Welcome to Round Trip Death.
Before we get into today's interview, I would just like to extend a huge thank you to all of our listeners around the world.
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This may be important for them right now. Now let's hear from today's guest.
We have on the line with us today Mark Waller from way down in Australia. We love our Australians.
We have a lot of listeners down there and we've had quite a few people from there on the show too. Anyway, Mark, welcome.
Thank you very much.
So before we talk about your near death experience, I want to hear just a little bit about you.
If you don't mind telling us where you live, what you do for a living, any of that kind of thing so our listeners can get to know you a little bit.
I live on the east coast of Australia, just south of Brisbane, a couple of hours south of Brisbane.
I'm an artist for a living. I father, husband, you know, love to serve. Pretty much sums it up.
Okay. How many children do you have?
I have three children.
And what kind of art do you do? Are you a painter?
I'm a contemporary realist painter. Yeah, that's if you want to pigeonhole it.
I don't want to, but that's okay. What kinds of things do you prefer to paint?
You know, it seems to me that we are these conscious bags of bacteria wobbling around on the thin skin of slime on a lump of dirt next to a nuclear reactor that went through space.
It seems like a nice idea to be immersed in the wonder of it all. So basically my paintings are that really.
They're about the magnificence of the tiniest of moments. But then also I also lean into just how incredible our existence is and how incredible being alive and being conscious is.
Where can we see some of your artwork?
I have a website which is not being updated very well.
But yeah, I have a website, Mark Bower Artists, and it's not hard to find I don't think. And you know, social media, all that sort of stuff.
Instagram and not so much Instagram. I got hacked and lost my lovely Instagram account. But yeah, Facebook, all that stuff.
Well, if you would like, we'll stick some of those links in the show notes for everybody so they can see your artwork because that description sounded really interesting to me.
Sure. So we're going to go back just a few years and and listen to the story of your near death experience.
But first, tell us what led up to it. What was going on in your life before this happened?
To be honest, my life in a lot of ways was falling apart. My career was going really well.
I was really pushing that hard, but becoming very, very aggressive and massive testosterone surges. So very impatient, very short, short with people I loved, aggressive and probably hypersexuality.
Probably massive libido, that sort of stuff. Just really lost control basically in a lot of ways.
To unhealthy levels, it sounds like. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Okay. And was that normal for you or was something going on physically that made that happen?
Look, I've always been a pretty full on individual, but not like that. Not like that. That was next level.
I was hating myself. I've got a studio away from home and I had moved out of my home, was coming down in the studio and literally crying myself to sleep. It was horrible. It was horrible.
So what was going on that caused all that?
Well, I didn't know what was causing it at the time, but I went to, I was doing a workshop in Perth, which is on the other side of the country.
It's about five or six hour flight. And I went over there, did a few bits and pieces and was just unraveling really quickly.
And then eventually collapsed and got rushed to hospital where I had a couple of scans and they discovered that I had a tumor the size of a peach in my brain and multiple tumors in my lungs.
What the doctor said was you have a mass in your brain and lesions in your lungs, but try not to worry. It might not be cancer.
So guess what I did? Worry. Of course.
The doctor says, don't worry. It might not be cancer.
Yeah. I'd sleep good that night. Now. Yeah. So what was the treatment? What happened?
Well, at that stage I had brain surgery, I think four or five days later.
And then had to wait for a month. Apparently you can't fly after brain surgery. So I had to wait for a month for all the air to dissipate out of my brain and then flew back and then came back here to this part of the country where I was put on to new drug treatment for cancer.
And did removing that tumor fix what was going on with you?
I was like, like someone turned the demon switch off. Yeah. It was night and day, completely different. I went into that surgery angry and confused and upset and came out in love.
And where does the near death experience fit into this whole thing?
Well, the near death experience itself happened during the surgery, but I believe that there was a gateway that facilitated that prior to the surgery.
So I had definitely had three experiences. The first one was kind of like an introduction, probably for one of a better term that happened before the surgery.
The second one was the whole shebang, the whole deal. And then the third one was almost like the experience was almost like tools for relating that to life and other people.
Why don't you tell us about the introduction first and then we want the whole shebang.
