Dead for 4 Minutes at Six. Dead Again at 39. He Came Back Without His Rage | David A. Williamson

What if dying revealed the truth about who you really are? After suffering a heart attack fueled by years of rage, trauma, and inner conflict, David A. Williamson says he left his body, heard doctors' thoughts as they fought to save his life, traveled through deep space, encountered "the Void," witnessed a mysterious hidden Grid beyond the universe, and received a life-altering message: "You killed yourself with your personality." In this extraordinary Near Death Experience (NDE) episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, David describes hovering above his body in the operating room, watching medical personnel work on him while somehow knowing their private thoughts. He then says he shot through space, encountered what he believes may be connected to black holes, witnessed a star-forming region, transformed into an orb of light, and saw an asteroid that NASA would later confirm actually exists. But that's only the beginning. David shares childhood experiences that he believes prepared him for this encounter with death, including an NDE at age six, powerful intuition, ESP abilities, lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and a lifelong sense that reality was far more mysterious than most people realize. He also reveals why he eventually asked God to take his intuitive gifts away. In one of the most unique life reviews we've ever heard, David says he was shown profound truths about identity, race, trauma, love, and the destructive power of unresolved anger. Growing up in a small, impoverished Southern town, witnessing KKK marches as a child, and carrying years of racial pain and resentment would eventually culminate in the heart attack that changed everything. He also discusses startling past-life memories of witnessing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, his views on reincarnation, Earth School, and why he believes we are already choosing future lifetimes based on the lessons we are learning now. We cover: - His detailed out-of-body experience during cardiac arrest - Receiving the profound realization that he was fundamentally "love and light" - Traveling through space and encountering "the Void" - Witnessing a star-forming region and becoming an orb of light - Mysterious Grid beyond space and what it may mean about reality - Angels and their role in humanity's development - Reincarnation, soul evolution, & Earth School - Why he believes souls cycle through many lives - Emotional and physical challenges of returning to life after death - Why he experienced severe depression after his NDE - How sharing his story 3.5 years later helped rewire his brain and accelerate healing - The dramatic personality transformation that followed his experience - Psychedelics vs. NDEs: key similarities and differences - What religion gets wrong about spirituality - How his NDE changed the way he parents and approaches relationships - Role of imagination, creation, & possibility in human life Whether you're curious about consciousness, life after death, reincarnation, spirituality, psychic phenomena, black holes, or the transformative power of profound human experiences, this conversation challenges conventional assumptions and explores some of the deepest questions we can ask about existence! Go to https://surfshark.com/mayimor use code MAYIM at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! Use code BREAKER at jonesroadbeauty.com http://jonesroadbeauty.com to get a Free Gift with your first purchase! #JonesRoadBeauty #adFor a limited time, get $250 off Cove Pure water filtration at http://www.covepure.com/breakdownReceive a free LMNT Sample Pack with purchase. Just visit https://drinklmnt.com/mayimVisitdrinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and get a FREE AG1 Flavor Sampler and a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3 + K2 in your Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order. Get your annual IANDS Conference tickets athttps://conference.iands.org/https://conference.iands.org. Watch the Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Official Podcast on HBO Max, the HBO Max YouTube channel, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.mgln.ai/StuartGo to https://tidd.ly/4uVltMe and use the code MAYIM50 to get $50 off your Elastique order. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I died multiple times. I drowned at age six, underwater, three or four minutes. I was 39, I had a heart attack. I watched the guy defibrillate me. I could still see the people. I could still hear everything.

• 0:11Mayim Bialik?

  You witnessed something source.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  I heard you killed yourself with your personality. Whether I'm in danger or dying, this voice speaks to me. It guides me through the trauma.

• 0:20Mayim Bialik?

  David A. Williamson died, witnessed himself being brought back to life, and shares with us how the experience released him from his attachment to hate and anger.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  I saw the KKK bringing it to my family at age five. I absorbed it all, this energy of hate. I was an angry guy that overwhelmed my nervous system, my body and my organs, and I died. I died because I hated this place. When I came back, none of those thoughts, none of the attachment was there. I felt like I was fixed.

• 0:46Mayim Bialik?

  It's as if your brain rewired.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  There's no pain, no confusion, no anxiety. I know now that my attention creates my experience. I put my attention on hopeful ideas. There is no alone. You are one with everything.

• 0:58Mayim Bialik?

  What do you remember of leaving your body?

• 1:00Speaker 00

  The first thought I had.

• 1:09Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 1:10Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:11Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to Our Breakdown. Wow, have we got an episode for you today. I know so many of you are interested in near-death experiences. And we have the opportunity to speak today to David A. Williamson, who about 10 years ago was suffering from a variety of heart-related issues, which resulted in him having a heart attack and a tear in his aorta. And he died. He died, and he witnessed himself brought back to life. But the experience that he had in this process not only changed the way he returned to life,

• 1:53Mayim Bialik?

  but changed the way his brain really viewed himself, other people, his relationships. It's one of the most profound shifts that we have ever heard from a near-death experience. What's particularly unusual about this NDE is when David died in the hospital about 10 years ago, it was actually not the first time he had died. When he was six years old, he experienced an unbelievable NDE related to drowning. He believes that it was some of those experiences that actually carried over into the NDE that would happen decades later.

• 2:28Jonathan Cohen?

  David describes what he experienced in the afterlife, the black void that he saw, the light, the beings, and what he saw at the edge of the universe.

• 2:39Mayim Bialik?

  David A. Williamson, welcome to The Breakdown.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Break it down.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:46Mayim Bialik?

