You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio in the UK and around the world. Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be in this particular timeline, Welcome to trans dimensional Realities, where we delve into the stranger aspect of our current reality. I'm your host, Melissa Lee, and I don't know what it's like in the rest of the country, but here in the Northeast, we've had two days of summer.
It's eighty two degrees outside. We're not supposed to get this for another couple of months. Just two weeks ago we were down in the twenties and below. So mother Nature is certainly having a time. Makes me wonder what the rest of the summer of the spring actually is going to look like. So let's hope keep your fingers crossed. We don't suddenly get more snow. And I've seen snow fall in April, so I want to keep the nice weather anyway, Let's get into the program. Our guest today
is doctor Adam Risby. Now Doctor Risby is a critical care physician and neurologist whose work bridges medicine and nondual Wisdom, author of Love does Not Know Death. He draws from years in the ICU and decades of contemplative study to show how forgiveness transforms fear into peace. He lives in California, where he teaches, writes, and co hosts the podcast Letters to the Sky. So please welcome doctor Adam Risby to the show. How are you, doctor Risbey?
Hey, Melissa, it's a pleasure to be here.
Well, thank you for being here. I'm really fascinated to talk to you about, not only with your background working in the hospital as an emergency room position.
I see you, I see you wait towards here, do the same thing more or less.
Yeah, okay, And then how you got to be writing this one book and that sets you down this path. So if you can tell us a little bit about how that all started.
Yeah, yeah, I you know, I was really interested in spirituality from the get go when I was young. I think that my mom and my dad sort of instilled in me a desire to get to the core truth of it all, why we're here, what we're doing here, and where we're headed, sort of the perennial questions, And that was actually so much a part of my life that right before the year before going into medical school, I was dead set on being a comparative religion and
philosophy professor. I actually majored in that in college, and I said, Okay, this is what I want to do. I want to teach people how to embrace multiple traditions to find the truth within all. I really valued harmony and tolerance, something I think the world needs a lot more of these days. Yeah, and you know, my father was raised, he was he's he was Pakistani, passed away now, but he he had this like in many ways he was he was modern and progressive, but with his children.
He wanted his children to either have either be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. And and if you if you're a family from not the United States, you know that first gen children often you know the weight of your the future of the of the family is on your shoulders because you're often the first one to go to college and the first one to have higher level degrees. So the expectation was that I would do that, and he didn't quite like that. I wanted to be a professor.
So I think his words were over my dead.
Body, Okay, I think that goes a little bit beyond not liking But.
Yeah, so I was a rebellious teenager or twenty something year old, and so I decided I would not go to medicine, which he wanted me to do, but instead be a barista at Starbucks.
That's rebellious.
Yeah. I did that for a year, and I'm grateful because it was my first real exposure to living in the real world, having to pay my bills, earning my keep, interacting with people, interacting with a manager, supervisor. And then I realized, like, oh, do I really want my life to be this? And it wasn't bad. There's a lot of people who make you know they're living like that. But I decided I want to go into medicine, and
I went into medicine, and I became a doctor. But that part of me that strove for what is the truth underneath it all? What's what's the purpose? Why are we? What are we here to do before we die? That never left me.
You know, that's a question a lot of us have, And I've been down my own spiritual path and doing a lot of research and trying to find out, you know, what is the purpose of being here? What is the purpose of this life. And I started off on a Christian path, but then in my twenties I broke off. And you know, I've been learning a lot since about a lot of different points of view. But I do
definitely believe that there's something to this. We are here temporarily and we're here to learn, and I think that what we were talking about earlier, love and forgiveness is something that definitely is on the agenda.
It's not the syllabus, yes it is. Yeah, yeah, we're we're taking a course, for sure, And and I don't think people know what the syllabus is or what the course is about. But part of what your searching and my searching did was we just we discover one that yeah, we're taking a course, we're in a classroom, and we're here to learn something, and that there is there is somewhat of a syllabus, but it's not it's not explicit.
You gotta hunt, You gotta hunt for it. You have to wake up to it and realize that that that is, in fact what's going on. That's the context. So you're so right about that, And.
If you also look at a lot of your experiences in life, even the negative ones have lessons to teach you. You know, I can just say right now, everything that I've had happened in my life, and I've had a lot happen, especially the last few years. I've even though they just say it they sucked at the time, I am a better person for them. I've learned, I've grown, I've become more empathetic and feel like I'm more on the right path these days.