Right. You know, the doctor, the nurse said what she said. But, you know, before the scans, I had this strange experience of seeing white light being shared between people.
And I was kind of putting it down to the fact that, you know, this was a surreal experience.
But every time the nurses came in, there was this white light being exchanged between them and who they were caring for. And there was this moment in the depths of the night where I saw this woman.
Oh, I heard this woman. She was in the emergency department. This old woman had been brought in. And all I could think of was my mom.
And this woman had lost control of everything, you know, bowels, everything. And she'd bombarded. She'd lost her dignity. And I heard these nurses at three o'clock in the morning say, oh, sweetheart, don't worry.
It's just a bit of poo. It's just a bit of wee. We'll clean it up. And then you'd hear this woman murmur. And then no, no, no, no, no, we can take it downstairs and we'll clean it up.
And then we're making that no, no, no, sweetheart, we have this box full of nighties downstairs. We'll bring it up and we'll do a fashion parade for you. And you can choose what you want to wear.
This happened at three o'clock in the morning while the rest of the world's asleep. And these women are cleaning up, I'm guessing women, I can only hear women's voices, but cleaning up poo and vomit and giving this woman back this the most precious thing she had at the time.
And that was her dignity. And I saw and felt this light being exchanged. And somewhere around that time, I came to the realization that this cancer experience was bigger than me.
And it was going to unfold the way it was going to unfold. And there was not a lot I could do about it. And that I surrendered. I just surrendered. I went, I'm out. I can't do much here.
But I've heard my brain say these words. Oh, well, I guess we don't need Mark anymore. And that triggered something that I still can barely talk about to this day.
This was I gave Mark up. And in giving Mark up, I saw love everywhere. There's this light coming out of every people. And I actually experienced people who had died not long before me. They'd also died of cancer. A couple of guys younger than me.
And they were laughing and saying, you can't come here. This isn't your time. And just laughing and kind of I don't know how to explain it. So bathing in this white light.
And again, this is prior to your surgery, right? This is prior to the surgery. Yes. This is prior to the surgery.
And so they'd given me steroids and things at that time. And I was thinking, oh, maybe this is some kind of weird trip. But it felt real. And the walls were full of love. I don't know how to explain that. But I could literally see energy. I could see this white milk.
It looked like everything was made out of milk, this gold through it. And it was beautiful, like absolutely beautiful. I had very little fear. In fact, at that stage, I had none. It was just and my family thought I was insane. I'm saying to them, everything's made of love. It's love. Everything's love. It's all love. And they all thought I was mental. And at that stage, I hadn't had the surgery. So it was easy to put down to.
Yeah, blame the tumor. Yeah, yeah. And then I got moved to another sort of came out of that weirdly. But I knew, you know, it's interesting. I knew that I had to make the job for the people who are caring for me as easily as easy as possible. And I knew that my job was to contribute to other people.
Even in that at that point, I knew that that was my job. Regardless of the cancer. My job was to help other people heal in some way, even though I was lying on a plastic bed in the hospital with a tumor the size of a page you might hit.
All right. So then came the surgery. Then came the surgery. Yeah, that was a trip. So I was six or seven hours surgery. I think six neurosurgeons. I've asked them, I asked them a dozen times. Did I die? Like what happened to me in that sort of did I die? And it turns out that I'm a joint to do brain surgery on. I don't know what that means. Everything's supposed to be where it is. But they didn't they didn't they said you didn't die.
But something happened. Something happened. I said, Did my heart stop and they they didn't. I didn't say my heart didn't stop. That just said you didn't die. But anyway, but they said something happened. The doctors did. No, I they didn't. You did. Okay, I did. Something happened because I remembered falling into unconsciousness. Yeah.
Then for some reason, I remembered and at that stage, I didn't know I was in surgery. I didn't know any of that stuff. I just became aware of being in this kind of cheesy milk is probably the best way to put it. Just warm and then see if I can get through this without losing my crap. I had this feeling of expanding.
And then I saw saw is not the right word. Saw isn't the right word. I experienced I witnessed I don't know. I don't know what the word is. I joined everything. So I had kind of access to everything, if that makes sense.