  You come highly recommended, not just as an NDE survivor, but as a human being, from our friend Betty. And we're so glad to get to talk with you. So, David, maybe you can take us back 10 years or so to what your life was like, where you were living, a little about where you grew up. Yeah, who's David?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll go back, because I drowned at age six. And in the most popular video, I didn't really even remember it. Well, I didn't recall it as a trauma, because I didn't integrate it as a trauma. But as a kid, I was in Yanceyville, North Carolina. Like Huck Finn, like everything was, I was in nature all the time. I loved being in nature. I used to dig holes in the ground, and anything I found was a treasure to me. And I would, instead of using lunchboxes for lunch, I had rocks and bugs and all these treasures that I would collect, and I would keep them there. Everything was magical to me as a child. I felt, I had spiritual gifts as a child. I was, I had lucid dreams often. I thought I was a bird.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  I had sleep paralysis, which I didn't like, but I learned how to manage. I heard people's thoughts. I could feel what people were feeling. I knew when adults were lying. And I didn't, so I lost respect for authority very early. You know, and I just figured that I had to figure stuff out. And that's my mom. My mom would send me to people when I had questions. My uncle was a bishop, I think, at the time, a deacon, a deacon at the church at the time. And I would ask him questions, and the questions, the answers, I didn't ever really like, you know? And she would ask me, did you get your questions answered? And I would be like, nah, but I find the answers. Because I always knew that if I dug for stuff, I would figure it out. Like, it's the same as digging holes in the ground.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  If I dug, I would find something, always. And so my effort, I would say the effort to just learn and grow and understand reality was, my mom encouraged it. She always bought me books. There was these, I think, Publishers Clearing House, where you buy, it'd be five books for five cents or something like that. And it was a lie, because you had to process it. So it would turn into about 40 bucks. And I thought every time that it was, actually, I thought that it was five cents. So, and she did it for me every single time. And I didn't know how much money she was spending on these books. But the books that I was asking for, even at five, six, were like the secret teachings of Christ, the Gnostic, like Gnostic texts.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  And just religious, like religious stuff. I was raised Christian, and I just wanted to understand it. I didn't want to just believe it. I wanted to understand it. And most people were like, certain things you don't, you're not supposed to understand. And I hated that, because I was like, at what point do you stop trying to understand before you just say some things you're not supposed to understand? You know? So for me, it was always, I'm going to understand it.

• 5:43Mayim Bialik?

  These are some remarkable abilities, which people who experience NDEs often report that they had practice in their childhood, either practice leaving their body, practice dissociating. Did you have siblings? Were you the special one in your family? Like, what was going on in your house?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  I had an older brother, but my little sister, she was, I was 15 when she was born. So she wasn't around then. But my older brother was more fun, funny. And honestly, if it were not for him, I don't think I would have, I probably would have left here very early as a child, because I didn't, I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to, I knew that I didn't want to be here very early in my life. And I think that's why I've died multiple times. I've almost died even more than the two NDEs. And even in the time where I almost died, I heard a voice guiding me through the process. So it was like, whether I'm in danger or about to die or dying, this voice speaks to me. And it either gives me warnings or it guides me through the trauma,

• 6:44Speaker 00

  to where I can say with honesty that there is no trauma that I can point to easily that's stuck in any way. I have to go dig it up and figure out how it, how it's affected me. Because it doesn't, it's never a memory that I'm going to have and be like, that was so traumatic. Nothing was, because this voice was always talking to me through the entire thing. So nothing was extremely traumatic for me.

• 7:06Mayim Bialik?

  What happened when you were six?

• 7:08Speaker 00

  I went to a summer camp and saw the kids in the water. I couldn't swim, but I saw that they had life jackets on. So I saw a life jacket on the dock. No counselor was around. I put it on as best I could and just ran and jumped as high as I could in the water. And as soon as I hit the water, the life jacket stayed at the top. And I went down like a rock. And I'm just going down. I don't even, I don't know how to swim at all. And I didn't make any effort to go up. I just had my arms beside me, and I was calm the entire time.

• 7:41Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I just got chills.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  And I was just going down, and I'm going down. And I remember having a thought, like, I'm not going to be able to hold my breath for much longer. And then it was black, you know, everything was black. And then a voice said, if you can touch the bottom, you can push yourself back up.

• 7:54Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my God.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  And I responded to the voice. I'm just going down. It doesn't seem like I'm going to touch the bottom. And then I floated back up. And as I'm floating back up, I became conscious again, because I could see the light coming through the top of the water at some point. And then I saw a splash. And when I saw the splash, the ripples of the water radiated from the splash and the light shining through captivated me as a child. And I stared at it for a while, like drowning. None of that was in my mind. I was still under the water. But that held my attention so intensely that I stared at it. And what I could see in hindsight is that it was the circle and the dot, the radiating circle that's the symbol of life in all cultures. Like, all over this world, this circle and a dot is a symbol of life and creation. I didn't know that then, but it meant something to me, and it stuck.

• 8:40Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, did somebody pull you out of the water?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Pulled me out of the water. I sat on the edge of a dock, and I sighed. I got coughed twice, and I sighed. There was no pumping water. There was nothing like that. And, but I turned around, and I looked behind me, and it was chaos, like people were crying and passing out. There were people running down from the top of the hill to the water, because everybody thought I was dead. I asked my brother, two years, two and a half years ago, I said, were you there when I went under the water? And he said, yeah. He said, he said, everybody thought you were dead. He said, people passing out screaming. He said, they were looking at me. He was eight, and he was two and a half years older than me. He said, they were looking at me like I was supposed to do something. I couldn't swim either. I wasn't going to jump in and save you. You know, it was like, I didn't know what to do. And I asked him, I said, well, how long was I under the water?

• 9:26Speaker 00

  And he said, it was no less than three or four minutes.

• 9:29Mayim Bialik?

  But that's all it takes to die?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I couldn't hold my breath for a minute and a half. You know, we used to time it. We used to have competitions as a kid.

• 9:36Mayim Bialik?

  Before we had cell phones, we just had contacts.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Just do dumb stuff, yeah.

• 9:40Mayim Bialik?

  How long can you go without blinking? That was a game on the bus.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Exactly, we did that. So I knew that a minute and about 30 seconds was around my life. So when he said, he said, no less than three or four minutes, he said, everybody thought I was dead. He said, it was, it was just, you know, people were, it was like the crying, and he said the screaming. He said, it was from people who just thought I was dead.

• 10:00Mayim Bialik?

  And you were just, you had some calm.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  I was, I was never traumatic at all.

• 10:04Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm fascinated by, like, Who pulled you out?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  That splash was a pole.

• 10:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Oh.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I grabbed it after I stared at it for a while. I grabbed it and I got pulled out. Yeah.

• 10:16Jonathan Cohen?

  You had to come back, right? Like you were, it was dark and then that process. And then you had to make a decision there in, in some way, like to have the wherewithal.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:27Jonathan Cohen?

  To grab that.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  And I don't know, honestly, and this kind of is the, the feeling that I have about,

• 10:34Speaker 00

  as a child, I know I didn't want to be here. And I, maybe the pause was, you know, was that like, ah, maybe I'm just gonna stay, you know? Because I definitely paused for a while before I grabbed the pole. Um, I don't remember the thinking, but I do remember being captivated by those rings and not really interested in coming out of the water in that moment, you know?

• 10:55Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:22Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:04Jonathan Cohen?

