it.
But this was this last lifetime that I lived in which I felt like the walls were caving
in.
There was nothing again once to hold on to.
And I felt that was it.
And all of a sudden, I made that decision.
I just saw the life between lives of that lifetime in my NDE.
And I saw that I wasn't judged.
I was embraced.
And there wasn't condemnation.
But I was also able to see from completion we begin.
And there was a big tie that I felt from my NDE and that situation where in my NDE I was
once again faced with a similar degree of proverbial and literal suffocation.
But what I did this time differently than that last lifetime was I surrendered to the
power thin.
I remembered who I was and what I was connected to in the midst of the deepest and darkest
of winter.
As Albert Camus said within me, I found an eternal and infinite summer.
And that was a lesson that I know was from my NDE.
And slowly but surely I had premonitions of myself speaking in front of a large crowd
of people.
And I was able to really see that this wasn't speaking as if from the ego perspective that
I'm this big fancy schmancy speaker and better than people.
No, it was just that when I was speaking, I was able to see that I was one with the
audience and getting this message out of allowing people to really remember who they are, like
the show started.
And on that moment I said as beautiful as the other side is, because I was given autonomy
to stay or go, this capacity to bring it into this reality, this proverbial way of bringing
heaven down to earth is not something that could pass on.
And it's something potentially even more glorious than the other side of an opportunity.
Within that decision, I chose to stay from that commitment to my soul's contract.
And then slowly but surely I found myself in a hospital bed, rushed by the ambulance,
and the rest is kind of history.
That's a lot.
That is awesome.
Thank you for sharing all of that.
It strikes me so, I don't know, really interesting that as a three-year-old, when you were on
the other side, your brain was working like an adult.
I think when I was three years old here, my thoughts were Captain Crunch, riding my trike,
you know, rolling a ball, whatever.
But you were thinking about the big stuff.
How do you think that worked?
Why did that happen?
I would say that two things could be true at the same time.
Well, there's an undeniable truth that we have a part of ourselves that's in congruency
with our chronological age of development and the temporary experiences that we have.
That's just one page of the book.
That's not the entire book or other chapters.
And when you cross over to their side, you're more in tune with your infinite spirit rather
than the projections or limitations of your own chronological age.
Just all giving an example, for instance, we may know a lot of people who are the age
of population or senior citizens who might have a lot of physical or mental or maybe
psychological limitations.
And oftentimes when they cross over to their side, they come through in readings.
They're young, they're free, they have a knowingness to them.
They're not limited by the temporary stages that they were going through in that part
of their life.
I think what we have in our lives are different experiences, but those are not the full totality
of our soul.
And all this life is just, to me, just an experience of the soul.
We are infinite, eternal spiritual beings having these temporary human experiences.
So I think a lot of people attach themselves with where they are temporarily and what they're
going through, and that's just an experience.
It's not the full story of the soul's journey.
So crossing over and having my NDE, I was able to be more in tune with the soul rather
than the experiences of the ego or the temporary experiences of this human journey.
Right.
It's like your full-grown, experienced adult spirit was back.
It wasn't held back by only being a three-year-old brain attached to it.
Am I kind of getting that right?
Yeah.
And this will sound controversial.
But I don't believe that any soul that we have is three years old.
I think all souls are eternal.
It just takes some time for the soul and the body to have congruency and to work with each
other.
But it's not like, all right, you live another 10 years, all of a sudden the soul has evolved
50 to 100 years.
It just takes time for the two to be in harmony.
And so just because you don't see it or just because it's not said, does not mean a young
infant isn't connecting on one level to the depths of their souls.
There's just what we see as the surface of the portrayal, which is by the instrument
that we're using of the body.
But that awareness is always there, despite it not necessarily being tapped into at a
certain point in time.
But then there comes a time where people remember who they are and by oftentimes letting go
of who they thought they were.
Makes sense.
Another thing that I found kind of interesting in some of the words that you use, use the
words surrender a few times.
And people that I have interviewed that have had drowning experiences use similar terms.
And I wonder if that's because when your oxygen is for you, your oxygen was cut off for someone
drowning, same thing.
And it's sort of this coming to realize, okay, I can't breathe right now.
And in a little time from now, I'm still not going to be able to breathe.
This whole thing about breathing is just over.
And the brain quickly processes that and probably the spirit too.
And then as you call it surrender, and there's probably 10 other words that we could give
to it.
But I find that very interesting that that's a very similar thing because I think you have
a little bit of time to process it compared to maybe someone who's killed in a violent
traffic accident or who knows what.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
I mean, I would probably say the majority of people tend to have suffocation and it's
like a slow, painful situation.
But you're right.
Some people it's like very quick and there's no time of incubation to go into that phase.
