Atheist Dies on the Operating Table, Meets Her Spirit Guide, and Sent Back With 12 Messages to Share on Love, Connections & Why We Are Never Alone | Nancy Rynes

What if time isn’t real, multiple timelines exist simultaneously, and your consciousness can leave your body? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Nancy Rynes (scientist, geologist, archaeologist, artist, inspirational speaker, and author of Awakenings from the Light: 12 Life Lessons from a Near Death Experience) reveals the unbelievable story of her near death experience (NDE) and the profound revelations that changed everything she believed about life, death, consciousness, and what happens after we die. After being hit by a car while riding her bike, Nancy describes watching the accident from outside her body, experiencing a split in consciousness between her ordinary “ego” awareness and what she calls her higher self, and encountering a mysterious woman who helped her at the scene, yet has never been identified to this day. During surgery, Nancy says she awakened somewhere completely unlike the physical world: a beautiful, ethereal hillside filled with tendrils of pulsating energy. But it wasn't a physical place at all. Nancy came to understand it as a kind of “construct.” As an atheist, her first question upon realizing she may have died was why wasn’t she in hell? Then came her encounter with a spirit guide, who told Nancy she had to return to “earth school”, something she desperately did not want to do. Nancy remembers an agreement she believes she made before birth: a “soul contract” that included being born into her particular family and undergoing specific personal transformations in order to fulfill her soul’s purpose. She also shares the 12 life lessons she says emerged from her NDE, including her profound belief that “God is love” and completely all-encompassing and all-inclusive, and that we are never truly alone. She explains why she believes energy levels may be the only thing separating our reality from the other realm, and recounts a powerful life review in which she experienced how her actions had positively or negatively affected other people. Her experience gave her a radically different perspective on the enormous impact of seemingly insignificant choices, including small, random acts of kindness that may affect someone far more deeply than we realize. Nancy also opens up about what happened after she returned to her body: the physical and emotional recovery, the struggle to readjust to ordinary reality, and the depression she experienced because she desperately wanted to return to the spirit realm she had experienced. At the same time, she discovered new creative abilities and gifts that she hadn't experienced before. Nancy describes remembering two of her friends dying before her NDE—only to discover that both friends were still alive when she returned. This bizarre experience became part of why she believes different timelines can exist at the same time and why she now views time as an illusion. Her experiences may have challenged everything she once believed, but Nancy wasn't always spiritually open. As a small child, she was deeply spiritual and believes she may have experienced an earlier NDE at age 4, which may have primed her for remote viewing later in life. Raised Catholic, she nevertheless questioned and rejected many of the teachings she was exposed to. As an adult, her science-minded brain—shaped by her work as a geologist and archaeologist—made her especially skeptical. She also carried a powerful fear of death. Yet before her life-changing accident, Nancy says she began experiencing strange dreams and an unmistakable feeling that something was about to happen. Was her childhood experience a preview of what was to come? Did her consciousness actually separate from her body? Who was the mysterious woman at the accident scene? What exactly is “earth school”? Could a soul contract really exist? And if Nancy’s memories of her friends suggest that multiple timelines can coexist, what does that mean for our understanding of time, consciousness, and reality? This is a fascinating deep dive into NDEs, consciousness, the afterlife, higher self, spirit guides, soul contracts, life reviews, remote viewing, spirituality, timelines, and the mystery of what happens when we die! Save 20% Off Honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/BREAKER! #honeylovepodThanks to Monarch for partnering with us! Start your free trial and get 50% off your first year of total money clarity using my link https://monarchmoney.yt.link/ZtigfhP or code mayim50 for 50% Off Monarch Core tier. Get $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more at https://ARTICLE. 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Nancy Rynes Book, Awakenings from the Light: https://a.co/d/041jQwfNNancy Rynes Guidebook, Walking in the Light: https://a.co/d/09mKNyXuNancy Rynes Art: https://nancyrynesart.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Before my NDE, I was absolutely freaking terrified of death. I would have considered myself an atheist. I thought our consciousness just ceased to exist.

• 0:10Mayim Bialik?

  You almost died as you were dragged under that car.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  The first inkling that day that something was brewing, a voice that said, just don't go out. I didn't listen to it. She was accelerating into the stop sign, texting while she was driving. She hit me.

• 0:27Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, my God.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  I heard my body hit the pavement. My human self was terrified. My soul popped out of that immediate trauma. Everything changed, literally in a heartbeat.

• 0:39Mayim Bialik?

  Geologist Nancy Rhines was a self-described atheist until she died and met God. Her near-death experience allowed her to pursue a life driven by intuition and creativity.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  The doctors didn't expect me to live. A two and a half hour surgery to fix my spine. I woke up and I'm standing on a hillside with this beautiful view around me. I'm in the middle of nowhere. It was ethereal. And then I kind of noticed what appeared to be a person approaching me. I couldn't see her face. She introduced herself as my guide.

• 1:14Mayim Bialik?

  You came back with 12 specific messages.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  The 12 most important things that I was supposed to bring back.

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• 2:27Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm I'm Bialik.

• 2:28Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:29Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, we have an absolutely astonishing near-death experience that we're going to share with you. Nancy Rhines was a self-described atheist, trained as a geologist and an archaeologist. She was on a bike ride one day when she was hit by an SUV at full speed. She not only survived, but witnessed the crash from outside of her body and then three days later, underwent a surgery to repair a shattered spinal cord that led her to be taken by a guide into an experience of an altered state of being that removed all filters

• 3:13Mayim Bialik?

  from this world and allowed her to see the truth of the human experience. We are all connected. There is a source of love in the universe that we can all access. Time is certainly not linear, and we all have the ability to impact those around us in ways that we may never fully understand. Nancy came out of this experience a changed woman. She became an artist. Her creative side flourished, and she believes that she has a new job in her life, and it's to share 12 lessons that she was given when she died.