  What did hearing lies and knowing someone was lying feel like? How did you tell that they were lying?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  It felt like tension. It feels like, it felt like, um, noise. It felt almost like, uh, like you, when you're talking to the microphone too close and you get feedback?

• 15:23Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  It's kind of like that. They're, they're saying something and then this, something strikes it. It's like, that's not true, you know? And I knew it's not true.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Sometimes I literally heard words, like people's thoughts. And, um, um, I prayed after I drowned at age six. A lot of weird stuff was happening to me afterwards. So I prayed at age seven to take all my spiritual gifts. I asked God. I said, please stop allowing me to know things that I'm not supposed to know. You know, and, uh, because it didn't really give me peace, you know? So I didn't want any of the spiritual God. I didn't, I said, and please stop, um, making it to where I can't get up when I wake up. You know, I didn't know the word sleep paralysis, but I knew I was stuck when I wake up a lot.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  I didn't want any of it. I didn't want any of it.

• 16:11Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, No Prophet does.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:14Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, that's Jonah Fled, right?

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:17Mayim Bialik?

  Job, right? Every great, you know, challenging set of information.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just confused me. And I, and what I said to God was, if it's not clear, keep it. I don't want to know. I don't want anything. I have to interpret just clear. If I don't understand it, I don't want to hear it, you know? And most of my life is with spirit is, uh, if I don't understand it, I don't really pay attention to it. And for me, the point is to ground it. I want to ground it. I want to understand it. And, um, some of it, some of that tendency, I think, comes from just memories of, of previous lives even to where I understood this stuff. And it's like now this life doesn't center certain spiritual knowledge to where it's like, I'm just remembering it now. It's not a, it's because it's not being presented in this time in the way that it was in older times.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  And, uh, so I remember stuff and, um, I have to ground it. I don't, I don't like to just say stuff that I hear, um, because it sometimes ain't grounded, you know? But I really do have a mystical type of experience, but my orientation more is, um, I was so traumatized by the mystical stuff when I was a kid to where my adult orientation is receive the mystical information, make it make sense, like integrate it and ground it versus receiving information and then screaming from the rooftops. You know? Yeah, because you will get judged. You have to integrate information, mystical information into the time that you're in, or you will be a pariah.

• 17:46Mayim Bialik?

  What this makes me think of is when we spoke to Dr. Pasulka, Diane Walsh Pasulka, who talks about how, you know, maybe the language of our times, for example, talks about aliens.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:58Mayim Bialik?

  But maybe thousands of years ago, we talked about angels, right? It's like whatever the language is that we try and like wrap our head around, like what if it's the same God, the same spirit?

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, like even with alien talk, I know we got away from the Indies stuff. But even with the alien talk, I, um, there, I mean, some of the words from ancient texts, it has nothing to do with alien, you know, it's lords. Some of them are very specific, too, though, and it could be alien, like sky people, people from the sky. Like, but the, but we've turned it into a lot of imaginative stuff. And, and a lot of the translations, um, they're just not, they're not accurate. I mean, we've gone, uh, this, this information has been available to humanity for the, at least 12,500 years, you know?

• 18:47Speaker 00

  We just tell bad story. We turn them into personal trauma narratives and turn each other against each other instead of assimilating the information back into a coherent, one humanity story, which it was, in my opinion, in the beginning. The oldest stories didn't separate us from each other. It was humanity was who was being spoken to, you know? And that's my orientation, especially after the second in the that I remember, that it was oneness. Like, there is, the things that even angered me in my life that led to my death stopped mattering because those things were based upon the assumption that I am something other than you. And versus we are a part of a system and we are one in it.

• 19:30Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so let's go back. You said a lot of things started happening after this drowning. Can you give us some examples of some other experiences you had and how, you know, little you made sense of them?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  I was seeing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like, the nuclear bombs exploding, and it felt like I was there. And my mother would say that my body would go stiff and I would just be repeating over and over, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die." But in those, in that state, for me, I was there. Like, I was in this place, seeing explosions, hearing screams, and it was scary.

• 20:07Mayim Bialik?

  Was it something you had read or seen about?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  I used to think that the only reason I even had that memory was because I used to read a lot and it was, I read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But my mother said that you were going into, like, a seizure while you was, and in that seizures, when I was having these memories, it wasn't reading a book, you know? It's likely that I read about it because I read everything as a kid. I read dictionaries, Bible, encyclopedias, I read everything. And, but, being, seeing that, seeing Hiroshima and Nag, I don't know whether it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I just knew that I was in Japan.

• 20:43Mayim Bialik?

  And it was a nuclear.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  And there was a bomb blowing up and it messed me up. At age 12, 13, I started researching nuclear energy. I was wondering why we didn't choose thorium over uranium, you know? And it bothered me. And it's like, the only reason I even thought about this was because of the, after I drowned at age six, this memory was stuck in me, you know? And another thing I was seeing was, as a child, I hated seeing dead animals in the road. I always felt like there was a better way for us to create roads and that was in, more in harmony with nature, you know? And create cities more in harmony with nature. I hated it, the way that we just, I hated riding by a big deer and people not even look at it.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  And I'm watching it the whole way, and I'm heartbroken, you know? And I was having visions after drowning of seeing dead bodies on the side of the road, and it was the future, and it felt like America. And people were driving by with the same indifference. And it crushed me as a child. So by the time I turned six or seven years old, about seven years old, I checked out of this place. I did not want to participate in this at all. My mother loved me and protected me. That is the only reason I think I probably didn't take my life even as a child, because I thought about not being here a lot as a child. I didn't want to be here, you know? But I think my mother kept me from being a criminal because the anger that I felt

• 22:09Speaker 00

  was extreme, and she kept me from killing myself, you know? And, but, I saw the KKK marching up and down the street at age five, up until probably seven, that's when it became more rare to see it. And, and that angered me. Like, I saw, looking up at my family, screaming at them and seeing them screaming at my family and everybody on the sidewalk and them in the street, marching down the main street and police officers keeping us from each other. It's just violent. And I remember, as a child, just looking at everybody. I'm small, I'm looking up at everybody like, like, this is crazy, but this must be normal? Like, this is, this is normal? Like, we supposed to hate each other like this? You know?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  I absorbed it all, and I was probably better at hating than anybody, you know? Because I terrorized people because I didn't want to be terrorized. So I would go into places carrying this energy of hate, you know? I did not want to be bothered, you know? So I would rather people be shaken by me than for them to think that they could shake me, you know? So the anger was just so extreme. It was, I had digestive issues for years, lost my gallbladder, and then that's, shortly after that, I had hypertension and then I had a heart attack. But I was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, you know? So my heart always beat hard. And then I get hypertension from anger and the heart, the valve exploded, it ripped.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  And when it ripped, it ripped into the heart, and they had to do the ventral procedure where they replaced it.