So there was a degree of incubation between life and death that I had.
But the term surrender is always something that comes to mind and that's quite a pathologized
word in many ways because a lot of people think surrender is giving up.
But I think the inverse that it's really giving in and tapping into your power and it's so
pivotal in today's world with people in recovery and AA and NA, just the power of surrender
to the higher power, deeper power within to really be in partnership with your changes
of your life.
Yeah.
This is a good kind of surrender.
This isn't I failed.
I'm giving up.
This is yes.
I realized where I'm at and I'm joining in the whole experience that's happening now.
It's a good way to put it.
I want to hear more about your guides and I'm sorry you can't remember their names, but
what else can you tell me about them?
Well, what I would say is imagine the most beautiful individual that you know and hopefully
if you're married that's a spouse, but maybe if not that's maybe someone else.
There's an inner and outer beauty that just goes beyond descriptive words.
It's beyond anything that you could articulate and imagine that person that you have such
a degree of admiration for and you see such an infant degree of beauty sees the same in
you.
And oftentimes we think if something is so beautiful and so great that we'll put that
on a pedestal and we'll say, okay, that's for someone else great, but it's not for me.
Like who am I to go to that ivory tower?
And so the beauty that I saw was reflected also from the guides to myself and all of
us.
And so they see us in such a different light than how we see ourselves.
But I just remembered just how physical beautiful they were, how they were with me the whole
time in just a degree of the blinders that I had within my human life that wasn't always
seeing them and connecting to them.
And I think that's within reason.
I think we're here to have the human experience and if we're just living on the other side
all the time and we're so connected, it's very hard for us to really live this life
as well as if you're given all the answers to the test, you're not going to grow as much
in work hard.
So I think there's a deal of toil, challenges, resilience, and the evolution of the soul
that happens in this lifetime.
I would say that a little bit with the guides that I saw that they were right with me to
the right side, the left side of me.
And it was just a tremendous reunion.
I just felt just so embraced and so loved and it was just a reconnection with beings
that were with me all the time.
In terms of their origins, in terms of our origins, that to me is not necessarily clear.
I do feel there's a strong past life connection or at least energetic connection that we all
have with our guides.
I say there's a magnetism in our lives.
So for instance, birds of the feather flock together and people have a vibe which will
attract our tribe.
And I think to the same way, the guides that we have within our life, just there's something
about us that resonates with guides.
And I do believe that a lot of spirit guides have lived lives over here versus angels.
They have not had any incarnations, the angels at least that I saw.
There always been angels, but I think spirit guides to me have had journeys over here and
they've evolved through these lives on earth.
Speaking of past lives, we're going to jump topics a little bit here.
And this is something we haven't really talked about much on this show previously, but I
know you have a good knowledge of it.
But we've heard the term past life regression.
Give us a very brief syllabus.
What is that and what can it do for people?
Past life regression is a very safe, non-invasive, pretty easy form of hypnosis.
And really all it does is help people tap into the higher mind.
Some may call it the subconscious mind.
But again, past life regression is a way for us to really get in touch with our libraries
that we have and the many different chapters of journeys that we've had here on earth and
to really access higher information from that library.
Some may call that the Akashic record.
Some may call it the hall of wisdom.
There's a lot of different vernaculars for all these things, but essentially it takes
you from your limited finite mind and opens up yourself to access information beyond your
finite mind.
And past life regression really does help people to tap into different lifetimes that
may usually have significance or overlay within this lifetime that are valuable to visit.
A lot of people come to me for different rationale behind a past life regression.
Some are looking for it for more of a curiosity, entertainment perspective.
Or some they may feel that they do not know why they're here.
They want a lot of guidance in their life.
And some may have a lot of untapped trauma that they can't sort out no matter how much
they see a psychotherapist like myself.
There's something that they're holding onto in a subconscious level they can't seem to
get to the bottom of.
So past life regression is great to really, in terms of getting the roots of and as well
as finding some healing so we're no longer repeating similar regurgitated patterns and
we're able to evolve from understanding our own history.
Let's kind of look at psychological history or the planet's history.
Without awareness of those behaviors, we tend to regurgitate those behaviors throughout
thousands of years on this planet as we're seeing now with all the world wars going on
and people going against each other.
I mean, it's just all the stuff with technological evolution.
Spiritual evolution collectively has improved but it's not fully there obviously.
It's still a lot of pockets regurgitating similar behaviors.
And so with awareness, we have the capacity to really change behaviors and to make better,
more evolved decisions that will allow the spirit to really be more expansive and more
evolved within their journeys.
But it is profound and it's very gentle.
It's guided.
It's safe and it's effective.
And the worst case scenario from a regression that one can have is many times they remember
through going into past lives that they weren't condemned in hell, that they're eternal.