And I saw atoms being formed. I saw stars collapsing and being born. I saw energy. I saw love everywhere. See, prior to, you know, in the hospital, I'd seen the walls were made of love. But then in this, I saw that everything was.
And there was this presence that was sublime, but not separate. It's almost like I merged with I don't like the word God. I don't like the word God. It has connotations and it's a diminishment of the best thing I can say is that I merged with all it is and has never been and all it was and will never be.
Does that I don't. Yes, even that's not even close. No, that's really pretty, but it is hard for most of us to wrap our brain around. What does that actually mean? Yeah, I and I can't answer that because the experience was beyond logic and beyond the capacity of my mind.
It's like if I said to you, imagine infinity. You can't you can't do that. And yet this entity experience this thing that I realized that I was not separate from was that unendingness in all directions.
You know, there's not words that can articulate that, you know, we're we're we're human beings with a limited brain that's being filtered by an identity. And so our ability to be able to experience or understand infinity is is too constrained.
That makes any sense. Oh, absolutely. So everything that you were experiencing was like that sounds like really, really indescribable. And you didn't see clarify for me. You didn't see with a physical eye like you see the grass growing outside.
Exactly. Yeah. But you had meaning come into your brain. Yes. And they're saying and weirdly there was this dialogue. There was this dialogue at the same time, you know, which it was like a dialogue that was coming from inside, but that was also part of everything else at the same time.
I see this is where it's so difficult to speak about. I've I've done a lot of investigation in since then. And I have some theories about that. But ultimately, it's not something that can be described or spoken about people because it's beyond our capabilities.
Having said that, though, I can experience it like evil now. And it's beautiful. It's explicit. See if you can describe that emotion. I tell you're getting very emotional. What kind of emotion are you feeling?
Rapture. Just all wonder, endlessness. Rapture is probably the closest word I can come up with.
How about love? Oh, yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. Let's go with rapturous love. Okay. I've never heard those synonyms, but that I get it. That makes sense. What else can you tell me about it? Was there kind of a sequence like this happened, then this happened, then something else or was it sort of all at one time?
Well, see, this is the interesting thing is that time for me has been forever destroyed. It happened in sequence and yet all at once. And look, to be honest, life's a little bit like that for me now, which is one of the reasons why I sort of struggle, you know, sometimes organizing things because I don't experience time in the same way that I used to anymore.
That must be frustrating. It's frustrating to people around me. Not so much for you. Not so much for me. Let's come back to this. I want to hear about what this did to your personal relationships. It sounds like you were a better person because of having the tumor removed. But I know these experiences can really change people. I hear of a lot of divorces, for example, that come after these. What happened with your relationships?
Okay, so my relationships with some people very, very much deepened, but with other people, not so much. It was kind of a threat to some of them, particularly because, you know, look, I've discovered that when you're dealing with a terminal illness, there's three types of people vaguely. One of them is the reals. They're the ordinary people who'll come up and go, oh, you had chemo, you had treatments the other day. Is your poo blue? You know, or something like that.
You know, did you get a secret cow from the radiation? That sort of stuff. They make stupid jokes and things. And then there's another group called the invisibles. So they're the ones that just fall off the face of the earth. They're in your life. And then something, you know, you get terminal ill and then they disappear. You usually catch the back of their heel as they disappear down an aisle in the supermarket trying not to be seen.
Or then there's the other ones that I call the no, but reallys. And so they, you know, they go, how are you, Mark? Very sympathetic. And I say, I'm well. And they go, no, but really.
I have a sliding scale for them, you know, how many no, but reallys I can get out of them. And the no, but reallys quite often, depending on how you handle them, will either turn into an invisible or turn into a real.
So which do you prefer or something else? I mean, oh, the reals. No, every time the real. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things is that I've realized that everyone wants to be seen. Everyone wants to be seen, and particularly people with cancer.
You know, like I go out of my way. Now, if I see someone who's, you know, who looks like they're going through chemo, I'll come up and I'll go, are you going? Are you well? And just start a conversation with them and then start making stupid jokes.
And it's just the act of people seeing them that, you know, because, you know, when you get an illness, because at the time I was expecting to have nine months.
So that was the prognosis generally accepted. Not the doctors ever say that, but, you know, stage four metastatic melanoma, brains and lungs. Yeah, that's not good.