• 3:51Jonathan Cohen?

  If you appreciate these conversations and the exploration into the nature of reality, what comes beyond, and how we can all live better now, please do subscribe to the podcast. It helps so much, and we really do appreciate it.

• 4:05Mayim Bialik?

  It's a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown Nancy Rhines. Break it down.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here.

• 4:14Mayim Bialik?

  I'd actually like you to start before your near-death experience because you had a very specific set of knowing that something needed to shift, that something was going to shift. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about your kind of belief system and what you anticipated was about to happen, even if you didn't know exactly what that was.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  I'm going to start by giving just a brief background of where I, my journey before that, because it's really important. And we can talk about this later if you want, but there's a strong possibility I had an NDE when I was about four years old. And when I was a young kid, I was exceedingly spiritual. I wasn't religious, but I was really spiritual between the ages of like four and let's say 10 or 11 years old, somewhere in there, maybe 12.

• 5:07Mayim Bialik?

  What did that look like to be spiritual for you at that age?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Well, my parents are no longer around to tell you the story, but I would go around telling everybody like, I swear I was like five years old when I told this to my dad when we were driving to the hardware store one day. I was looking around and I said, you know, Dad, I think we're all just thoughts in the mind of God. And I, I'm telling you the truth. And he looked at me like I had like five heads because this kid, this kid next to him was talking like a philosopher. The other thing I used to talk about with him, because he was, let's just say he was not, he had some, he had some issues with bigotry.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  And I used to kind of get on his case about it, and I was the only one of the kids that did. But I, but I used to talk about how, you know, you know, Dad, we're all one. God tells us we're all one. Why, you know, why are you doing this? We're all, we're all one, you know, human family. We're all one spiritual family. So I think it was a challenge to my parents because after that first incident when I was four, I got, I was just, I guess, a weird kid, you know? But that kind of drifted away from me when I got into like middle school and high school. And I'm not, I can't necessarily pinpoint why, but sometime in that, those early high

• 6:41Speaker 00

  school years, maybe because it was, I was interested in mathematics and the sciences, and I let that kind of take over my life. But I started to get really skeptical about the existence of a divine, you know, universe. That's what I call it now. The divine universe, divinity, God, some people would call it God. I got really skeptical about, you know, a spiritual viewpoint of, of the world, of the universe. And then, so we were, I was raised as a Catholic, and that was in, kind of in the greater Chicago area back in those days. And that was also, it unfortunately overlapped with the time that there was a lot of trauma

• 7:26Speaker 00

  within the Catholic community about, you know, young kids getting abused by priests. And that really turned me away. I just, I couldn't understand how if there was a divine being, he, she, or it would allow this to happen.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  And so that's really when my, my really began to turn away from a spiritual viewpoint on, you know, reality. So by the time I went into university, I was, and I, I studied like the hardest of the sciences, literally geology.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So geology and archaeology. So, you know, Burt on the Big Bang Theory.

• 8:09Mayim Bialik?

  I was just going to say, we have so many jokes about the geologist on the Big Bang Theory.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  So that's what I was. I mostly studied geology, but I also did, my, my minor was archaeology too, because I was really a history buff.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  So I studied both of those. I actually became an archaeological artist for a while, went on digs in the Middle East and did, I did the Indiana Jones things for a while too. So that was fun. I didn't have a bullwhip or anything like that, but, but we were finding stuff. So that was really where I kind of got cemented in, I think, a material view of reality because all of my peers, all of my, at least as far as I knew, all of my professors were skeptical of all of that, and some of them very much so. And so I kind of, I sort of absorbed that.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  So by the time this event happened that, you know, we're going to talk about today, that was, you know, like 15, 20 years later. So in that time, I was, I would say that I was, on my good days, I was an agnostic, meaning I, I didn't know what there was, you know, to the universe. Most days, I would have considered myself an atheist. And there were some days I was kind of a nasty atheist, too.

• 9:28Jonathan Cohen?

  We know those type.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  That was me back. I'm not that way anymore.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  So that, that's kind of where I was. The weird thing is, now, this is, my friends tell me how weird this is. I was still super fascinated by the idea of ESP, you know, all of those extrasensory abilities that people talk about. It still fascinated me, even though I couldn't fit it in a materialist worldview.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  So by the time I was in my early to mid 40s, I was kind of lost. You know, I had gone through a divorce and I felt like my life was sort of blah, you know, not, I didn't feel like I was doing what I wanted to do. I just felt numb and not really depressed, but, but just in a weird

• 10:30Speaker 00

  state, like I just didn't know what was coming next for me. Usually I'm a type A person. So I had a clear idea of where I was going and I didn't. So this was in late 2013.

• 10:41Mayim Bialik?