Yeah, I had a mentor of mine long ago once say, life isn't about preventing the fall, because you're going to fall. It's about learning to stand back up every single time and building that resilience. And part of standing back up for me is learning what that was all about, what the fall was all about. And then with that sort of resilient mindset, the growth mindset, I know I've become a better person. I become a kinder person, a more
compassionate person. Oftentimes, especially after big mistake that I make, I become way more compassionate to other people who make mistakes because I know what it feels like.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely so. With your history working in the ICU, how long have you been doing that.
Let's see, I finished Critical Care Fellowship in twenty eighteen. So I think I've been doing icy work if you count the years of fellowship, maybe for about ten.
Years now, Okay, okay, and.
I'm still kind of young in the whole journey of being a.
Doctor, okay. And what prompted you to write your book Love Does Not Know Death?
Yeah? Well, when I was in fellowship, it was my first time working day and day out in an ICU. I had done ICU work in residency and even in medical school, but this was pure critical care. This was the whole point of the fellowship was to get critical care down, and so being in the ICU, I ended up being present with death quite often. And I remember
my first few deaths. They were so intense, emotionally charged, from dealing with the emotions of the family member to the patient themselves not wanting to die, but then dying anyway. I remember that there was one case early on. It was a woman who was going to get I think her gallbladder taken out or something, I forget, some abdominal surgery.
And I was walking with her, lovely old lady, and she looked up at me and she had this look of doom in her eyes, like it's like abject terror, and she was holding my hands, say I'm going to die, I know it, and she just looked right at me with utter convey I know I'm going to die. I don't want to die. And she held my hand super tight, and me thinking, like, you know, you're just going for a small procedure. This happens every day. I told her,
you're going to be fine. It's a simple procedure. You're going to be fine. She went into the procedure room and she never made it out. She had a heart attack on the table and she came out, and I was devastated. I thought. I looked at her in the eyes and I told her she was going to be fine. I wish I wish I had maybe helped her to embrace that possibility. I don't know. I really don't know if I could have said anything differently because of where
she was at. But my first encounters with death were very rough. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to honor these patients. I wanted to honor her. I wanted to honor the surprise death that I mean. I guess she kind of knew it was happening. But so what I did is I started writing a journal and I called it my I still call it my death journal. And with every death that I was that was my criteria. If I was physically present in the moments leading up to or at their death, then I
would write about the patient. I would write what led up to their death, everything that I did during the death to support them or otherwise, and then the lessons I learned that the insights that came to me, that just the raw emotion of the experience, and I would capture. And I would also use that journal entry as a
means to pray for them. I would often write, like, you know, I'm offering prayers to them, well wishes and in my own word and language, and I would I would often close the journal entry with just closing my eyes and connecting with the with the that person, with that soul, and giving them love. And oftentimes it would be a conversation in my head with them and letting them know that thanking them for being in my life when they came, and letting them know that they're free.
They're free to go and and and do the next thing in their journey. And I have I now have well over five hundred journal entries in my death journal, and then I shared that with a group of friends of mine and they said, Adam, you got to just publish this. Publish your death journal so people know all the different ways that people die and and and what you learn, and that there's so much beauty that happens, and there's so much terror and anger and grief and
anguish and liberation and release. So much happens in the moments before and after death that I thought, Okay, let me, let me capture this, and and then it it led to the book Love Does Not Know Death.
Fantastic. With some of the cases that you talk about in the book, or maybe some of the others that didn't make this book, it sounds like you have enough for a couple of volumes. There's a lot of times when people are close to death, they start seeing and hearing things that we don't and a lot of times people are chalking that up to dementia or drugs that they're on or whatnot. My own father, who passed eighteen years ago, the last couple of days, he was seeing
people that he knew in the room. He had severe Parkinson's and dementia, but he was seeing these things before he passed the congestive heart failure. So was he really seeing people? That's up for debate, but it happens with a lot of people. Is it those neurons firing just before death or is it something else?
Yeah? Yeah, that's a great question. And this is probably where I might get in the most trouble but most physicians, and that is changing now. But I'd say that the default worldview of Western medicine is that who you are is a complex biochemical machine, this thing, and consciousness or awareness is a byproduct of your neurons talking to each other and firing, and that if the brain dies or shuts down, then consciousness itself disappears. That never rang true
to me. And after having been practicing for several years now in the ICU, I've seen stories and heard stories that make me more convinced than ever that consciousness does in fact continue on after the death of the physical body. I would there's so many resources now that are being built, the books that are being talked about. The near death literature is exploding, just the anecdotes, the stories, hundreds of thousands of stories indicating something in fact does continue on.