And this was seven years ago, right? This was seven years ago. Yeah. I just had scans two weeks ago and my oncologist is very happy with my inertness.
Yeah, that's great. Because there's no evidence of cancer. I'm cancer-prone. You love proving doctors wrong.
I do. Yeah, she's great. Like she's great. When I first met her, she said, you will have probably have this disease for the rest of your life and your life is considerably shortened.
Apparently I laughed. I don't remember that, but she said I laughed when she told me that. But, you know, I knew I wasn't in the diet. I was told.
All right. Tell me about that part. When were you told that?
That was really early. That was my friends. You know, like I said, that those friends were there. They were again, you know, it's a really hard thing. I'd recognize them as them, but they were kind of these weird beings of light, basically.
And they were just laughing and saying, look, I've got a martial arts background and they've known me for a long time. And they knew that I had been trading for a long time, nearly 50 years, I think.
And they knew that, but they were, you know, making jokes and saying you can't block this wall.
You know, there's nothing you can't fight this kind of thing. And then they was saying, but you can't come here. This isn't your time. This is not your time. You can't come wherever he is.
But yeah, you can't come here. This isn't what's going to kill you. And I don't know why I knew that to be true, but I just knew it was true.
And you know, it's interesting. I played a game through that whole cancer journey called Happy to Stay, Happy to Go. And it was incredibly confusing.
You know, you talked about friends where the people changed around, you know, it did. It was confronting for people for me to say, yeah, I'm happy to die. I'll die tomorrow. No problems.
You know, it's very confronting for people who care about you and also people who have a lot of fear about their own mortality.
So that did change people. But yeah, my relationship with people. But that came directly from that conversation with those people who were, you know, at the time I saw them as separate entities.
But after after the second experience, I realized that they were all that as well.
I know I got a sidetracked just a little bit on relationships. Let's go back to what you were talking about, about the NE itself.
Was there more that you haven't explained here yet? Well, no, not really, because no, but yes.
In that, like, I mean, I don't know how to explain to you that I saw everything. I don't know how you can see everything.
I'm going to ask you to try to explain that if there's any way you can. Well, again, C is the wrong word.
But I became conscious that cancer was a mutation. My fingers are a mutation. Death is not the end of life.
Death is just death. It's the end of a body. I became conscious that a body was part of a cycle.
It wasn't all it also wasn't finite. There was no there's no such thing as finite.
There is only an evolving of things in time and space and that each of those things morphs into something else.
You know, like I was very conscious that his body would eventually return to the stars.
Now, I hadn't considered that in any meaningful way, but I in the experience,
I was aware that every atom in my body would eventually be skewed into the cosmos in the same way that it was assembled by the cosmos.
And that that was exactly what was supposed to happen. That's that was how it was meant to be.
And that somehow in there prior to that, there would probably be creatures crawling through my eye sockets.
And that that was also beautiful and wonderful.
And that I also saw this profound connection with every other human being because we're all going to die.
We're all going to do this. And it made me love people even more.
You know, we were no longer, you know, there was no longer us and them. It was all of us together doing this life thing.
It's it's almost like probably the best way I can explain it is imagine walking up with your little laptop
and walking up to a mainframe that everything on the Internet's on and then everything being dumped on it.
That's probably the best way I can explain it.
Kind of a huge download of more information than it can really take in.
Basically, yeah. And a lot of the time, I don't know that I took it in until I have a conversation like this.
And it's just there. It's just there for me.
But yeah, I mean, there's no separation. That was very, very clear. There's no separation.
You know, we breathe in, we breathe out every time we breathe in, we're inhaling water molecules.
It's one of those water molecules was quite probably paid out by a dinosaur.
You know, the the things that my body are made from came from the death of thousands of animals, thousands of plants,
you know, atoms, molecules, all of this.
So every time I put fuel in this machine for one of a better term, I'm actually part of a cycle.
And every time I excrete, I'm part of a cycle until I breathe in, I'm part of the cycle.
Each time I this body moves, it's part of the cycle.
There's this unfolding constantly and none of it's good or bad.
It's just it just is. And it's miraculous and beautiful.
And I saw all of that in that space. I don't know how it's been.