  What was your understanding of what happens after we die in this part of your life?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So as a kid, I was raised to, you know, in the Catholic church, we go through this, you know, they believe that there is a soul that survives and that's it. You go into a purgatory state before you go to heaven and that's it. It's just, but the bad people, including the atheists, go to hell. So it's this whole fire and brimstone, you know, burn in hell and you're damned for eternity. I never actually bought into that because that didn't seem to fit with the loving God that they talked about. So there was a huge problem for me already.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  So when I got into my very atheistic years,

• 11:33Speaker 00

  I would say for probably a good 10 to 15 years before my NDE, I was absolutely freaking terrified of death. I would, I would sometimes even lay awake at night shivering at the thought of no longer existing. Because by that point, I thought all this stuff was made up. Better, our consciousness just ceased to exist and that was it. Candle's gone, we're done.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  So for most of those, like 10 to 15 years before my NDE, I was absolutely terrified of nothingness. Just, I couldn't wrap my brain around the concept of nothingness.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  I didn't, you know, I didn't still didn't buy into the hell thing, but it was just the nothingness that bothered me. So that's kind of where I was. You know, when this event happened, I was thinking that I either needed to move or get a different job in order to feel better. I was trying to externalize this problem that I was having internally. So I was thinking, well, maybe I just need to quit my job and find something else.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  And that's when, you know, unfortunately or unfortunately, depending on what your viewpoint, everything really changed literally in a heartbeat. It was just bam.

• 12:52Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:48Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:52Mayim Bialik?

  How many sisters are there in your family?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Two surviving. I have an additional sister that died before this.

• 16:58Mayim Bialik?

  Okay. Cause I think you, you talk about in your book, kind of talking to your sisters and saying like, feel like something needs to change. Like, it sounds like there was like such a specific notion you had that like, and I'm wondering if in retrospect, you feel like you knew something was brewing.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  I think I did. I mean, that's a really a good point to bring up because, so what we're going to talk about today happened in the early days of January of 2014. So in December of 2013, with a month before, I was having very bizarre dreams, like consistently weird dreams, but it was very specific. And I was getting this nervous feeling that something was happening because the, these dreams were all about butterflies. And I swear to you, I don't have any particular interest in butterflies, other than they look pretty, you know?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  And there were times when I would have these dreams and I was surrounded by thousands of butterflies. And I told one of my sisters that dream one day. And so this was in December of 2013 and she got freaked out because a friend of hers, who I won't name her friend, had just died within the last year of, of this event. And that, that friend of hers was strongly into butterflies. Her whole house was just butterflies everywhere. So my, my sister, who was very spiritual,

• 18:39Speaker 00

  thought that this person, her friend, was basically trying to tell me, it's your time.

• 18:45Mayim Bialik?

  Whoa.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  And in a way it was, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't physical death, I think, that, that the message was butterflies are really a symbol of transformation. You think about it. So I think that's what those dreams were trying to tell me, even, even though at the time I didn't, I didn't understand what that meant.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  So that was kind of that that month before, and I just, I knew, I was actually a little bit afraid that something bad was going to, she got, you know, I allowed my sister to get into my head. And so I, I was thinking that maybe, you know, something bad was going to happen. And from her perspective, it was bad, but from mine, it was absolutely transformational in a good way, even though it was a little traumatic.

• 19:34Mayim Bialik?

  Take us to that day when you started packing up for a bike ride.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it was a typical, it was a typical, I think it was a Friday. And I had actually taken a week off work between the Christmas holiday and New Year's. We had a, we didn't have much going on at the office, so I thought, you know, I'll just take some time off. And at the time, I lived in Colorado, and it was a beautiful winter. It's, it's not like East Coast winters, for people who don't know, like in the Denver area, we can have 70 degree days in January, and it's kind of typical. But then it'll snow and we'll get three feet of snow and, you know. But this day, it happened to be pretty warm, and I thought I would just go on a bike ride.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  And I was just gonna go on a little bike ride around town to run some errands and, and take a little trail ride. So it wasn't that big of a deal. I did this quite a bit. So I was putting, putting all my, my stuff in my, I had a little, you know, backpack that I was, that I was carrying around and got my helmet and everything, and I'm stuffing my, you know, jacket and stuff in my backpack. And I had this, knowing that I just needed to not go out today. And I, there was a, I had a real strong argument with myself, like, there was a part of me that said, just don't go out today.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  But I couldn't, you know, as a, I'm a, you know, left brain thinker at that point. And I thought, what is that? I mean, that doesn't make any sense. So I just ignored it and went out anyway. So that was, that was like the first inkling that day that something was brewing, like, I, I never had any, it was like a voice that said, just don't do it today, just don't go out. So I didn't listen to it and went out on, it, honestly, I didn't even make it, I don't even think it was a half a mile from my house.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  And went, I was gonna, you know, bike to the library and drop off some books, but I didn't even make it a half a mile from the house and went into a roundabout, one of those traffic circles, which was brand new for us in Colorado. We didn't have a lot of those. And as I went in, I noticed some cars coming in, you know, from a side street on my right. And they looked okay, it didn't, it didn't look to be an issue. So I kept going, because I had a guy right behind me, and this was a one lane only traffic circle. So there was a guy right behind me, he was, he was being respectful, he wasn't right on my tail, but he was still back there.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  And, and then I had these two other vehicles coming in from the right. And unfortunately, at the very last second, I realized that that first vehicle coming from the right was accelerating, not stopping at the intersection with the traffic circle. And at that point, it was, it was too late. I wasn't really anything I could do. And she hit me. And that was, unfortunately, I didn't, well, I guess in a way, it was fortunate that I didn't lose consciousness, but I remember every millisecond of that whole accident still. And so the first thing I tried to do is, I guess I was trying to do a pole vault or something over the vehicle, so I put my hand out.