And I think if you if you pull the average American or the average human being around the world. I would say most people believe that consciousness does in fact go on, that there is some form of afterlife. Now we have different beliefs about what that might look like, but I would say most people feel that there is an afterlife. But in the western scientific world, that's not
the case. In my experience, I've had paid I've had a gentleman have a heart attack, pronounced dead by me with EG that means brainwave of electrical brain of activity. That that was isoelectric, meaning flat, no brain we of activity come back. His heart starts up again, only to tell me and describe a story of meeting many many people that have since passed on and then and then have to come back to his body. And the interesting thing is, and this is not an isolated incidence. There's
many cases of this. If you if you're visually seeing things, at least when you're in a body, your occipital lobes, the part of your brain that processes visual input, will light up. It will show that it's it's processing information. And he saw a whole bunch of things in this period of being dead, and yet nothing showed up on his EEG. I know there are other doctors who are
talking about this. I think we're on the early early stages of a shift in worldview within the sciences where we're going to start to acknowledge there is something else happening that we haven't been able to quantify. But I will say if you had asked me twenty thirty years ago what the general perspective of other physicians is, I would say almost everyone believes that we're just the meat suit.
But more and more physicians that I talked to actually are starting to consider that consciousness does in fact exist independent of the physical body.
And that's great because before now you're right, it's just science with science, and they didn't want to hear anything that contradicted what they thought of with science, as if we even though we're in the twenty first century, we think that, oh, we are on the edge, cutting edge.
We have sciences just progress so much, and we know so much, and I personally don't think we know nearly as much as we think we do, and there's more out there, especially when you start looking at religion is religion, but spiritual experiences are very unique, and people could have a spiritual experience like a near death experience, and it could be along religious lines and others. It's totally unexpected
what the experience. And lately I've been really listening to a lot of podcasts with near death experiencers because the subject fascinates me. I do definitely believe in that, but I want to hear other people's stories. I mean, I've gone through surgeries, I've been you know, under anesthesia. I never saw anything, so of course I didn't die on the table either, but it's it's really fascinating what's there.
And I think we're reaching that stage, as you mentioned, where it's starting to be more acceptable to accept that the two are can exist at the same time.
Yeah. Yeah, And if you really look at the near death literature and the stories even on just YouTube, what I notice whenever I do that is I feel touched. I feel transformed. I feel greater love for myself for those around me. I start to appreciate life more. There's a sense of meaning and purpose that I start I have, and the vast majority of near death experiencers they report
feeling transformed, like deeply, deeply transformed. They feel held and cared for, they feel like there's there is some presence watching out for them, guiding them, guiding their life, and and generally they I feel they become kinder people, nicer people, compassionate people. That and I think that's what happens when you shift your identity from just being the body to recognizing that you're something so much more that life and love don't know death, They keep they keep going it.
It helps you become a kinder person. And and that's as I really started to dive into this literature and doing my studies and my research, I realized that's what's happening. We become kinder people. It doesn't if you have beliefs in the afterlife. I mean, many people have beliefs in the actual life, but it doesn't make them good human beings. It doesn't make them kind people. But when you when you have that sense of love, when you have that sense of oh, this is this is what I'm here
to learn. This is the classroom, which a lot a lot of near death experiences report. And if and if you realize we're all in the same classroom, we're all learning. Why not help each other, Why not help everyone get a's so to speak. You know, there's no there's no curve in this classroom, we don't we don't have to segregate ourselves. We can help each other. So I actually end my book with a chapter I think. I think
the chapter title is be Kind, because that's it. It ultimately boils down to that if you're if you consider yourself a spiritual person, but you're not kind, you're not doing it right. There's there's spirituality will bring you to kindness and compassion.
A lot of a lot of that, I think is it's the nature versus nurture argument, where depending on a person's home life, how they grew up, whether it was let's say, in a religious family or you know, instilled with certain cultural beliefs, and they can they a person can act on those, or a person could be a little bit more aware and start realizing and seeing the
lessons and become that kind of person. I think too many people fall into the trap of physical, physical pleasures, physical power, physical sensations, and thinking that even if they're religious, even if they have beliefs, they still are not nice people because in some way they're either lashing out or they're holding on to that low vibrational negative trauma or outlook that again might have been impressed on them when
they were younger, growing up. There's a lot of factors that can come into it.