But, yeah, I was just very conscious of this expanded way of experiencing existence.
How did this affect your creativity in your artwork?
Well, I did a lot of paintings of star scapes.
And I did a lot of paintings of land stage with star sketch behind them.
So, yeah, but, you know, people have said to me that my paintings are different.
They have a more ethereal quality to them, which I I'm not surprised about.
But I don't see it that way. I always had a sense of wonder.
But I guess there's a layer of people under it now.
So you mentioned earlier about something that happened, another experience after the surgery.
What happened then? So this is the trippiest thing.
So this was this was kind of like this is so the first experience was so completely expensive and overwhelming that like I'm still I'm still coming across fragments and nuggets of that today.
You know, but it was just too much. So this was after the surgery was maybe a day or two after.
I can't really remember. But there's a funny little story.
So I hadn't been cleaned up at that state.
And I felt like I was in hospital for months. It seemed like I was in there for months, but it turned out I was only in there for four or five days.
Like I think I walked out of the surgery on the Monday and walked out of the hospital on the Friday.
But it felt like I'd been in there for six months. Time was so completely twisted.
But there was this evening not long after the surgery and this Indian guy came in and he was this introduced himself as Opie.
And I was very cute. You know, because I came when I came out of the surgery, I was deeply in love with every single human being on there.
And this human being was the most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen. And I wanted to know everything about him.
And he told me his name was opera cash, but he'd made it abbreviated to Opie for, you know, expediency.
And he was the most beautiful man. And he said, we started talking. We talked about age and all that.
And then he said to me, he said, and I told him a little bit about what happened in the surgery.
And he said, you know, 20 years ago, I collapsed and was taken to hospital for a massive heart operation.
So he was a 70 year old man working in the hospital at three o'clock again in the morning.
And he said to me that being taken to this hospital and had emergency surgery, came out of the surgery.
And then after recovering, he was wheeled into the ward.
And when he was wheeled into the ward, he said, all of these people started clapping, all the people in the room.
And he said, what's going on? He said, these people welcome you to this group.
And he said, what group is this? And people have had a heart attack.
He said, no, I'll let one of the patients do this. So one of the patients came up and apparently and grabbed his forearm.
This is what he was telling me, grabbed his forearm and said, welcome. And he said, what to?
And he said to this group and what's this group? And he said, people who are finally awake.
And then at three o'clock in the morning, he put his hand on my arm and said, welcome.
And then he said to me, tomorrow you're going to have a shower and it will be the greatest shower you've ever had in your life.
I don't know how he knew this. And then so that was that. Off I went to sleep and I got up the next morning and I had the nurses was so kind.
They were so beautiful. They put me in a room that had a shower right next to it.
So I was in a room by myself and I had the shower right there.
And I had to traverse this distance of about, well, maybe eight, ten feet, three meters, something like to get to the shower.
And I did that. And it was the first time I took my foot and breath in my life, like consciously.
And then I went into the shower room and I sat on this plastic chair and took my clothes off.
And I had to take this plastic bag. Hope you're talking about that. Take me this plastic bag on my head.
Or it wasn't hope yet. It was just someone else had taken this plastic bag on my head and I sat in this shower and turned on the tap.
Anyway, you know, as you do, you know, you strategically place yourself over the holes here and there to stop all the water coming out of the chair.
So I'm sitting in a nice little puddle listening to these rain drops or the shower drop onto my head.
And I was watching these riverless of water run down the handhold, this stainless steel handhold, because, you know, it's hospital shower.
There's all these bars and things to hang on to. And I wasn't steady enough to stand up properly at that stage.
So I'm sitting in this chair and watching this water run down these little sparkles with rainbows.
And I was just really taken by that and the sensation of the water of my skin.
It was just exquisite. It was mesmerizing. It was all my senses were kind of lit up.
And I saw this handrail and the water running down it. And I had this, oh, that stainless steel.
And then there was this. I don't know what happens.
There was this thing where I went that was made in the stars. Those were made in the stars.
And somehow, in almost in saying that, I felt myself falling through the stars. The room disappeared.
And I was and look, you know, I laugh about this all the time because on the one hand, I can say, you know,
I was dosed up with steroids and God knows what other things they put into you when you have brain surgery.