• 23:43Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, very emotional talking to you. It's very, very, you know, it's a very powerful journey. You know, you have all of these, you know, mystical, supernatural, you know, paranormal, you know, kind of things happening. Was the anger, the persona, you know, that you describe, was that a way to try and keep some of this at bay? Because it seems like you were given an enormous responsibility spiritually when you came into this life, right? So I wonder, did those things keep happening to you or did it morph more into physical ailments and anger? Like, where did the magic go?

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think some of the anger was to, because I wanted to be left alone, you know? So some of it was just demonstrative, just to, so I could just come and go as I pleased without a whole lot of being bothered, you know? I had, the friends that I had were the friends, the only friends that I really wanted to have. I didn't really like people thinking that they can approach me and be my friend. Like, I was not open to that, you know? But the people that I liked, I liked, and I wanted them around. But anyone else, it was like, you know, it was disruptive to me. Like, and the way that I sometimes said it is that people were noisy, and I didn't like the noise, you know?

• 25:09Speaker 00

  So I would try to stay away from a lot of people. And the people that I resonated with mostly were people whose energy was predictable, like, I understood it, or it was quiet, you know? It can be noisy if I understood it. But if I don't understand it, I didn't want noisy energy around me at all.

• 25:28Mayim Bialik?

  From a kind of medical perspective, right? It's so interesting, like, I wouldn't, you know, there's so many poetic ways to describe your heart, right? You know, you were born with a different kind of heart. That's your, you know, your window to the world, right, is your heart. And what you're describing is that the stress, right, that this world gave you, you know, you had a predisposition, right? You had a biological, physiological predisposition, and because of your experiences, right, it puts strain on this part of you that otherwise might not have had that strain.

• 26:08Mayim Bialik?

  Describe, because you had a lot of experience with, you described other ailments, but the day that you had a heart attack, you thought it was just like your back. Like, take us to that. So how old were you? Take us to that day. You know, had anything else been going on that was interesting?

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was 39. And I turned 40 that year. But I was leaving work, a normal day. I was teaching IT courses at a, at a, like, it's like a vocational technical college. Yeah. And I was leaving that day, and I remember like yesterday, there was a lady that had, I turned in some paperwork and I went back to my class and she was still sitting there. So as I was walking out, I asked her if she needed a ride. And she said, "No, my ride, just contacting me, they're close by, thank you." And I walked out, I said, "Okay." And I walked out. And then this guy, I don't remember his name, but I used to like him. And he said, "See you tomorrow, Mr. Williamson."

• 27:11Speaker 00

  And he was so happy to say that, like, he was excited when he said it. And I looked at him and I said, "See you tomorrow." And I thought I was gonna see him tomorrow, but I left there and died.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  So I remember that because it was like, I'll see you tomorrow. And I, and I, and I literally went, left, went home. I, I felt, when I said, I see you tomorrow, I stepped off the curb and I felt the sting for the first time in my heart. Because when the heart valve ripped, seven days prior it ripped. And I walked around with a ripped heart, ripped aortic valve for seven days. And then I had a heart attack.

• 27:45Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so you go, so you feel a sting.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:47Mayim Bialik?

  Something's been going on, but nothing big enough.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  The pain, the pain initially, when I felt the rip was in my back and in my shoulder. And it literally felt like my shoulder was falling off. So I was walking around for like three days like this. And then I integrated the pain to where it was almost normal. And, uh, and then on that seventh day, um, it's, things went awry.

• 28:09Mayim Bialik?

  So you went home from work?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  I went home from work because I was, uh, I was thinking that it could have been related to the gallbladder stuff.

• 28:15Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  So I was like, eh, you know, my heart's beating funny. I'm trying to catch my breath and I said, maybe I can get, I can get home. This is, I can get home. So I'm getting home, I'm breathing hard, I'm still feeling, for the first time, I'm feeling it in my chest now at that point. And I'm like, okay, this actually is my heart. And, um, I get home and I'm still not fully convinced that I'm having a heart attack or that this is an issue. So I'm like, maybe if I eat a sandwich or something, you know?

• 28:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Sandwiches solve most things.

• 28:41Mayim Bialik?

  Feed it.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I, I make a sandwich and, uh, I'm like halfway finished with the sandwich.

• 28:46Mayim Bialik?

  Are you living alone at the time?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  No, my son, my son, my son's mother and I, uh, we're living together and, um, she was working from home. And, uh, so I just yelled up to her, I was like, I need to go to the emergency room. I think I'm having a heart attack. Luckily, she was working from home, you know? Cause my dumb self would have probably figured like, let me just sit here and breathe deeply and it'll stop, you know? But she took me to the emergency room and, uh, when I got there, I, I was very close to death at that point. And the guy was trying to get me to sign paperwork and I, I cussed him out. Like, my hands were shaking, I was like, what kind of paperwork you think I'm gonna be able to sign? I said, I'm dying, man, I'm in a heart attack. I cussed him out, I didn't say that, those words are nice compared to what I said to him. But, um, but, but as soon as I started cussing him out, the doors opened and a gurney came out.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  So he had already called the people and I apologized to him later because I felt, uh, after the NDE, I felt like that behavior was just terrible.

• 29:43Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm not, you, you can say, you can use whatever curse words you want. I'm curious, when you're a, when you are actively dying, what are the things that you yell at the dude at the front desk of a hospital?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Like, like, I.

• 30:00Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning you were at a level of like anger that was, right?

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Extreme. I was like, the fuck are you putting these papers in front of me for? I'm not, I can't sign anything. You know, I'm just shaking, I'm in a bad state.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  I was angry. And, uh, and he looked and he just, he didn't even, really, he kind of just, still had to pay, and the doors opened and I, he didn't care, you know, it, it didn't bother him. But, uh, cause even when I apologized to him, he was like, man, people come in here dying. He said, I'm not gonna judge that, what you, what you say in that state, you know?