Yeah, yeah, Actually, what you just said is one of the avenues that I think we can use to practice a really deep level of forgiveness. I talk a lot about it in the book because I feel like when people are facing death their own or a loved one, inevitably what happens is a lot from the past comes up,
a lot of unhealed hurt and pain. Families that were distanced from each other, estranged, they're often forced to see each other again when the father or the mother is dying, and when they come together, anything that hasn't been healed just comes right up to the surface. And I feel like forgiveness is such a huge gift to yourself if you know how to do it. And so one of the first ways in is well, I should talk a
little bit about the deeper meaning of true forgiveness. But what I want to share first is if someone did something wrong to you and you can see through the negative action and see them as a child, see them in see all the trauma that they went through, all the pain, the abuse, all of the belief systems and potential brainwashing and cultural indoctrination that they got from the media,
from their family, from friends. Who knows that has turned them into who they are now, and recognize that their behavior is a product of that, and then you don't take it as personally. Then you realize, oh, what they're telling me, what they're saying, the way they're behaving, it's not personal, a reflection of everything that they've been through. Now we'll say something. Forgiving someone doesn't mean you're saying what they did was right. It doesn't mean what you're
saying what they did to you is okay. You can forgive someone and never talk to them again. You can place those boundaries. You can tell them what they did was absolutely inappropriate, wrong, if it's necessary to take legal action. I'm saying, like, the actions that you take in the world is distinct from what's happening inside, in the mind
and in the heart. And the reason why I like to say that forgiveness is a gift that you give yourself is because there's such a burden when you are resentful towards someone, when you hate someone, when you judge them, when you hold grievances, and you carry that with you for years. It is such a burden. And if you forgive, if you can see through to the innocence of the other person, and if you can somehow recognize a similarity.
Maybe it's that we're all human beings. Maybe it's that we all face struggle when we grow up some way to connect at a deep level to the other person. Then you're able to drop that burden. You're able to let it go. And for me, part of what drove me to write this book is I would see some
families do this unconsciously, maybe they did it consciously. They would use the opportunity of impending death their own or their loved one to resolve those grievances, to let things go, to finally decide to forgive and give themselves the permission of living life without the burden of judgment. And then I've seen family members who don't do that, and they fight to the bitter end. There's terror and shame and betrayal and anger and rage to the very very bitter
end and then beyond. And then I thought, you know what allows some families to turn death into a moment of healing and others not. Let me share the stories, let me capture it and then allow the reader to learn from that.
Sure, sure what people don't realize unless they've experienced it. Holding on the negativity and negative thoughts, it just drags you down. It drags you down, makes you miserable or at least have a negative outlook towards life and not trusting people. And I'll tell a little story. I had someone in my life about twenty five years ago who really did a lot to me, and I didn't realize how bad it was until years later. And I held such resentment towards this person. I didn't even want to
speak their name. I wanted nothing to do with them. Some mutual friends were still friends with this person, and I would run into them once in a while and I was just I wanted nothing to do with them. And this person wound up passing away about six years ago, and even at that time, I still had negative feelings towards them. But as I've been going on my own spiritual journey, I realized I had to let it go. I had to there's no sense in continuing to be angry.
What happened happened, and I had to admit to myself it was a learning experience I did learn so much out of that, and even though this person passed, I still forgave them. And does that mean, you know, if they were still here, i'd allow it to happen again. Absolutely not, and I probably wouldn't have any contact with them. But I had to let that go in my heart to just say I forgive you. You did what you did, but I'm not going to hold it against you anymore
and move on with my life. And I have felt so much lighter since then.
Wow, you nailed it. That's exactly it. That's so thank you. You could have I could have said it better. We all go through moments like that, and maybe that's something we should all consider that as human beings, no matter what country you're in, no matter what religion you practice, we are human beings that suffer. We suffer in very unique ways that it's so diverse, but in the end, like the pain is the same, the struggle is the same.
Now some people it's worse than others, but you're right, we can learn from it, we can grow from it. We become who we are now, resilient and strong and powerful because of those traumas in the past. And it takes a willingness. Sometimes the teeniest amount of willingness will start the ball rolling. Maybe it's just a consideration of maybe at some point later in my life, I will be at a place where I could forgive that person.