• 23:14Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I, I have to say, your description in your book is like unbelievable, because you're very clinical, you are a scientist, and you're very, very clinical with how you describe it. Like, the level of detail that you were able to process in real time and then recount, I mean, every moment literally mattered, and it's so fascinating, you know, well, I'll, I'll let you keep going, I don't want to get ahead of you.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  You're right, in that I remember everything, but it was like, it's this whole, the whole accident itself took, I don't know, 30 seconds or less. To me, it felt like hours, because during, you know, traumatic events like that, time kind of flies out the window. There's a different, you experience time differently. And what I experienced was like a hyper-focus on every millisecond, which I think in, in retrospect helped me survive. If I didn't have that, you know, I would have probably died, because I ended up on the, the hood of her SUV.

• 24:22Mayim Bialik?

  How fast was this truck going when it hit you?

• 24:26Speaker 00

  I'd have to go back and look at the, at the police report, but I think the, the police estimated she was going about 30 miles an hour. So she wasn't slowing down, coming into a nurse, there was a stop, she had a stop sign there. So she wasn't slowing, she was accelerating into the stop sign. And I found out why, when I was on the hood of her SUV looking in, she had her phone up on her steering wheel, kind of doing, she was texting while she was driving. She didn't even see me looking in the windshield at her.

• 25:00Mayim Bialik?

  She makes impact with your body. You end up on the hood of her car.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  I'm trying to get her attention, but I'm also trying to hang on, because she keeps, she doesn't even see me, so she's continuing to drive. And, because she's focused on her phone. And I'm trying to hang on, because I know that if I go down, that's it, that we're, I'm toast. She's in a, at this point, she's in a, she's in a turn, because she's going around the circle. So there's, there's, there's like no way that I'm not gonna get run over at this point. But I can't hold on, and she's not seeing me. And I ended up losing my grip on the, I was kind of up over the hood of her vehicle, had grip, kind of a grip on the, the top of her hood, and I lost my grip, I just couldn't

• 25:50Speaker 00

  hang on anymore, and fell down and went off the, the front, underneath of her front, you know, underneath the engine compartment.

• 25:59Mayim Bialik?

  It sounds like you're a stunt woman. This kind of, like, the way that you're describing it, this literally sounds like something you'd see in a movie. Like, Jason Statham should be doing this.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  It was in a movie, it was in Indiana Jones.

• 26:13Mayim Bialik?

  So you're on the hood of her car, and then you start falling, and you're basically trying to avoid being trampled underneath the car at 30 miles an hour?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And if, if you've seen Indiana Jones, where he goes off the front of the, the truck, and underneath, that, that was me, that's what, except I didn't have all the padding on that that stunt man had on.

• 26:36Mayim Bialik?

  So you slide down the front of her car, like, very cinematic, and you describe, like, you remember seeing the license plate as you were going down?

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, everything. I was trying to grab onto something. So I remember, you know, trying to grab onto, first of all, the grill, and then the license plate, which I couldn't grab, and then the bumper.

• 27:00Mayim Bialik?

  Oh my god.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  And I kept, you know, and then I was, then I was underneath. You know, I heard my sho, I heard my, my body hit the pavement.

• 27:09Mayim Bialik?

  Oh my god.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  I don't want to talk about that, because it's pretty gross, but I heard, I heard myself hit the pavement. Thank God I had a helmet on. So anybody who's a cyclist, there's a reason why you wear a helmet.

• 27:21Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe if you're not a cyclist, just when you're walking around, I think everyone needs to start wearing helmets.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  It's, you know, honestly, the helmet is really the only reason I survived that, that accident, that and, and some people that helped out right afterward.

• 27:35Mayim Bialik?

  So what, I don't even know what the underside of a car looks like, what are you holding on to?

• 27:41Speaker 00

  So I, at some point, I automatically just reached up with my right arm, and I'm still trying to grab something. And I ended up putting my hand over her, her, the axle underneath the vehicle, so that, that front, I don't know what it's technically called, but it's the front drivetrain, basically. So I had my, I had my right arm kind of like this, up over the, that axle thing. And I'm, you know, I'm looking at the underside of her vehicle. I didn't, I actually didn't think I was gonna survive it. Like, how do you survive something like that?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And at that point, I was thinking, you know, I was terrified, and wondering, you know, how this was all gonna, I didn't see, and I didn't see a good end to this accident at that point. And I was terrified, absolutely, like a wounded animal would be, just absolutely terrified, just trying to survive. But this is what was the weird, like, there's a, this was the first part of the experience that I really wanted to get into was, at the same time that that was happening, and I was terrified, my human self was terrified, there was a part of me that popped out of the accident.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  So if you would, if you will, my soul or my higher self, popped out of that immediate trauma, and was standing off to the side, kind of watching everything happen. And that was the, that actually freaked me out.

• 29:21Mayim Bialik?

  So, hold on, wait, so you're being dragged under an SUV, clinging on for dear life, but you're also aware that there's a part of you that's observing this?

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 29:37Mayim Bialik?

  That's a lot of information coming at you while you're trying to save your own life.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. That was the first of all, so whatever we're going to talk about today, that was the first inclination that I had that something in my understanding of reality was not right. But I didn't, I didn't have time to really dwell on it. And the, and the really, it got weirder from there, if you, can you imagine? So the part of my higher, I'll call it my higher self or my soul was standing outside watching all of this happen. And that part of me was very observer like, very kind and compassionate, but also not scared. And that part of me was talking to the human part of me, trying to calm down the human

• 30:28Speaker 00

  part of me so that I could survive.

• 30:31Mayim Bialik?

  This is part of where, you know, kind of our scientific explanation of what happened to you has to step in because in an instant, you were able to essentially gather a tremendous amount of information on a physiological level, right? You're gathering all of this information about where you are in space, but you are also capable of maintaining a knowledge of some other part of you, right? Like that, that's kind of a phenomenal moment. And we're not talking about you're taking time to meditate and you're tapping into your higher self and I have an observer and it's a non-dual world.