So, you know, maybe this was a massive trip.
Apparently my tumor was touching my right pineal gland or something.
I was basically falling through space in a plastic chair with a plastic bag taped to my head.
And I was sitting there going, it all everything comes from the stars. Everything comes from the stars.
It's all from the stars. Everything comes from the stars.
And then I heard this little voice say, where did the voice come from?
And in the second, see, I see if I can get through this, the second that that question was formed,
all of the stars merged back into that whiteness again.
And I rejoined everything again.
And there was this sort of message in there.
And it was not these words, but ultimately it's this physical process of being aware of our bodies being assembled
over billions of years forged in the stars is a gateway to expansion,
a gateway to expanding beyond the identity and to being open to the love that's in everything.
Wonder and awe are spectacular.
And they are a gateway to the diminishment of the narrow identity that we've formed that reduces our experience of existence.
And so, you know, even to this day, I still have to have MRIs every year.
But when I go into an MRI, they're constantly asking me, are you OK in there?
Because I drop into this trance and I swear I feel like the universe is talking to me.
I can hear all these little beeps and I literally feel like I'm falling through the stars again.
Yeah. So the first experience, as I said, was an introduction.
The second one was this is how everything works.
And then the third one was this is a way of presenting this gateway for people,
because everyone can get lost in that ball of existence when they look at that.
But if you start talking about everything's love, you kind of lose a few people.
Hey, it is what it is. It is what it is. It has an energy, right? Yeah, absolutely.
And so the doctor was right. That was an amazing shower.
It was an amazing shower. Yeah.
And I said to him later and I said to him, I hope he my friend, that was the most spectacular shower.
He put his hand on my arm again and he said, I know, because he's been there, done that.
He's been there. He's been there. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, look, I can't be the same human being.
I can't be the same human being.
That's not to say I suffer occasionally. I do.
And I don't let my mind get the better of me occasionally. I do.
But for the most part, you know, if you said to me, go back and do it again without this brain cancer, I'd say not a chance.
Not a chance. No way.
I would rather have the tiniest life and just have one taste of that experience in birth than have a really long life and not have it.
I have a couple of questions for you.
The first one is when you're in that MRI and you go to that place that you were describing, can you do that any time that you want?
Yes. And do you do that very often? Yes.
I have to be careful because, see, one of the things I've learned is one of the major functions of humans or a driver, an unconscious driver of humans is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
And since after the experience, directly after the experience, I could see there was no difference between the two.
So when you're truly happy to live or truly happy to die, then pain is irrelevant. Pain is.
Yeah, but it hurts. Yeah, it does. So does life.
Yeah. Yeah, it's part of the deal, you know.
Well, there are opposites in all things. So that makes sense to me.
But pain and love feel so much different that I'm having a hard time processing that.
Well, you know, so maybe push the pain out of the way and think of it instead of pain as think of it as fear.
So the opposite to love is fear.
Fear is a function of survival.
And by default, then it means it directly relates to the physical 3D experience.
It's about keeping the bag of bacteria alive.
But love transcends all of those things.
See, for me, if you fall in love with pain or you fall in love with fear, then you transcend it.
Because, you know, when you think about it, like you think about physical experiences that happen in your body when you feel fear.
So your palms sweat, you know, your chest gets tight.
There's this surge of adrenaline.
And I've had surges of adrenaline that I can taste, you know, like you can literally taste the adrenaline,
especially when that doctor gave me that diagnosis.
But when you think about it, what an amazing thing.
I've got this blob here that I'm sitting inside and a snake, a tiger, a shark or whatever it is goes past.
And all of a sudden, all of these chemicals pour out of certain parts of my body and go to other parts of my body
so that muscles can fire quickly, so that my brain can go, how amazing?
It's miraculous. Like it's indescribably incredible.
These things are incredible.
No matter what state they're in, they're incredible.
It took 13.8 billion years to make that this thing.
And when you sense the awe in that, the fear disappears.
It stops being something to be avoided.
And this just becomes another experience.
I think I lost my way in there, but it's difficult to say.
There's really only two paths, fear or love.
And most of our fear is about survival.