And I like that you use the word let go because forgiveness can be can trigger people that the word forgiveness, but you can replace it with letting go. And the key, as you said, is it doesn't mean you do anything different. At the level of form and action. You can still place those boundaries, but it's about going inside. Can you let go in here?
Well, one other thing what taught me in that situation is I know of people throughout my life I have wronged and I always felt guilty about it. And then just a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to reconnect with a lot of people in my past where I realized I was a jerk. I did not handle things the way I should have, and I really
felt bad for what I did. So when I reached out to these people, I would apologize to them to make amends, and I would say ninety percent of the time, none of them ever remembered it, but I did, and because I did, it was still me letting go, apologizing, getting it out there in the open air. And you know, whether you know, I didn't really need to receive forgiveness for it. I just needed to say I'm sorry. And I think that the people appreciated that, even if they
didn't remember. But I just reached this point my life where I just wanted to make amends with everyone and try to move forward with the rest of my life.
Uh, to not do that, Yeah, that's great. Forgiving oneself is a is a whole other ballgame, and it's it can be a lot harder. It's because we're harder on ourselves most of the time. We because we see everything on the inside. We know what we intended, we know what we were feeling. So but it sounds like you were able to do that. There was one thing I was going to share, just to dive a little bit deeper into forgiveness or letting go, however you want to
use that term. One. There's one level of forgiveness that is I would say the world's description of forgiveness and and it's it's not what I'm talking about. The world's forgiveness says you did something wrong. I'm the better person. I'm better than you, and because I'm better than you spiritually, I'm gonna I'm gonna let this slide. I'm gonna I'm gonna forgive you. And that's sort of like a false charity,
you know, That's not the forgiveness I'm talking about. There's a deeper level of forgiveness that cuts through, or sees through the appearance of wrongness. Someone does something wrong, or you do something wrong. That's the surface level. Deep forgiveness goes through that and goes to the core of who that person was, and then you see the story everything that led to that behavior, and then it goes even deeper and further to the nature of who they are.
And this is where what you and I talked about at the beginning comes to play. If who our nature is is consciousness and even deeper you could say, pure awareness, It's not like there are little buckets of consciousness. There's only one consciousness. There's only one ground of awareness. And the deeper you go, the more you realize separation is an illusion. There's just oneness, this raw pure awareness that we are. And I would add to that the word innocence.
There is no sin in pure awareness. There's no guilt in pure awareness. It's the ground of being. And if we can go to the core of someone that we think has wronged us and see that innocence and recognize that it's the same innocence in us, there's this instant sense of deep, profound connection with the other person. So you forgive the other person not because they've done something
wrong and you're the better person. You forgive them because you see at the core of their being they are innocent, and at the core of your being your innocent, and so really there's nothing to forgive because all there is is innocence. That's a very deep level of forgiveness that is I think most but it's something we can strive towards.
When you mentioned about those people who could they forgive, but they're kind of lording it over the person that I'm a better person than you, No, they're not, because to have that kind of mindset is negative. You're putting yourself over somebody else. You're not really forgiving them, You're patting yourself on the back for something that you've done. There's also the people who can't forgive themselves and can't
love themselves, And I'm one of those people. For the longest time, since I was a child, I beat myself up constantly, and it's only been in the last couple of years that I've been able to accept myself, love myself, and move forward. And it's so freeing. But people who hold onto the past, hold onto the negativity, and it just it's a cycle that just continues over and over and over again because they can't learn to forgive themselves. They can't learn to let it go, like letting it
go when somebody else has wronged you. So they beat themselves up, They get into drugs or alcohol abuse, they get into these really self destructive patterns because they can't love themselves and forgive themselves.
Yeah, gosh, I'm so happy we're talking about this, because oftentimes, because the book is about death, we end up talking about after life things. But this is the core, this is the main message of the book, which is our life is meant to be a life of healing. It's it's as you said, it's a classroom where we're learning the course that these lessons. The interesting thing about self forgiveness, I'll say, no one can punish you better than yourself.