• 31:16Mayim Bialik?

  We're talking about in the moment. I mean, when I was reading this, what occurred to me was like, oh, this is the NDE because you're describing a split of consciousness, which as you later talk about, to me, what this sounds like is you were dying. You were possibly at the threshold of death and something snapped that back into you. But in that moment where you had an awareness of observing yourself by all psychiatric, psychological, and like every understanding we have of a near death experience, it was happening. You almost died as you were dragged under that car and the part of you that exists

• 32:00Mayim Bialik?

  outside of your physical being was watching it happen and was also in a peaceful observer state surrounding that. It's unreal.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  I mean, it was to me in that moment, too. I had no idea what to do with that. As you can imagine, that was the first inkling that I had that the world wasn't the way I thought it was, but I didn't have time to really dwell on that. I was trying to survive, but I knew that something had shifted. And when I laid, so I'll just skipping forward to talk to kind of address your point, the, the chaplain who came into my room later, after the, the real NDE, basically that's what she said too. You were, that was her understanding of what my, you know, what I experienced was, well, during the accident itself, you were on the verge of death.

• 32:48Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:43Speaker 00

  And then, then something snapped you back in. So you're exactly right. That's the way that she read it too. And that's how I see it today. It was, it, it was the moment where I could have left. And honestly, the, the guy that was driving behind me in the, in the Subaru, he couldn't believe that I didn't die. He ended up, he was an ER physician on his way to work.

• 36:08Mayim Bialik?

  Get us back to you're underneath the SUV, you're holding on to some part of the car that I don't understand. And at that time, you kind of didn't either. You, you are being dragged against the pavement. And as you describe it, the only thing that protected your skin and your casing for your nervous system was the backpack on your back where you had thrown an extra set of clothes.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Right. Yep.

• 36:38Mayim Bialik?

  So you're being dragged under this SUV. She eventually stops? Is that what happens?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the only way that I actually know what happened with her stopping is because of that part of me that was outside. Otherwise I would have never known. So this is how I know now that that was real because underneath the car, underneath the SUV, I can't see much because I'm, you know, looking up and all I can see, because my eyes are almost in her engine, it's, there's not a lot of room under there. I'm just looking at her engine. I can't see anything around, but that my higher self or observer self watched what happened. So she got partway around the, the traffic circle.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  And then the, the guy who was driving a, a silver colored Toyota truck was behind her, you know, as she was coming into that traffic circle. He drove around the traffic circle, the opposite direction and got his truck in front of her and physically stopped her. He actually put his own life on the line and, and stopped her. And he put his, you know, he put his truck on the line too, because she may have just plowed into him. But, but she saw the truck, so she saw this guy's truck and she stopped. And that's kind of how all of this started to resolve was when she finally, you know, got her attention up out of her phone long enough to see that there was a vehicle across

• 38:14Speaker 00

  the street in front of her. So that's when, uh, so that, that's when the, um, the people on the scene helped to kind of, they got, you know, they got the, the SUV pushed off of me. I wasn't, I was not pinned underneath of it. I was still in between the front wheels. Thank God, you know? But I, I wasn't pinned underneath, but they pushed that SUV back so they could get to me. And then, you know, obviously called, um, called the 911. But it was lucky for me, not, you know, the, the, uh, the fire department was like, I don't know, half a mile away. It wasn't that far off.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  I was in a really good spot for getting immediate help. I was in this, um, spot near a hot, luckily near a trauma center too. So it was all very fortuitous that everything happened the way it did.

• 39:10Mayim Bialik?

  What you were experiencing at this point, you've been dragged under this car, were dealing with, you know, this kind of enormous crisis scene because you have a woman who was essentially unaware that she hit a cyclist and then dragged you under her car, had to be sort of forcibly stopped. And you now have an entire group of people. There also was a woman who came to your side, who mysteriously has not been able to be located or, or identified. Who was this woman and what did she do until you were taken to the hospital?

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So once they, once the onlookers kind of pushed that SUV away, my initial instinct was, it came out of nowhere to get up and run. Well, to get up, punch the woman who hit me and then run.

• 40:08Mayim Bialik?

  So in, in this state with what we now know was essentially a shattered spine, I mean, in various places, you had a very strong instinct that you, you felt anger and rage and wanted to essentially fight this person who had done this to you. And you're barely functioning physiologically.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  If I would have made an effort to get up.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  I probably, again, it would have been immediate lights out, death on the scene, because as you said, my spine was a mess. And so were all the ligaments and tendons, holding my head onto my neck. I mean, everything was shattered. So if I would have gotten up at that point, the doctors told me later, it would have immediately severed my spine, or spinal cord up at the, you know, at the very top. My, my neck was in such bad shape that there was no way that I could have gotten up and survived it.

• 41:08Mayim Bialik?

  Just for a little bit of context, I broke my toe last week, and I thought I might not be able to go on living. Like, I couldn't speak to anyone, I was weeping, like, I was like, I don't know how to function. You're describing fragments of your own vertebrae, threatening to sever not only your spinal cord, but your brainstem, and you're still kind of consciously calculating revenge, as well as your own mortality and a split in your consciousness. And we haven't even gotten to your actual near-death experience.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, this, this was, this was opening number one, but that's exactly, and I still don't, I mean, the amount of the human body and mind's ability to process information is vastly underrated.

• 42:04Mayim Bialik?