But when you lose your fear of death, survival disappears and so does fear, largely.
It still kicks in occasionally.
Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned surfing.
If a nice big shark swam up under your feet, you'd probably feel something.
Well, interestingly enough, not long after the surgery,
so where I'm sitting in my studio, if I walk probably 200 or 300 meters to my left, I'd be in the ocean.
So I go surfing at this spot a bit further up, and quite often what I do is paddle down the beach,
come in in front of here and walk in.
So I don't have to walk far.
And I was up at the point paddling back, and I saw this sort of little fin break the surface.
And I thought, oh, what's that?
Now, if anyone knows a bit about my part of the world,
we had a spate of about five or six great white attacks within a really short period of time, fatalities.
And this was kind of not long after that.
So we had a lot of great white sharks around here and big ones.
And I'm paddling along, and all of a sudden I realized that this is a substantial fish.
And I can't do anything.
Like, I'm paddling towards it, it's paddling towards me, or swimming towards me.
And it kind of went down a little bit, so its fin went underneath and went underneath me.
Now, I could have reached out and touched this thing on the back or touched its dorsal fin, that's for sure.
But it was massive. It was absolutely massive.
And I remember thinking, being really confused about the fact that I wasn't absolutely cracking, crapping myself.
I was going, wow, that's amazing. Look at that thing.
And it completely ignored me and kept heading off up towards the point.
And I kept paddling that way. I did look back over my shoulder once or twice.
But, you know, so cancer had been my greatest fear before I got it.
I was terrified of cancer. One of my friends had died of cancer.
My grandmother had died of cancer. I watched my father die slowly of lung cancer.
And I ended up with tumors in my lungs.
I thought that if someone had said to me, you're going to have cancer, or sorry, you'd have cancer,
that I would have spent the rest of my life curled up in the fetal position under a table.
I also thought that if I'd come face to face with a great white shark like that, that I literally would have crapped myself.
But I didn't. And I was really shocked about both of those things, really shocked about it,
because I went, oh, look at that. You know, it's seven years now.
I'm not sure I'd be quite as calm about it. I don't know.
But, you know, I like to think that that big survival fear is somehow, definitely the edges come off it.
There's no doubt about that.
Yeah, that's awesome. OK, I'm going to ask you something you're going to need to speculate on a little bit.
I've heard now, oh, so many near death experiences. Every single one is a little bit different.
Some are very, very different. Yep.
I'd like you to speculate on why do some people see a lot of detail, people, faces, blades of grass, animals,
very finite kind of things like that.
And other people like yours, your experience was this big, too big to explain kind of thing without all of that detail.
Well, the detail was in there, but the vastness of it overtook the detail, if that makes any sense.
Sure. Yeah. OK. So my theory.
So I've done a lot of reading, a lot of meditating, trying to understand what happened to me.
And what I know, what I believe is this.
We're pushed out of a human being as beautiful as our mothers are.
And we're conscious. And then over a period of time, we develop an identity.
And that identity is a tool for survival.
But we can't tell the difference between the identity and the construction of the identity and the development of the body.
So the two are interwoven.
And so we think that in order for our identity to survive, our body must survive.
But also our identity takes on its own self-preservation routine, for want of a better term.
So that's why people will fight to death over a car park.
It's not about the car park. It's about someone taking something from them.
You know, people, we become so incensed at someone voicing an opinion.
It's not that we have a problem with their opinion.
It's that we feel like they're making us wrong and diminishing our identity.
Like all of the source of our upset, our opinions are born in our identity.
And I believe that in the process of dying, our identity is shit.
And as the identity is shit, then we get to experience the universe as wide open consciousness.
And I think that people's experiences, and this might be contentious,
but I think that people's experiences are shaped by the amount of the identity they've managed to shed, if that makes any sense.
But I think at the point of true final surrender, all of that's obliterated.
It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It still exists in consciousness.
But as a driver, it disappears. It's seen for what it is, just another story in consciousness.
So I have some very religious friends, and we've had this conversation.
And in my humble opinion, they have a very strong religious identity.
And because it's woven around the afterlife, it's probably one of the last things for them to let go of, in my opinion.
How about the pre-life? How much of that identity did we come here with?