We are so good at punishing ourselves and we do it for so long years are are, you know, for a whole life sometimes and it's because there's this deep, deep belief. We believe we have sinned, We believe we've done something wrong, and we don't deserve forgiveness. We deserve punishment, and it will go as far as it can or needs to for the the ego, that part of us that believes that we're alone and separate and unworthy to
feel justified. Now, you said earlier that you know that that type of worldly forgiveness lording it over over someone is negative. I would say it's also negative to punish yourself because you believe that you are inherently a guilty, sinful person. People will do it, like you said, with drugs or alcohol or depriving themselves of things. Sometimes it's a silent suffering, a silent punishment. But the gateway out
of it. First, I always start with there needs to be a willingness, a willingness to see differently, a willingness to shift your perspective. All you got to do is tell yourself I'm willing And generally what happens is the suffering gets so bad that you realize something's got to change, and then the willingness comes, and then after the willingness comes the tools and the path to healing. And that part of what is in my book, but it's not
just in my book. There's many other books that talk about this is the willingness to see that there is a part of you that is innocent. That's the part you got to see, that part of you that did its best with what you knew well, and that's all we're ever doing. We're always doing the best that we can with what we know. And if we can get to the core of that and see even if it's the sliver of it, sliver of innocence, that's the beginning of healing.
And with that, in going back to forgiveness, can you really forgive somebody else if you won't forgive yourself, You need to be able to forgive yourself and then be able to forgive others so that you're coming more from a place of positivity and that your load is lightened and you feel better. And then you talk to that person or even silently in your head. You know you may not need to confront them, but you let it go.
You say, I forgive you, and I don't think that could really happen until you've reached a point where you can forgive yourself.
You are naming something that I think is not talked about enough. But it's like, there's a mirror like quality to the world, to the to the universe. The way you see someone else deeply is mirrors how you see yourself, and then the way you see yourself mirrors how you
see others. There's an interesting story that happened, and I allude to it in the in the book, but the longer story behind it is there was a surgeon that was very, very difficult to deal with early on in my career, and he was very antagonistic, very angry most of the time. Whenever he would do a surgery and the patient would come up to his ICU, he would bark orders and tell the nurses and other physicians exactly what they need to do and how, and if anything
went wrong it was our fault and not his. Very intense, hard to work with, and I remember I was so triggered by him, and I just thought like, gosh, what what what a rough person to be with, you know,
and I would, uh, yeah, it was. It was those were rough days when he was in the ICU and then later on uh not related to him, but I had a patient come in beautiful young woman who had a respiratory disorder of her lungs ended up dying, and I felt so much guilt around her death because I thought I had done maybe there was something I could
have done differently to save her life. And I was able to get to a point in the days after her death to really deeply forgive myself and realize, no, adam you you really did everything you could with what you knew about her at the time, and I could get to that innocence of who I was to see that I really was an innocent boy who did what he the best he could with what he knew, and that she died because it was her time and I
was honest. I was a first person. I would be the first person to catch if I had made a mistake, and maybe there were things I could have done differently, but in the moment, I did what I could do.
Best.
Now how it relates to the surgeon is days after I had forgiven myself and I could see the innocence underneath the mistake. I started to recognize that I wasn't triggered by the surgeon anymore. It was a very interesting phenomenon. He would still behave the same way, still bark orders, still be angry, but it's like they would just washed
through me. I didn't take anything personally, and I realized, Oh, yeah, he's just being who he is because that's what he knows, that's how he was raised, that's how he was taught. Nothing was taken personally. And my intuition was that it was deeply connected to my own self forgiveness. Because I could forgive myself, I was able to see through what he was doing and how he was behaving. It wasn't even a one to one connection. I just started to
see others more likely. And I feel like the more we are able to figure forgive ourselves, the less the world triggers us, the less others will bother us. And it's vice versa. There's that mirror like quality.
I'm smiling because that's absolutely right, especially in my case. I totally agree one thousand percent. It's you forgive yourself, things become a lot easier. Even when more problems come up, or if you screw up and do something, you take it more as a learning experience. Okay, this is how I handled it. I did not handle it well. I'm learning from this and I'm moving forward and I won't
do it again. And I think that's also part of the purpose of this life, is to learn and grow and become the best version of yourself you can be. I don't want to say a better person, because that's very subjective, but being the best version of yourself in this lifetime and learning from those mistakes, and it makes moving forward a lot easier. Even when things are crazy, you don't like things that are going on, you just just let it, let it roll off you.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I I have a friend who's retired marine, and he was sharing with me that he after after he finished his time at the Marine Corps, it was so much he had guilt over and he made a decision to himself that he the the intensity that he applied in the Marines of getting things done, like when they had a job, nothing mattered, they would get it done at every resource emotional, mental, physical, would be marshaled to ensure that this mission was accomplished, He said, he
applied the same intensity to what he called radical self forgiveness. He basically put the intensity of his work into making sure he forgave himself, and every time a guilt would come up in the years after, he would he would like get laser focused and he would just go to the core of the issue and he would forgive himself.