  Especially Nancy's, because I'm pretty clear how I function. Broken toe, life is over.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  So I want to make, make sure everybody understands. So in that moment, during the accident, I actually felt no pain. Because of those natural, you know, the natural endorphins that we have, I absolutely felt zero pain. That's why I thought I could get up and run. I didn't feel like any, I actually felt fine in that moment.

• 42:35Mayim Bialik?

  PCP is one of the drugs that, when people take PCP, they often have no perception of pain or, and like, you know, this is these stories when police officers arrest people who are on PCP, they're often kind of like fighting all the way down, and they're jumping over cars, and they're jumping off bridges, right? Like, meaning we know some of the, the chemical, you know, mechanisms, right, that subserve these kinds of systems. And you talk a lot about how you were just kind of like, an ordinary person, like, I don't know why this happened to me. But also, like, this is a very special set of capabilities that you ended up needing to harness in this moment, and, and many others that followed.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I actually am very, very grateful that, for all of this, that we're going to talk about, and that we've already talked about, I'm so happy, number one, that I had worked out physically consistently, because I think that was one of the main reasons I survived, because I was very fit, I was very strong, you know, I did a lot of resistance training and a lot of cardio.

• 43:43Mayim Bialik?

  I feel like that's kind of a, that's a low blow at my broken toe, because I'm not, not very fit right now.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  But, you know, broken bones hurt. They really should hurt. There's a reason why they hurt.

• 43:52Mayim Bialik?

  Just the middle toe. What was the other thing that you were talking about, in terms of, of your gratitude?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Because I was a scientist. I was able to tap into that ability to think my way through from here on out, rather than to be controlled by emotion and what I wanted to see. So I think that really helped me analyze all of this, certainly in, in the long term, but definitely in that short term as well. It still didn't help me with this woman that you asked about. I, I still don't have an answer for her, so when I was laying there and I really had that desire to get up and run, there was a blonde woman that kind of came up out of nowhere. Now granted, I'm laying down, I don't know where she came from.

• 44:42Mayim Bialik?

  But she was blonde.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  All I remember, all I really remember was a, a big blonde ponytail, and she had sweatpants on, like, these gray, gray sweatpants on. And she came up and she said her name was Anne or Annie, I honestly can't remember what she said. She did give me her last name, but I could never remember it. And she said her name was Anne, that she was a trauma nurse, and that she was going to help me until the paramedics arrived. So she physically, I could, she probably saw that I was wanting to get up, and, and anybody, I assume, who's been trained in, in, as a trauma nurse or physician knows,

• 45:27Speaker 00

  the first thing you need to do is put your, but, but keep the person still, you know? They can't get up and run, not a good idea. So she put her hands on my shoulders and physically held me down, and kept, you know, she kept my spine straight, she kept my shoulders down, she talked to me until the paramedics got there. And, and I still, at the whole time this was happening, so I'm still in split consciousness mode at this point, while she's there. So human Nancy is looking at her and, and trying to calm down, and, you know, soul Nancy is just watching all this unfold with this amazing, everything's going to be okay kind of attitude.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Even though my human self didn't think things were going to be okay, the, the, the soul part of me was saying, don't worry, it's going to be fine. But it's so, she was there for, you know, however long it took for the paramedics to arrive, which actually wasn't that long, they were very close, so a few minutes. And then as soon as they came, of course, they're trying to assess my injuries at that point, and one of the paramedics kind of, I was still laying on the ground, I'm, you know, up my back down, and he, he reached around behind my neck like this, and just barely touched my skin, and I screamed. That's when the pain came in. And I couldn't believe the amount of pain I was in, in that moment.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  And when that pain came through, that's when bam, both of those parts of myself came back together in my body. It was like, soul Nancy came and slammed back into my body, all in that moment. And, yeah, the pain was awful at that point, but luckily up until that point, I didn't have any.

• 47:18Mayim Bialik?

  This woman, Anne, or Annie, she seems to sort of disappear.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Actually, one of the police officers came and talked to me later, he actually did speak with her for a few moments, and he, what he told me was as weird as what, what I'm about to tell you, like, in, she asked, she asked if, if I wanted her to be in the ambulance, and I said, sure, please come, because I'm terrified at this point, I said, come to, you know, get in the ambulance, come to the ER with me, which was literally half a mile in a different direction, so it wasn't that far. And so she said, yeah, I'll do that, I'll, I'll make sure I'm in the ambulance with you. And she just, from, from my perspective, she disappeared.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  I, I don't, she never actually got into the ambulance that I'm aware of, I didn't see her. And from my perspective, she disappeared. The police officer did speak with her, he said, he spoke with her for a few minutes. She refused to give him her name. She wouldn't give him any details about who she was, or where she could be reached. And then he said, and I turned around and looked back to find her, and she was gone. So from his perspective, she disappeared as well. So we don't, we don't know.

• 48:38Mayim Bialik?

  Do you know the origins of the name Anne?

• 48:40Speaker 00

  No, I don't, actually.

• 48:42Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, this is a fun fact. So Anne, I had a feeling, comes from, it comes from the Hebrew for Hannah, which is Chana, and it means grace or favor, as in, God has favored me.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  It's cool.

• 48:57Mayim Bialik?

  It's pretty cool.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, whoever, whoever she was, whatever she was, she made it so that I'm able to get up and walk around today and survive that. If it hadn't been for her intervention, whoever she was, whatever she was, I likely would not have made it this far. And if I had, it would have been, you know, in a wheelchair. So I'm super grateful for what she was able to do for me.

• 49:26Mayim Bialik?

