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Death is all around us.
It's a natural part of life.
Why are we so fearful of it, then?
We consider it something grave, sorrowful, and mournful.
Something remembered painfully.
Does the death of the physical body spell the end of everything?
Or is there anything that continues on?
I do believe there's a multitude of things that are going to happen
after our physiological death.
Then suddenly a splendid, kind,
and loving light appeared.
There's a particular moment when there's nothing but the body...
At that moment I felt my daughter was in a much happier place
than she could ever occupy in her earthly body.
I felt as if bathing in a sea of love,
acceptance, and tranquility.
In his book Who is Afraid of Death? writer Jan van Helsing claims
that the entity with whom he entered into contact asked him right away
not to be called the Angel of Death, but rather an Angel of Transformation.
Interestingly, Amazonian shamans view death in quite similar terms.
An Amazonian shaman, at the time of the making of this film 102 years old,
had never agreed to appear on camera.
But suddenly felt that the time had come for him to speak to us.
In our conception there are different heavenly worlds.
There are beings who sing and dance and are immortal.
NEW JUNGLE AMAZONIAN SHAMAN
Every shaman knows these worlds and can enter with his spirit
into the one with which he is familiar.
We cannot go into the next life with our body,
the only thing that goes there is inside - our spirit.
There we can't undo anything that we have done in the body,
we just try to be good within the spiritual being.
But we don't suffer, in our culture God doesn't punish disobedience.
He tells us that for the sake of life in the heavenly realms
we will lay aside our flesh as a serpent sheds its skin.
We slip out of the body and live on.
I'm not afraid of death, why should I be?
Nothing happens, it's just a change of location,
a step towards a better life.
After death comes a better life.
That's what history says, our ancestors say so,
that's how it's told.
When I found myself in Mexican Teotihuacan,
a strange thing happened to me at the Tetitla palace.
A local warden saw me practicing my exercises,
came up to me and asked me whether I was into meditation.
To which I nodded.
He wondered was I interested in visiting a special place
with a peculiar kind of energy, which he would be happy to show me.
He took me to a cloakroom of sorts, where the labourers used to change,
there were wellingtons and overalls lying about.
And there was a stripe on the wall, with three imprints of a human hand.
He told me to sit there, lean with my hand against the imprint,
and promised I would experience something special as a result.
Looking around at the overalls, I thought it all a pile of nonsense,
but still I sat down, leaned against the wall,
and closed my eyes.
Instantly...
I felt a pressure coming from the other side,
and wondered what or who it was,
and before my mind's eye appeared my mother
who by then had long been dead.
I asked her: "Why are you spooking me like this?"
She answered me, after which I assured her of my love,
and behind her there appeared her own mother and father,
with my father's parents materialising next to them.
And behind those grandparents more people started cropping up,
and I realised I was looking at my ancestors,
tens and hundreds of people,
presumably my great-grandparents
and great-great-grandparents, and so on, all watching me.
I was completely awestruck, while they reached out their hands
like this and shouted:
"We're not angry with you for any of your mistakes.
We don't blame you, as we too have made mistakes aplenty.
However, we're overjoyed whenever we see you succeed."
For the ancient Mexicans in the pre-Conquista era,
there was no fear of death.
It was part of life, part of the cycle,
and there was no fear of death, at least not like ours.
The fear of losing all we have, of losing the material things
we surround ourselves with today in our Western culture.
In fact, beings were not dying at all, but they were changing their state,
they were changing into another type of life.
In this sense, death had neither painful nor regrettable connotations.
It was not a punishment. It was simply a change of state.
It's strange that in this so-called Euro-American culture of ours,
the concept of death as something heavy,
sad, tragic, and scary, has gradually taken hold.
Yikes - he felt the touch of death.
It scared him to death.
Look, he's got death on his tongue.
Yet, for example, young children, who are not yet fully absorbed
in the games of grown-up people, perceive death quite unencumbered.
I THINK THOSE WHO FEAR DEATH HAVE NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF.
IT'S NOT THAT SCARY.