And I was so impressed. I don't think I approached my forgiveness with that level of intensity, but I probably should if we all did just a percentage of that and treated it as as important as getting up and going to work each day, because that's how we get paid, that's how we put food on the table. If we treated self forgiveness with that level of intensity, we would see great, great healing.
That is so profound. I absolutely agree with that. I was wondering if we could go over We've got about fifteen minutes left in the show, if we could talk a couple about a couple of stories that you mentioned in the book or otherwise about these experiences with people dying.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Well, one that comes to mind has to do well. I'll share the story a young It was a young boy. I was in Tucson at the time. I was working in Arizona and we had a multi vehicle pile up. It was a lot of a huge crash and he was the only survivor. Initially of the crash, paramedics called told us that they were coming in hot with the trauma. I was in the trauma bay anticipating the The young kid comes in. He's on a stretcher.
There's a female paramedic straddled over him like doing chest compressions. Nurses are coming. They're immediately trying to get ivy lines in. Another paramedic is just ripping his jeans and his clothes off with scissors. All of it is part for the course for a trauma. They welam into the trauma bay and the er physician and I tag team to run the code. Running a code a code blue is when
someone's heart has stopped. Running a code essentially means you're at the foot of the bed and you help assign roles to everyone and you ensure that the process goes very smoothly. So the first few minutes it was the er doc, but because we were so busy, the er doc stepped away and I took over. So I was at the foot of the bed. Here's this kid in front of me. I have a respiratory therapist placing a breathing tube through his throat. He had a massive gash
through his chest where his chest. This might be TMI for your listeners.
That's okay, it's fine.
I'll minimize the gore then. Suffice it to say the scene was very, very bloody and chaotic. And what was interesting though, was after we had assigned roles and we were pausing every two minutes checking for a pulse, doing chest compressions, giving medications, we got into a rhythm and a flow and the chaos of the room sort of
died down. It was a little bit quieter, and everyone was just doing their duty, you know, pushing medications, doing chest compressions, checking for a pulse, pausing like we would just go through our cycles. While that was happening, we were maybe twenty minutes in. I got this sense of someone behind me into my right and I thought it
was the ed physician. At first, I kind of looked over to assuming he was like walking up to tell me something, but there was no one there, and I looked back and I really felt the presence, and this sort of interesting thing happened. I got the intuitive knowing that it was the boy standing next to me.
I was just gonna say that yeah.
And it's funny, like I could feel like it was a masculine presence. I could even see his face in my mind's eye. It was weird. And I should preface this by saying, I'm not psychic. I've never been trained. I don't have any exposure to that. This is just These are the stories of what I felt when I was there. There's this kid next to me who's you know, his body is there. I feel him right next to me, and there's a weird thing. I could hear him asking
a question, but it wasn't audible. It was in my head, but it didn't feel like my voice. It felt like his. It's hard to describe. I don't even know if I'm doing this justice, but I hear him tell me, is that me? And he was looking at the body, and I'm looking at the body too, and I sort of tell him in my head, that's your body. It's not you, that's your body. So I wanted to make the distinction for him. And the interesting thing was he wasn't worried
or afraid. The emotional feeling that I got from him was amusement, like, oh, how interesting, interesting that that's my body, you know, like sort of uh, like you're like you're watching something and like a movie or something. And what
happened after was was really interesting. As soon as I said, yeah, that's your body, it felt like the scene, the entire scene of his body and the nurses and the therapists became like a thin film, like like the film that you that a projector will shine light through, you know, like a movie film. And I felt like I was diving through the film and I was entering an ocean.