• 30:31Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so the gurney comes out.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  And I, less than 20 seconds after being on the gurney, I was gone. I remember getting on it, going through those first doors and then seeing a curve. And I'm taking this curve and I see the doors, the double doors that I end up, that I go through for where they defibrillate me and all this stuff. But, um, I see those doors, but, but I remember, I knew, I just felt tired. So I, I remember rolling over on my left side and I put my hands up like that. And I was like, the last thought I had before I closed my eyes, well, this is gonna be some amazing sleep.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  And I, and for me, in that moment, what it felt like was I went to sleep. But as soon as I closed my eyes, uh, nothing stopped. Like, nothing stopped.

• 31:12Mayim Bialik?

  What do you mean?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Like, I kept experiencing, like, I closed my eyes like I was going to sleep. But people, I could still see the people, but it wasn't, it was blackness, but I could see dots of light where the people were standing. I could still hear everything, but it was like underwater.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Nothing really stopped. Like, I was still experiencing myself inside of a body, but it felt like the body, like I'm my IT guy, it felt like the body was in a shutdown process. And everything was strange, like the, like the first scene, uh, well, once I got inside of the room, um, through those doors, I started coming out of my body and I could see from the above now.

• 31:49Mayim Bialik?

  Had this happened to you before?

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Not like that, like the dreams, like the lucid dream.

• 31:53Mayim Bialik?

  Right, but what does that feel like to, like, what do you remember of leaving your body?

• 31:57Speaker 00

  It was almost instant and, uh, and it was seamless. I, I could, where I, I was watching them, uh, from what was like a, this angle, cause I was laying in the gurney. I was watching them that way and I could see the dots of light. I couldn't see people, it was just dots of light where the people were. And then boom, I was looking down and I could see the people were, where the dots of light were, where the dots of light were. So I knew that that's, oh, those dots of light were where the people were standing, you know?

• 32:25Mayim Bialik?

  And you're thinking this whole time?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the first thought I had when I came out of my body, it was like a human thought even. It was like, ah, so this is how it happens. And, um, and then that went away and then I, and then I looked at, I couldn't really see my body because there were so many people around me, but I had no interest in my body. I was looking at everything around, the people, watching them defibrillate, watching everything. And, um, uh, I heard a phrase that, he's dead, you used to live there. And, uh, his body, his mind and his ego is dead. And I responded, uh, same as when I was a kid. And he said, touch the, if you could touch the bottom, I said, well, what am I now? You know? Because I'm still experiencing, you know? And, uh, and all of the words came in at the same time.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  It was like light, uh, love, consciousness, awareness, soul, spirit. Um, and, uh, I understood it. And, uh, the next phrase that I heard was, you killed yourself with your personality. And I completely understood that. And, uh, and I remember having a thought like, uh, it was like a really brief thought, but it was like, uh, dang, you blew it. It wasn't, it wasn't like sadness. It was like realizing that I had this opportunity and I didn't take it, but I'm in a perfect state now, so there's no woe is me. It's more like, dang, I just missed that. That was a life that I could have lived, that I spent the bulk of it just mad at the entire planet and not wanting to be there.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  And it's like, I felt like I wasted that life.

• 33:56Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:26Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:31Speaker 00

  I watched the guy defibrillate me.

• 35:34Mayim Bialik?

  Like, were people freaking out? What's it like when someone dies in the room?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  There was a woman sitting in the back of the room in the left and she was holding her face like this, like she was either new, um, but she wasn't involved in the resuscitation.

• 35:47Mayim Bialik?

  Like a nurse or something?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Maybe, but she just sat, she sat there, maybe she was the person to record the time of death, I don't know. But she just sat there, but she was distraught. And I kept trying to talk to her, like I literally was in her face, in my mind, I was in her face, trying to communicate with her, she couldn't hear me or see me. But I was trying to explain to her that this experience was beautiful and I had never experienced nothing that's beautiful and there's no pain, there's no confusion, like you shouldn't be sad. You know, he's dead, that body is dead, but I'm right here, I'm right here talking to you. Like, I, I wanted her to hear me. And, uh, and I almost feel, I, they know almost, like I knew that if I had stayed there long enough, I would have learned how to talk to her. I would have learned how to make her hear me. That's what I truly felt, like I could have made her hear me. And, uh, and the guy holding the defibrillator pads, he was, I hear these thoughts, these were the thoughts.

• 36:33Mayim Bialik?

  You could hear people's thoughts?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was blaming himself for the whole thing. Like, it was like, if I, if this guy dies, it's my fault. It's like, and I, I was trying to tell him that if I don't come back to this body, it's my choice, it's not your fault. I wanted him to know that it's nothing, it ain't got nothing to do with him, you know?

• 36:51Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, let him keep trying.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And there were other people, right? And none of them, those people seemed to be, the way that I felt it at first, when I came back, the way I described it, was they just didn't have, they weren't emotionally invested, you know? But the way that I look at it now was, they weren't emotional, they were just focused on saving me and they saved me. So if they had been in there shook and, shaken up like the woman holding her face, and even the guy with the defibrillator pads, I think he was keeping his cool, but he was, he was shook up. But if those other people had been as shook up as those two, I probably wouldn't have made it, you know? So those people that I initially thought were not caring, they were just focused and there was no huge emotional signature.

• 37:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  You know, so I didn't, I didn't have to pay attention to them, you know?

• 37:38Mayim Bialik?

  That's interesting, just as a, as a side note, you know, it takes all different kinds of people, right? And when I look at, you know, people who, you know, firefighters, right? People who run towards a tragedy or, or even just everyday people, right? There are certain people who have the capacity to not have, like, for me, like, everything is difficult, you don't want me being a firefighter. You barely want me like making breakfast in the morning, you know?

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, but as a neuroscientist, though.

• 38:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, but it's

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Is that the amygdala?

• 38:10Mayim Bialik?

  No, well, well, I think it's funny because I wanted to go to medical school and I wanted to be a surgeon.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:16Mayim Bialik?

  But I, I did not have steady hands.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Mayim Bialik?

  And I think part of it was that I did not have that personality.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:23Mayim Bialik?

  And that's why when you meet neurosurgeons and fighter pilots, right? They've got a very like specific personality because you have to be able to regulate that. But what's interesting to me and other, other people we've spoken to who have had NDEs have talked about is in that state that you were in, you were able to pick up on emotional signatures. You could almost sense like intensity, right? And where to take attention.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Kind of even how in my life, how I chose friends, it was way more intense out of the body. It was, um, that lady's sadness, her being distraught that I was dying. And I, when I was out of my body, she didn't look how she looked when I came back to my body. She looked like my aunt, who was in a, in a hospice setting at the time that I was having a heart attack, who had had several heart attacks. So she had been back and forth probably several times. And she was sitting there and I was loving her, like this is my aunt. And, uh, and my aunt is my mother's twin sister. She died in, uh, 2017 and later that year after I had my, uh, well, was it that year?