THOMAS NYKODÝM: "I THINK WHEN I DIE, I'LL GO TO HEAVEN. AND ONCE THERE,
I'LL ASK THE ANGEL IF I'M ALLOWED TO LIVE ANOTHER LIFE."
CAMILLE: "I THINK WHEN I DIE I'LL GO TO HEAVEN IN ORDER
TO BECOME AN ANGEL. I'LL BE FLYING AROUND THE HEAVENS THEN."
"GOD WILL MAKE ME INTO A BROWN DACHSHUND.
I'LL BE BORN TO A DACHSUND AND WILL BE LIVING A DOG'S LIFE.
THIS WILL BE REPEATED ON AND ON, SINCE LIFE IS ENDLESS."
Of course, some adults too may come
to some more reconciliatory, intimate relationship with death.
Usually it's on the basis of some personal, profound experience.
I remember there was a strange case described in Australia,
where a stillborn baby girl came to life during childbirth.
A little girl had just been born, and the doctor said to the mother,
"Madam, I've got some bad news, the little girl is dead."
And the mother said,
"Put her on my belly, I want to bid her farewell."
And so they put her on her stomach, she was stroking the little girl
and talking to her all normal, telling her what the girl's name was,
what the mommy's name was, what the daddy's name was,
what the brother's name was, who was looking forward to her.
And as she was stroking the little girl, she said,
"Doctor, I think the little girl has just made a movement."
And the doctor said to her:
"No, it's just an electro-chemical reaction of the tissue,
it's like when you cut up a fish and fry it in a pan and it's still
jumping around, it's just a reaction of the matter, it's not life."
But the mother insisted, "But she's breathing."
And the little girl came to life.
And then the reporters asked the doctor what it was
that made the little girl come back to life, what caused it.
And the doctor said:
"Maybe it was just the love of that mother
which somehow overcame death."
When I was young, I used to get tonsillitis very often
with a very unpleasant to severe course,
MIROSLAV KREJČÍŘ, M.D. DOCTOR, PSYCHOLOGIST
so I ended up in the throat ward where they recommended tonsillectomy.
A pretty simple surgery.
But after the operation, an interesting thing happened,
I suddenly found myself in a sort of dreamlike state,
looking down on this situation
where two young doctors were lamenting about
how the chief was going to be upset
that there was going to be a young corpse
and which of them had screwed it all up - stitched it up wrong -
and I realised this should be me.
I had a huge problem, logical, medical, psychological,
how to explain that I was lying on that operating table,
but I was looking down from above, and when I was looking down
I was looking even though my eyes were on the gurney,
I was hearing even though my ears were on the gurney,
and I was even thinking even though my brain was lying there...
There I actually found out
that I was not the body, that Krejčíř lying there...
Then there was a kind of cut and my life began to run in detail,
uncomfortably detailed,
and it was not evaluated by an outsider,
and the one evaluating it was me.
Which was a huge surprise to me, because I was expecting
there to be some judge that I would be discussing with,
that this or that had happened differently and so on... none of that.
And there I couldn't, as the vernacular goes,
sugarcoat it and I knew exactly what I had done,
which major screw-over which minor screw-over I'd done,
what and why I had done well.
Then suddenly there was a gorgeous,
kind, loving light
that was in an incredibly blissful environment full of colours, smells,
as if some music was playing,
and the experience was tremendously blissful and incredibly alleviating.
But then the light started saying things
which I didn't like very much again,
that I couldn't stay there, that I had to go back...
Without any explanation.
And then there was a remark that I remember,
which didn't say anything to me at that moment,
but later I realised and understood its meaning,
that I mustn't get ahead of myself.
I was driving with my friend to a Christmas concert.
We stopped at an intersection
and just as we were slowly heading out on a green light,
a big black BMW emerged coming from the right side at top speed,
and it crushed us.
This is where my story begins.
On the fourth day, the doctors invited my mother to the hospital
and told her to come and say goodbye to me,
so she came and they handed her my discharge papers,
which included a box filled in for the cause of death.
But something happened that nobody expected,
I didn't die, I came back.
And actually this coming back
was a complete transformation of my whole life...