The mental image that I had that that appeared to me was that beneath the film was a vast ocean, and I could see the rippling waves and it's almost like you know how when you go out to the beach on a on a beautiful sunny day and you see the sun sort of like reflect and it creates like sparkles on the on the ripples of the waves. That's what I felt like. I was seeing this like sparkly ocean vastness, and and I got the intuition of like, oh,
that's this boy's soul. That was the intuition like this this boy, this is his brilliant, beautiful, vast nature underneath the film of the body. It's like the body was the most superficial layer of who he was, but here he was in his in his you know, awesomeness, And then I felt like he was watching what I was watching. We were both going through this together, and I told him, I think that's I think that's your soul. I think
that's who you are. And then what happened is I felt like I dived through this ocean of light, and underneath it was an absolutely profound, vast expanse of pure light, like no ripples, no wave, no ocean, just an endless expanse of light. And then my intuition was, Oh, that's who we both really are. That's the that's the depth of all humanity, that's where we're all won. And I remember telling him I was equally surprised because all of
this was happening in my field of vision. And I told him, I think that's who we are, you and me, both all of us, and he sort of smiled and like sort of nodded and acknowledged, and we both sat there or stood there watching this. It was mesmerizing. It was endless and so bright. I felt like it was overlaid on what I was witnessing, and then I kind of rested there for a while, and by then we were maybe forty minutes in something like that, and he
had been progressing. His heart rate went from For those who are listening and you have medical background, he transitioned from pea to v fib, course of v fib, then fine v fib ventricular fibrillation. We shocked him a couple of times no effect to asis, which is flat line, and he basically was in flatline for the past ten minutes every time we checked his pulse, and by forty minutes we just well over forty minutes. We decided we were not getting him back, and so I asked everyone
if there was anyone that disagreed with calling it. Everyone said no, and so then we called it, and that was his time of death, and I still felt him next to me. And after his time of death, I asked for a moment of silence, and I could see him watching this with me, and he didn't say this, but the emotional feeling that I got was he was like, hmm, cool, and then he was gone. He just disappeared like that, and there was no one next to me anymore. He
just vanished. It was such a surreal experience for me. But what I got most, which is very I shared because it was very healing for me, is this feeling of diving into who he really was and then discovering who I really was Through all of that.
I have to admit I am stunned and astounded. That is one of the most incredible stories that I've ever heard of what I would call a shared death experience. And the fact that you picked up on him and you don't have to be psychic or think yourself. Everybody has an ability to at some point to sense these things, and it was probably one of those things that you were meant to experience. The fact that, again I've been doing a lot of research into near death experiences, the
dispassion that a person feels seeing their own body. They just look at it like, oh yeah, they have no emotional connection to it while they're out of it. The fact that he wasn't going back probably even added to And there's no fear and but the rest of it. I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. That has really struck a chord with me.
Yeah, you know what, I Melissa, I had never heard the term shared death experience until after I started doing interviews for the book. I didn't know that that was a thing, but you're right. I think he was seeing that and I was seeing what he was seeing.
Wow. Well we're going to end on that note that. I mean, it's phenomenal, But thank you so much for sharing that. Now for your book, Love does Not Know Death, Stories of Death, Dying and the Miracles of true Forgiveness. Now where can people find that?
That is on Amazon. I have a website Love does Not Know Death dot com where you can sign up for a newsletter newsletter. But the best way to stay up to date with everything I'm doing is my sub stack adamz feed dot substack dot com. I call it Adventures and Kindness and I basically write articles several times a month sharing what I learned in the hospital and what I learn in life.
Fantastic. Now you have a podcast, right.
Oh that's right. Yes, it's a it's called Letters to the Sky that I do with my best friend Stephen Downs. It is for those who are really deep in the spiritual path. Steven and I talk a lot about the ins and outs of the spiritual path, almost very similar to what you and I did today, Melissa, and and it's like, once you realize that that's the classroom you're in, you want to learn the lessons you want and you want to do it well. And that's what we talk about in the podcast.
Fantastic Well, Adam, this has been rivening. This is one of the most eye opening interviews I've done in a while. So thank you so much for coming on the show and hopefully people will be picking up your book and read some more.
Thank you all right, well, thank you for.
Being on the show. Wow, I'm gonna be very honest with you. I'm stunned and just overwhelmed with the entire interview. Probably people wanted to hear more about the death experiences that Adam had to share, but I think we covered so much that is so important for people to realize without being preachy. And but that last story I had to wipe my eyes afterwards. I'm tearing up. It's so for profound and I hope you as the audience feel
the same way that I did listening to it. So I want to thank you Adam for coming on the show. A wonderful interview. I'm very pleased and if he ever, if he writes another book, I'll have him back on Definitely. We'll talk a little bit more about some more of his stories next time. So until then, everyone, you have a wonderful week, and you all be good humans and we will talk with you soon.
See you