• 39:35Speaker 00

  She died that year, I believe. Yeah. Um, uh, she was like a second mother. Uh, I loved her like, uh, like, it's like a mother.

• 39:45Mayim Bialik?

  And that's who appeared to you.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  That's who she seemed to be when I was above looking at her. And, uh, that would have made me want to come back, you know? Uh, if it was, if I had saw the young lady that I didn't know, I probably would have tried to console her still, but I wouldn't have cared to come back. Like I, my aunt, my aunt convinced me, I think, to keep my attention there.

• 40:04Mayim Bialik?

  So you're watching them defibrillate. You're watching this whole thing. You're kind of interacting with this woman and you're hearing all the thoughts. So what ended up happening was a series of minutes, right? That you were watching. Did you have any of the sort of classic NDE things that we talk about? Was there a tunnel? You know, you mentioned that there was love, right? You had that kind of like love spirit connection. What else happened in that time?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  There was no tunnel. I, I was watching all of the things happening in the emergency room, trying to communicate with the people. And then, um, at some point I just kind of look up. And when I looked up, I shot through, it's like I just shot up through space. It's like, I saw the ceiling for a quick second and then I was in space. I was in a void, it is extremely black dense area. But I knew it was not on this planet. I knew I was in space. And, um, this void felt like, uh, it was dense blackness, like a tangible, like I was moving through this blackness. It felt like velvet, um, as I was moving through it. And it was communicating with me the entire time, like whispers, voices, uh, images in my periphery.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  But when I turned my attention directly to the images that were in my periphery, they disappeared like smoke. And I understood that, like I, I said to myself, I said, uh, ah, everything that I saw that amazed me, I said, ah.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  I said, ah, so, um, everything is here, but nothing is here. And I knew it. I knew that this was like a source of, of physical realities, like a, uh, it feeds this, it feeds physical realities. It, it even is connected to other dimensions and it feeds from there. It pulls from the, I don't understand all of this. I'm not a scientist, I'm an IT guy, so I don't get to come here and start telling people about things that I don't, that I don't have a lived experience, you know? That's why I say I have to ground things and try to speak about it with people who are experts and who are science.

• 42:01Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, look, I mean, you're the ex, I mean, you're the expert in you and your experience.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:05Mayim Bialik?

  But the, the thing that I instantly was drawn to is what you're describing is the best explanation that rabbis and priests and ministers tried to give to explain what nothingness is before God created something. And the description in the Old Testament is, you know, how could there be nothing, right? Meaning like, how do you describe nothingness? What could nothing be that gives rise to something? And if something's nothing, you can't describe it. But what you're describing is like the best explanation that I've heard. It's a dense, you know, blackness that has no place or space and you can't, you know, like, you witnessed something source, like that's the best that I can understand.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  It was beautiful, like it, it felt like home. It felt like, um, for me, I didn't want to leave the void. But at some point I started floating out of the void and I still was fixated on it. I didn't, my attention didn't go anywhere else but on the void. When I came out and, um, every, every idea that ended in my mind, the void responded. It would be twirls and colors. And if I had a question, the clarity would be in curl, in the void, like I would instantly understand it.

• 43:12Mayim Bialik?

  You were interacting with it.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. It, and as a child, 18, 19 years old, I drew this picture of black holes in a series. Because in my mind, I was like, they can't be random. Black holes have to communicate, they have to interact with each other. And, um, I said, there are small black holes that may be mobile, but these big ones are fixed and they, and they work together. Like eight or nine years later, I read a paper from NASA that pretty much confirmed everything that I was trying to explain with this picture that I drew. And, and I have the picture that I drew. In my mind, these are black holes. I'm showing where the event horizon is and I'm showing how the, the energies from each other black hole interacts at the event horizon.

• 43:51Mayim Bialik?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about that.

• 43:53Jonathan Cohen?

  You're in this void and you mentioned that you put your attention, your consciousness back on yourself in the hospital room and then that's when they revive you.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think that it's your attention that reanimated you? Or do you feel like you became reanimated and then it sucked your, your consciousness back?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  That's a great question because the best word to describe what I felt like I was when I was in space is attention. And I've said this a lot. I believe that, uh, you can say words like awareness, consciousness, soul, all this stuff. But in that state, the, the attention was what guided the experience. Wherever I put my attention, that's where my experience happened. I understood everything. If, once I said, ah, the distance between me and what I looked at disappeared. Like, uh, the movie, I always say this because it's, this is the only way I can explain it. Uh, the movie The Grudge, when the girl comes out of this well and she comes towards you and they make the distance between her and you telescopically disappear. The distance between me and anything that I looked at and said, ah, telescopically disappeared.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  I don't know how much space I was covering, but if, no matter how far away it was, it would be like three little shakes and I would be there.

• 45:10Jonathan Cohen?

  The description of how you can move through time and space without the limits of spacetime.

• 45:16Mayim Bialik?

  You could say it's, his consciousness was there.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  I traveled, that's all I wanted to do was travel. And I, I saw the light. I didn't want to go to the light.

• 45:24Mayim Bialik?

  What'd the light look like?

• 45:25Speaker 00

  A big star.

• 45:26Mayim Bialik?

  Like yellow, white, red?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Right, brilliant white, brilliant white.

• 45:30Mayim Bialik?

  Sparkly?

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Very. It was, it was like a star. It looked like a star from far away.

• 45:38Mayim Bialik?