  So you're placed in an ambulance, this woman is not with you, and you go to the hospital, and just to sort of get us to this next part of the story, there's, there's, you know, kind of an excruciating several days until you can actually be operated on. And there's the, and, you know, this is, I highly recommend, obviously, that people read Awakenings from the Light, you know, the details of sort of like, both like the bureaucratic system, and also your particular sort of medication reactions and preferences leads you to be, was it three days?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:07Mayim Bialik?

  So you're in the hospital in this state where, I mean, in addition to your spine being threatened, right, to be essentially impeding your spinal cord, tell us about some of the other injuries that you have going into the surgery.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Sure. So I had a cracked pelvis, which is not surprising. I had a, this collarbone was broken out here, a distal fracture on the collarbone. The rib, five ribs on my left side were broken in a couple of places each, punctured, punctured and partially collapsed lung. I had some internal bleeding somewhere in my abdomen, which they couldn't pinpoint right away, but, but took care of itself fairly shortly. So that they weren't worried about. My sternum was cracked, which I'm told is really a tough, tough bone to crack,

• 51:04Speaker 00

  but my sternum was cracked as well. And, and then I had bleeding in my brain, kind of back here, which that was the thing that they were most worried about, which they didn't tell me that at the time. I didn't even know I had a brain bleed at the time. They were trying to keep me calm. And so they only told my family some of this stuff, which I found out later. So they didn't tell me about the brain bleed until my niece, who is a, who is a nurse, told me about that, you know, quite a while later. But she, you know, my niece also relayed that the doctors told the family that they didn't expect me to live for the weekend. So this happened on a Friday. They told my family, just don't

• 51:48Speaker 00

  expect her to be around on Monday.

• 51:50Jonathan Cohen?

  You can't stay present when your body is like that, right? Like there, there's a survival mechanism where you have to leave. Now, what we haven't really understood before is the notion that leaving can still have an awareness of what's happening, right? Like, we don't know where that leaving goes to.

• 52:08Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think at this point, what's fascinating is, you know, you're in, in a variety of medicated states through this weekend to try and essentially, you know, stop the human instinct to run, to flee, to tighten, to, you know, like, this is sort of where, you know, there's, there's a miracle, right, in certain medications that can try and depress, right, the system. But you survive the weekend and you are wheeled into surgery. And what I think is really interesting is you've been under anesthesia before. So you kind of, you're being wheeled in, you have a lot of anxiety, which is again, not unusual,

• 52:50Mayim Bialik?

  right? And you figure you're going to have the kind of experience you've had in the past. And for anyone who's been put under general anesthesia, it's not fun. They tell you to count backwards. And, you know, in my experience, you know, you start counting and then you wake up a second later and you're, you know, recovering in, you know, a nurse's station and everything's been done and it's been hours, right? And what you describe is that you were wheeled into surgery expecting for that to happen. What happened after you counted down?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  I think I made it to like nine. So I counted down from 10, you know, I made it to nine. And, you know, I just expected that gray blah. And then, like you said, you wake up in recovery. And, and so this was expected to be like a two and a half hour surgery to, to fix my spine. And I, I drifted off on that, on the count of nine. And I came to, I thought, I actually thought that I had woken up out of anesthesia at first. And it freaked me out because all of a sudden I was aware of everything around me. But I, I woke up and I'm like, standing on a hillside with this beautiful view around

• 54:08Speaker 00

  me. But it wasn't, it wasn't an earth viewpoint. It was ethereal. It was almost, I don't know, sil, there was like a silvery cast to it. There was energy flowing everywhere. It was, at first, I just noticed this visual of, oh my gosh, I'm standing up. I'm not supposed to be standing. Why am I standing up? But, and then it's like, the second thing I noticed is there's this, I'm in the, I'm in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing around me except hills and trees and, you know, this beautiful view.

• 54:47Mayim Bialik?

  Did it look like anywhere you'd been before? Or were you in a foreign place in the middle of this surgery?

• 54:54Speaker 00

  It wasn't like any place I'd physically been to on, in this reality, in this, on this planet. It, I think it reminds me now, since I started, you know, kind of trying to put a visual on it for my readers. It, it looked a lot like the Highlands of Scotland now in hindsight, but I've never been there. I've, not in this lifetime. I've never, never been there. But it very, like rolling, kind of rolling mountains with some trees and like this misty fog, but everything was very silvery toned. There was like this glint or metallic glint to everything. But there was no sun in the sky. That was my first

• 55:34Speaker 00

  clue that something wasn't quite right. It was just this beautiful, bright sky that was almost like a photographer's umbrella, kind of that, that diffuse light, but very bright, but it didn't hurt. And, and then I just noticed this, it looked like tendrils of energy flowing everywhere. That's the only, that's the only way I could describe it. The underneath of everything that I saw was that these pulsating energy, lines of energy.

• 56:09Mayim Bialik?

  Was this a physical thing that you're sensing? Or was it an emotional knowing?

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Kind of both. Well, it seemed to me at the time, at the very, at the very initial stages, I thought it was a physical place. But very quickly I realized that it was a construct. And that's, you know, we'll get into that too. But, but at first, because I'm still in earth mode in my, in my thinking, I'm trying to think about where does this fit within my knowing of planet earth? And, and so I thought it was a physical place at first. And the more I was, I'm standing there, kind of like, you know, as a scientist, you're going, checking off all these boxes, like, is it this? Is it this? What does this

• 56:57Speaker 00

  look like? There was a moment after going through all those, the checklist, I thought, I wonder if I died. And I had that kind of aha moment of, oh my gosh, I may, may have actually died on the operating table.

• 57:15Mayim Bialik?

  So you're thinking, I'm in some afterward, I mean, were you thinking, I'm in heaven?