Or how much did we just gain through our experiences here?
Well, look, again, so I don't think consciousness...
So if you sit here for a second and you did an experiment and you said, you asked yourself, are you conscious?
You would obviously answer yes.
But if I said to you, are you conscious, then I'll be a right knee, then you would be.
And if I are you conscious of your entire body, you would be.
And if I said to you, are you conscious of the entire space that you are sitting in right now, you could probably do that.
And then I said, if you expand that, could you do that?
And then my question to you would be, can you find an end to consciousness?
And the answer is no, in my opinion.
Like I've not been able to find an end to consciousness.
So if there is no end to consciousness, there must also be no beginning to my mind.
So there's this consciousness is eternal.
And I think that when we're, before we're born, before we developed an identity, we have access to consciousness.
Would that be past lives?
See, I don't think we have a life.
I don't say I have a life.
I say this body is alive and I'm currently conscious of being in this body.
But consciousness was here before this body and will be here after this body.
So the body's a bleep in consciousness, but so is the identity.
It doesn't mean though, while the body's recycled, the identity isn't necessarily right.
Recycled, it's dropped back into the database for want of a better term.
And I actually think that these past lives are actually people connecting with a previous narrowed consciousness in consciousness.
Does that make sense?
So my friends who appeared with me, their consciousness, their entity, their essence still exists in consciousness.
And when I removed Mark enough, I was able to see them.
But they, of course, and this is where it gets really confusing, is see them as identities and as personalities maybe,
but that really they were all.
This is where it gets confusing.
So I actually think that the secret to transcending life and death is to see the identity,
truly see the identity for the narrowing of consciousness that it is.
And then you get to experience endlessness and everything that occurs in consciousness.
My last question for today, and that is something that maybe you could help somebody that's listening today.
If somebody is listening today, we're sitting with you and said, Hey, I just lost a child or a loved one.
And they're distraught and they just need something positive, some hope.
What would you say to them?
My first thing was, so just so you know, I get a lot of people coming to me who have cancer and they come to me for various reasons.
But a lot of the people come to me asking for hope.
And I will clearly say to them straight away, I'm not in the business of giving you hope.
And in fact, my advice is to give up all hope because hope is an imposition on the unfolding of things.
You know, it's the only true path is to surrender to what it is, because the truth is we have very little control over much.
So what I do and I do, I spend a lot of time with people who are terminally ill or who have lost.
I have someone recently who just lost a child.
And so what I did with them was exactly that exercise that I just did with you, except I put a spin on it.
So if I was to say to you, are you conscious?
And you got in touch with your consciousness.
And then I said to you, can you find an end to that consciousness?
And ultimately, I've not had anyone say that they can find an end to it.
Then I put forward the proposition, if it has no beginning and has no end, then it must be eternal,
which everyone seems to have agreed with so far.
And then the next question is, think of someone you love, whether they still exist physically or not.
And they do. Then I say, can you see an end to that love?
And the answer, of course, is no.
So to my mind, if consciousness has no beginning and no end and is therefore eternal,
and love has no beginning and no end and is therefore eternal, then the two must be the same.
So for me, those identities, those people are always available in consciousness.
What we have to do is get the identity out of the way so that we can experience them in their true nature
and not through our pain and through our suffering,
because our pain and our suffering is a blockage a lot of the time to expansion.
And in expansion, that's where everything is, including the people that have been lost.
So Mark, to me, that is a message of hope.
Well, you know, I don't see it as hope. I see it as fact.
Yeah. Yeah, I guess there's semantics figuring in here.
Yeah. And see, I think the problem with a lot of people with hope is that hope is a function of the identity
trying to impose its will rather than a dance with what really is.
And the identity is a figment of our imagination.
So it can't truly be a relationship with what is.
It's always going to be a relationship with what we perceive.
And there's a big difference between the two quite often.
So the bottom line, I think of your message there is, if I can interpret it just a little bit,
is lost loved ones are not lost.
Absolutely not.
They're eternal. They are not lost.
And we don't need to have all this mourning because we may miss them for this time, but they're not lost.
You know, and the truth is, they're not lost. We're just blind.
Perfect. Thanks a lot, Mark. It's been fun.
Well, no problem with us.
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