And I think in a way the church hit a lot of, religion itself hit a lot of reincarnation
because of fear that people will know that, hey, I don't go to hell.
I'm reborn.
So all of your fear mongering that tells me I'm going to go to hell if I don't follow
your rules is out the window because that's what people will experience in past lives.
But there's no real hell we continue on and there's other opportunities here in this earth
school of life.
You mentioned earlier growing up Jewish and you were only three years old and that was
all you had been exposed to.
Do you mind and if this is too personal, that's okay.
You don't have to answer.
But do you mind telling us how this has affect your religiousosity, religionosity?
What is that word I'm looking for?
Religiosity.
Yes, going forward.
You know, as a kid, I was very much brought up in a very dogmatic circumstance where I
don't know, if you're a female and your skirt is one inch a little bit short, you're ridiculed,
the pots and pans need to be separated if it's made of milk.
You have to wait six hours, not five hours between eight.
So there was a lot of these rituals and laws and dogma that just didn't resonate.
And so I think in a way I was a pretty big rebel against this outwardly and inwardly
and I never really bought into this.
But again, part of what I believe is key is learning flexibility and adaptability.
And I know that's something that Charles Darwin highlighted and survival of fitness, that it
wasn't the strongest, necessarily the smartest that survived.
It was those who are most adaptable that were able to survive.
And in my childhood to survive, I had to bury a lot of the stuff in myself and keep it within.
Otherwise, it would just be an exhausting all out war against all these oppositions.
And so there was a degree of radical acceptance that I had as well as at times picking my
battles, but I never really bought into it despite accepting it.
And so that was a big part of it.
But there's a big monopolization on spirituality, the afterlife within all of religion.
And I say, spiritual and the afterlife does not exist because of religion.
It exists despite of it in a way.
And religion does not have a monopoly on spirituality.
It's just one way of understanding it.
But for some, it could be the total antithesis of anything that's spiritual, because it falls
in love in more of a God that I think it's interpreted in man's image versus a God understood
in our image in a way.
Okay.
I'd like to wrap up with this.
This is a two part question coming at you.
Part one is this happened to you when you were only three years old.
That makes you different than most three year olds and other kids and teenagers growing
up.
So I want to know how this affected your life.
And then let's leave everybody with a message of hope that came from your life being this
way.
Great question, Eric.
Well, the subscription for most children and infants is to fit in, is to give your power
to adults around you that you're very little, you know nothing and just self abandon yourself
and give your power over to people who are bigger than you or you feel, you know, more.
So from the onset, there's a suppression and a disempowerment that most infants and
children do face.
They're not told that, Hey, you have the answers.
You're told, Hey, we have the answers and abandon yourself to really get on board.
And the other thing is most infants or children are prescribed to be normal.
What does that mean?
Well, normal in many ways is just self abandoning yourself to fit in with what the leaf and
water is, what the tide is in front of you, what everyone else is doing.
And so I think to survive that's something that I needed to do, you know, because I remember
being a kid and having all these incredible interdimensional communications, which often
is an after effective near death experience, particularly with all the brain changes that
happened after my NDE, but I saw that to survive.
Yeah, you know, I needed to accept that I was a kid.
Oftentimes I was called weird by other kids or just people just didn't know what to make
of me growing up.
And so I self abandoned myself.
But I would say is to learn from those who are about to cross over back to the one way
ticket back home, the pun intended.
And one of the top five regrets that people have is usually that they were someone else's
image of who they wanted them to be or society's priorities of who they wanted to be versus
being empowered enough to be themselves.
And so I think if anything else to be weird, to be different, to be yourself, you know,
that is what's going to change the world.
You know, no normal person really ever added to anything.
I think we're all unique.
While we're all one, we're all have a unique note to add to this.
Just a singer song, dance your dance, you know, say your story, stop worrying about
what other people are going to think of it.
Because no matter what people will love you, people will hate you and very little of it
will actually have to do with you as one of the four agreements of Don McGorrie says,
you know, to not take life personally.
So really to know how to live, how to begin life from understanding from those who are
at the end of it and to not give your power over to those around you and to not be just
a clown to entertain people or to satisfy people with who they want you to be.
But we're all here, part of our life's purpose is to remember who we are, to be unique additions
to this world and to be unique.
That's what will be remembered.
That's what will last.
And so weird and odd people are those who change the world.
Normal people, you know, are never remembered.
They don't add.
So be different, be daring.
That is the coolest thing you could do once you are connected, if that makes sense.
Great wisdom from Jacob Cooper.
Thank you, Jacob.
Appreciate you being with me today.
An honor.
Thank you so much, Eric.
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 ericatroundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.