• 57:22Speaker 00

  I didn't call it that for myself. I, I just thought it was some sort of quote afterlife, which now I don't like that term either. But, but I thought it was some sort of like afterlife kind of thing. And once I kind, once I glommed onto the idea in my brain that I must have died, the next, the next thing I asked, and this, this still really gets to me, because this is where the emotional knowing, the knowing at the, I should say, at the intuitive level comes in. I asked the question in my mind, well, if I had died,

• 58:06Speaker 00

  why am I here? Because my parents and the pastors always told me I should have gone to hell. Because I was, I died an atheist and I didn't have last rites or any of that stuff. So in that, you know, in, in that mode of thinking, I'm like, well, wait a minute. If I did die down there on the operating table, this doesn't look like any idea of hell I've ever been told about. Why am I not there? And this is what really, it really chokes me up because there was an answer, which I didn't expect. I didn't expect anybody

• 58:46Speaker 00

  to answer me. I just thought I was there by myself. There was an answer. And it was like this kind of voice, loud, but not loud at the same time, that was around, kind of around me. And it came through me with also an emotional welcoming. And it said, effective, I can't remember the exact words now, but essentially, this is your home. You're a child of mine. You're a part of me. Welcome home. This is your home. And that's kind of when, first of all, I started bawling. Couldn't stop myself. I was bawling my eyes out. And at least that was my perception in that space. I perceived that I was bawling

• 59:29Speaker 00

  my eyes out. It was so emotional that I couldn't control it anymore. And then I remembered. That's when the memory came back of before this life, that there was a before and that there is an after. And everything sort of flooded back in that moment. Like, that's right. This is home. And all that stuff that was happening in my life as Nancy on, in the earth reality, that was a nice little dream.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  And a learning experience, but now it's over and I'm back home. And it was this like welcoming feeling of finally I'm back home. And just feeling loved and welcome in a way that I can't, I just can't describe it. It was, it's just so amazing. I felt that love coming like through me as a part of me. And just being welcomed.

• 1:00:29Mayim Bialik?

  For people who have had transcendental experiences, for people who have had psychedelic journeys, for people who have done healing journeys with plant medicine. You know, this is not an uncommon thing. And the reason I'm bringing that up is not to say that like, it's all made up and it's just like you were on drugs and it was just the medication. Actually, what if you flip that and say, maybe what drugs and transcendental experiences are getting us in touch with is an actual truth that we are a soul that exists beyond, right? This corporal being, we are a soul that gets to put on the meat suit that we are now conscious

• 1:01:11Mayim Bialik?

  of, but there are opportunities we have to break through that consciousness to glimpse the actual truth with a capital T of the sort of consciousness and the larger consciousness system, which is that this is one iteration of our soul's visit. And what you experienced, I've actually never heard someone who had an NDE describe this this way. People have touched around it, but I think this is the clearest articulation. It's like, oh my gosh, this is kind of the dream. This is the sort of illusion and we're all wearing these meat suits here and we're talking through also like a satellite that's projecting, right?

• 1:01:54Mayim Bialik?

  Your image on the screen that I'm looking at, but that there's a entirely separate reality that exists that most of us don't get to touch and you got to experience after you almost died twice.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was very, like you said, at that moment, when, when all that memory came back to me.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  Basically the filters came off. So when we come into this life, we have to come in with, with a set of filters on our awareness, on our memory in order to be able to focus in on what we're supposed to do here or experience or learn. If we didn't have those filters, it would be pretty tough, you know, to, to exist from day to day.

• 1:02:37Mayim Bialik?

  You're also describing, you know, for thousands of years, almost every single tradition that we have had people speak to us about have said, there's a forgetting that happens when you are dropped into your current meat suit. And, you know, we've talked about the angel Lila, you know, placing her finger here so that, Rizwan Verk talked about this with us, that every tradition has a notion of, I'm going to make you forget that you're actually this, you know, however you want to describe it, astral, incredible, out of your body soul experiencer, right? You have to forget in the same way that, as I describe it for the brain, right? Your brain has to filter out the fact that you're sitting on this chair and wearing clothing.

• 1:03:20Mayim Bialik?

  Because otherwise you'd be like, what the, all the time, you'd be like, what, get it off me, right? So like the thalamus is like, no, no, no, you're good. Just like, think about the conversation. So in the same way that the brain does that, right? So like, this is like a fractal, right? Just the way that, that our nervous system says, I'm going to let you function here, but you're going to forget all of the craziness that's going on in your sensory systems so that you can just have a conversation and go to work and like make your breakfast. You had that experience on the most infinite fractal level of like, what does it look like to remove that forgetting?

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was like the first, as we go along, that was like another thing that really was kind of that aha moment for me that changed my life here. But in, it just gets, you know, more incredible after that. But that knowing, being able to realize, oh, that's right. That earth thing is important. Don't get me wrong. It's not that it's an unimportant dream. It's actually very important, but ultimately it's just one little bit of who we really are. That helped kind of put some of this stuff into perspective.

• 1:04:40Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Nancy Rhines. There is so much more to come. She's going to talk in part two about what actually happened when she met her spirit guide and was told that she had to return to earth. She also is going to talk about the life review that she experienced, the actual lessons that she was given to bring back when she was placed back into her body. She's also going to talk about the continuing recovery that she's been experiencing since her NDE, as well as an experience she had at four years old, which led her into a world of what she now sees was remote viewing and the ability to separate from her consciousness.

• 1:05:22Mayim Bialik?

  All of that and more in part two of our conversation with Nancy Rhines, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.