  Ah.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  The light for me was extremely far away, but I knew it was the light. Cause I couldn't stop looking at it and it pulled me towards it if I didn't travel. If I, I wanted to travel, so I just kept moving around. But if I stopped, I would float that way. I didn't want to float that way, so I just kept traveling. I wanted to learn. I wanted to experience. I wanted to see, and that's all I did was travel. I saw asteroids, I saw everything and I wanted to understand it. I saw an asteroid, it looks like an asteroid that NASA has taken images of. It has a band in the middle of it. I saw it and I moved around it and looked at it and I saw an image of NASA and it looks like the exact same asteroid. When I came out of the void, to me, that's what it was. It was a black hole, in my opinion.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  And the reason why I say that is because space was black, but the void was blacker than space. And there were more than one. Like I could look out into space and see several of these voids in different places. And, um, so I understood that it wasn't just one void, like, you know? But this void somehow seemed to be very connected to this experience. And, um, and the reason why I say that is because when I came out of the void, there was a star forming region there. And, um, I didn't know the word, I didn't, when I looked at it, I didn't say, ah, that's a star forming region. When I looked at it, I said, ah, and that was it. And then the, the space between me had disappeared and I was there. But I was in the, kind of like in the outside in the clouds.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  And these clouds were like, uh, dark red down, like radiated down to pink to white, then dark blue, radiated down to light blue to, uh, white. And then white clouds. But in the middle of these clouds was faint forming lights, like, and I knew that these were stars. And, and in my, and in my awareness there, it was like, these are babies and I shouldn't disrupt it. It was like a nursery and I was, I was not going to go. The way that I did with everything else is that when I said, ah, and the space disappeared, it was almost like, just, I zoomed up to it really close. There I didn't. I stopped at the, the edge of where the stars were forming and it felt like a nursery. And like I wasn't supposed to go in there and disturb that. So I watched it for a while. It was beautiful to just see the stars forming. And, uh, and then I looked up and I saw that asteroid.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Uh, the name that NASA seems to have given this asteroid is Benu. It looks like the asteroid that I saw.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  The place that I was at, I referred to it as, when I was out of my body, I said, ah, so this is where stars are born. The place that our ancestors talked about, even as far, even older than Egypt, they say that this is a star there called Dneb. It's the brightest star in the Cygnus constellation.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  A lot of ancient monuments are designed to where Dneb is visible, you know.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  I was in this place that seemed to be that area, Cygnus constellation. Just a month or two ago, I found out about Cygnus, and Cygnus is referred to as the nursery of the stars.

• 48:31Mayim Bialik?

  Love it.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And this is a place where they, a lot of ancient cultures say the soul travels after it leaves here. A lot of cultures, not just Egyptian, not just, even global, it's the culture up in Turkey, I forgot.

• 48:45Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, okay.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  It's old. They say it's even older than Egypt. They have monuments that are directly pointing to Dneb.

• 48:53Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I was thinking of also like the pyramids like in Tikal in Guatemala, right? Like all the, so many of them are astral, like astronomy based, and yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that region is important. It's the Milky Way, it's part of the Milky Way, Native Americans speak about it, it's every culture speaks about it. So, not to even try to make myself seem like somehow I'm special and I went to the place, you know, but the description of it seems to be exactly what our ancestors speak about.

• 49:19Mayim Bialik?

  So, what's striking to me is that, and this happens, you know, when we talk to people who have left their bodies in this way, this is a lot more than five minutes of information. And like, to me, this is one of the most powerful indicators that something is happening when we die, right? For people who come back, because whatever experience this is that you're recounting, it takes more time than you were actually gone to experience it, right? This happened with Elizabeth Krone. She was gone for a couple minutes, but she said she was told it was two weeks. And the experiences she had took up two weeks of time.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and even, there's even more, like I, like even when I was watching the light, I realized at some point, and this is when I was getting resuscitated, but I realized at some point, when I took my attention from the light, which was up into the right, back down into the emergency room, which was down into the left, that my attention went through me. So I would go like this. And when I did that, my attention went through a orb of light. And I, it was fascinating to me. It was one of those odd things. So I did it like four times. I went back up, I went back down, I went back up. And I went through myself each time. And I was just a glowing orb of light. And I don't know how big I was, but in the context of space, I felt like a nanoparticle,

• 50:45Speaker 00

  you know, and, but there was no anxiety. Like I've tried to visualize myself in space as this orb of light, and it just feels like a lightning bug in a vast blackness. It's like it's alone, but there's no anxiety. There is no alone. You are one with everything. People speak about missing family, or some people say, well, I would like to see my mother as my mother, not an orb of light, you know, because that's, that's not personal, you know.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  The experiences that you have outside of the body are as full as they need to be. You don't have, like the human idea of missing someone is not possible when you are one with reality.

• 51:29Mayim Bialik?

  What you're describing is that we're souls, and we're placed into bodies, and presumably not just one, doesn't happen once, like, you know, the universe has got some.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  I think it happens a lot.

• 51:39Mayim Bialik?

  Right, probably happens a lot. So the, the people that you think of as your parents are the people who contributed the DNA that formed the vessel that makes the body that your soul was put into. But like, that's not really, right? Like, that's not really who any of us are, right? Like, I call that my mom, or I call that my dad, but we're all like souls, and we've been placed here in that orientation, but there's nothing to say that in another lifetime, I wouldn't be the parent, and that soul wouldn't be the child.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was five years old, and I asked my mom, six maybe, I said, if you died at age 70, and I died at 97, would I be older than you in heaven? I was like six or seven years old, like five, I think, when I asked that question. But, but to me, it's, it's, it's pretty scientific to me. Like, I don't buy into a lot of the explanations that are out there about how reincarnation works, about how the between works, about how we choose, and, and, I, I think we choose our next life now, with our awareness now. We're choosing, and if you are aware in this, in choosing now, the, all of the process

• 52:53Speaker 00

  in between, everything is, in my opinion, is something that you've kind of laid out. And it would be more of a, it would just be a more graceful transition. But if you, when you leave here, if all you have ever did was immerse yourself in belief, and that's it, no real understanding of your autonomy or your agency in this experience, then you'd probably just be reincarnated. And that's fine, that's not, there's no punishment. Because I've heard people speak about, like samsara, you know, illusion of a cycle of, you know, birth and re, death and rebirth, as if it's some punishment. If, if I'm here, and I'm lost in this, and I think, I'm addicted to something even,

• 53:38Speaker 00

  and I die addicted to something, I died wanting to come back here. That's what that means. If you still long for things when you leave here, you want to come back, if you've reconciled all of that, then you can choose differently when you leave here. But if your spirit is so stuck in this experience, the other parts of you are going to return back to this experience.

• 53:59Mayim Bialik?

  The Zen Buddhist notion is you will repeat it. You will repeat it until you escape it, you know?

• 54:05Speaker 00

  But to me, it's not escape.

• 54:06Mayim Bialik?

  I meant escaping any loop of suffering, that there's a place, right?

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, but there is no other loop I'd rather be in than this. And I died hating this place. I died because I hated this place. But when I came back, none of those things were, none of those thoughts, none of the attachment was there. So there is no better loop to be in than this. So if you are in this loop and you love tacos, just don't ever let go of the love of tacos, and you'll come back and continue to have experiences with them. If you love your aunt, and you leave here, you're going to come back and have experiences with aunts that you love, you know? Like, our attention creates the experience, period. Our experience, our attention, in my opinion, creates the, the content of the, of the NDE. If, all Christians tend to have Christian NDEs, you know?

• 54:55Speaker 00

  They all see Jesus, and they all think I'm the devil, because I didn't see Jesus, you know? And I get a lot, you know, grief from Christians, because I don't say God, I don't say.

• 55:03Mayim Bialik?

  Don't Christians have something better to do than pick on someone who had an NDE?

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Boy, it's, that's, I, it's rough. Like, there are times when I'm literally, like, I'm not the devil. I'm not the devil. You know, I'm having to assure them that I'm not the devil, you know? Like, I, I just, I'm just, I was an angry guy, that overwhelmed my nervous system, my body and my organs, and I died. Like, in, in that process, I, my attachment to the things that killed me dropped, including identity, all of the philosophies, all of the orientations. If it's not about helping us understand this reality, and emphasizing hope and responsibility, I don't want to hear it. I don't want, it's just storytelling, it's bad storytelling. Anything that's about anxiety and fear, I don't, it ain't, if you, if I've died, there's what else is there to fear here?

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely nothing. So if there's nothing for me to fear here, then no story of anxiety and fear, that especially if it's projected onto another group of people or person, is going to ever sit well with me, you know? I'm not going to fear the people you want me to fear. They're me.

• 56:06Jonathan Cohen?

  You said something before you started to describe the entire NDE, that your anger killed you, that your personality killed you.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but initially, it was digestive issues, not having any internal peace, mental peace, you just disrupt normal processes. I started off with digestive issues, lost my gallbladder. I went years with, I had, when they removed my gallbladder, I had two stones, this, the size of ping pong balls. And one of them was in the neck of the gallbladder, so the pain was.

• 56:39Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, God.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Like, I would scream, and all I could do was scream sometimes for three hours at a time, and then it would go away, and I'd be like, okay, let's go back to my life. I would never go to the doctor. So, the last time that happened, like eight hours straight of just throwing up, screaming, blood pressure spikes, about to die, you know? And I went to the emergency room, and the doctor came in, and she said, yeah, we got to get your gallbladder out. And that was the first time I saw her, and it made me so mad. I was like, you've not run any tests? You walk through the door, you're talking about cutting me open and taking out an organ? I was like, let's do some tests. I went and did the tests, and she was like. The surgery is scheduled tomorrow, or like a couple of days later. We gotta get it out. She just knew, man.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  And it was, I thought she was special for how she came in that way and was so calm and just knew.

• 57:31Mayim Bialik?

  So some of the anger originally manifested kind of in those physiological ways.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Very much so.

• 57:38Mayim Bialik?

  Stomach, you know, these are not uncommon.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and blood pressure. I would go to work. After I had my gallbladder removed, I had stitches that were coming under. My blood pressure was so high that I was bleeding through. I would wear three shirts sometimes just to see it, to keep the blood. And I was bleeding through the stitches because my blood pressure. When I got to work, I would take my blood pressure because I knew at that point I was dealing with hypertension. I would take my blood pressure when I left home or when I was about to leave home and it would be normal. Like 120 over 180, in that range. And I'd get to work and as soon as I walked in, it would be 240 over. I would sit out at my desk and it would be 240 over 160.

• 58:18Mayim Bialik?

  Dumb question, was your work particularly stressful or distasteful to you?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  It was white people. I hated white people that much that my body reacted that way around them.

• 58:29Mayim Bialik?

  They can be really stupid, so I get it.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  In hindsight, everybody is stupid, you know. And then when you look at, like, I was mad about colonialism and slavery and things like that. But slavery was a rich man's game. Very few white families could even afford slaves. So that's not a white thing, that's a rich white thing. How many white people make decisions on who, where we go to colonize? Like, less than 1%. So it was like I was projecting the decision makers, the toxicity that I felt for greedy, insatiable people onto the entire race of people. But every person you meet is not that way. And they would not, and most people don't support a lot of the policy that we're even seeing now.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  So it's like there is no monolith in any group. So to just throw all of a group into one umbrella is always gonna be, to me, unmeasured.

• 59:26Mayim Bialik?

  I think it's worth mentioning, though. Were you aware of feeling, you know, generational trauma? Were you aware of bearing, you know, kind of a historical place that you were arriving in?

• 59:40Speaker 00

  My biological grandfather was a sharecropper. My uncles and aunts worked on that sharecropper's farm. So for me, my cousins and I are the first generation in our family effectively out of slavery. And so the awareness is there. The stories that you hear about growing up on a sharecropper's farm, they're not good stories and they're not gonna make you feel good about a group of people who made you feel that, you know, put you through that, you know? So my grandmother would share a lot of stories and it's just, all it did was make me more angry, you know? And it justified, like, I went through, I was reading books about the colonization of Africa, colonization of this.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  And instead of saying that the leaders of these nations or the people who are running these nations, planning these things, it was all white people are colonizers, all white people are this. And it's just, what I learned when I died is that if you say something that's not measured and you can't put, like, a friend of mine who had an NDE that helped me ground, it helped me integrate mine. If it wasn't for him, I probably would have committed suicide after my NDE even. It was a guy named Zachariah. He had an NDE as well and I was a kind of complimentary NDEs even. He, just talking to him, it really helped me understand, like, the importance of, like, having virtues.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Like, some things that happen to people who have NDEs is that the, we have a different thing. It's a different framework sometimes, you know, guiding our behavior. But if you don't have a framework guiding your behavior and you don't have a working amygdala, you can do things to hurt people without understanding it, you know? I know my amygdala got downregulated. I know that's why my personality changed so drastically. I can't, I can't point fingers at people anymore. I can't, I can't blame anybody. Because one thing I know that as soon as I point the finger, I lose agency. I can't fix the problem anymore if I put it on someone else.

• 1:01:47Mayim Bialik?

  We're gonna hit pause here on our conversation with David Williamson. But part two is everything that happens once he wakes up you do not want to miss. What happened when he opened his eyes? How he began telling his story? What religion gets wrong about spirituality? And how his NDE informs his entire life as a parent and as a citizen?

• 1:02:10Jonathan Cohen?

  He talks about past lives, angels, and psychedelics in part two. You don't want to miss it. If you want more content like this and conversations about the episodes, check out MyMBiAlex Breakdown on Substack.

• 1:02:24Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.