A transformation of my whole family,
because up until then we were a normal atheist family.
Even though I didn't have a body, I suddenly found I was still alive,
I was expecting the darkness to come, that's what I'd been taught at school,
but nothing like that arrived.
I felt tremendously happy and I perceived that I could finally,
for the first time in my life, really breathe
and I perceived that I was breathing in and out with everything,
that I was an all-pervading space,
an all-knowing space that was filled with life.
And it was tremendously wonderful to have that connection
to who I am and who we all are, actually, who life is.
So my perception of it was
that I was swimming in an endless ocean of love
and acceptance
and peace and relief.
I perceived bliss,
I perceived pleasure,
I perceived actually the feelings I'd been looking for all my life,
that is, the connection in love,
which I used to look for, e.g., in partner relationships,
but there it doesn't compare,
actually the love that I'd been looking for all my life,
I actually found in that death, because I found out
that love was myself...
And... that we all are love...
And it's great that I can talk about it now,
because we usually only find that out only at the moment of death,
but it's great we can find out sooner,
because in the context of life then we can live better
and we can do more beautiful things in the world.
I'm an empirically minded person,
and as a physician I had a great deal of confidence in science
and an expectation it would explain everything to me.
So I wanted to confirm that what I was dreaming, quote unquote,
that it was real...
I had this strange feeling it was more than a dream...
So I asked the nurses if they would show me the operating room...
When I looked at the young man on the operating table,
I could see from up there a sort of shielding screen
behind which a lot of surgical drums were stacked.
The only thing I was interested in: Is that screen there?
When I got to the surgical room,
I was surprised to see that that was exactly what I saw,
and when I looked behind the screen, my jaw really dropped
as there were the surgical drums
stacked exactly as I had seen them from above
which, even if I had been conscious,
I couldn't have seen them as they were hidden behind the screen.
That's where my worldview changed in a way... empirical, not theoretical,
not a belief that something could be,
but I realised that it was an experience where I knew
that something was different than what is normally scientific.
I was bathing in this splendour, absolutely happy, blissful,
and I just felt like I never wanted to get out of here again.
I knew I was in the source of myself,
the source of life, and I called it home.
From my point of view it was an infinite bliss, however,
after some time I suddenly began to perceive my own life in contrast
to the bliss I'd experienced and I suddenly became horrified...
It wasn't as if I'd lived a really bad life, however,
regarding it from the amount of love I was contained by,
I actually saw that I hadn't brought any of that love into my life at all,
that I thought I was bringing it to the people I loved,
but in comparison to that experience
I found that I was living in my thoughts,
that I was living in my emotions,
I was living in my evaluation of either myself or others,
but I wasn't bringing much love into the world.
The most pain I experienced was in relation
to not being able to tell my mom that I loved her.
I knew I didn't have a body, I knew I couldn't come to her again
and I couldn't tell her because she wouldn't hear me,
and even though we had a beautiful relationship,
we were actually a happy family and I had no idea,
that I never actually told her with the power of true love,
and with that in mind, I then saw how I could have have said
and expressed love in so many other different places,
how I could have given love everywhere else and I hadn't.
And this experience, this contrast, brought me to my knees
and I perceived great pain.
A deep desire arose within me to go back
and get the opportunity to repair what I had not given,
and I had the choice to either merge forever with this one source of life
that fills me with incredible bliss, or I could go back.
So I chose in that moment to go back.
Let's try asking the scientists,
of course, those who are open to spiritual experience,
even if they may have started from some materialistic conception.
I graduated from medical school,
and if you'd asked me that question at the time I graduated
I would've had no problem,
simply death is the cessation of physiological processes
and consciousness is a product of the brain,
the brain depends on bodily processes,
so when the physiological processes cease, that is the end of life,
the organism, and any psychological activity.
Today, afterfifty years of studying the extraordinary states of consciousness,
the situation has become complicated for me.
I believe there are many things that happen after physiological death.
It is very surprising that a consciousness that has separated from the body
has the ability to observe the surroundings,
not only the surroundings of the body,
but in some cases that consciousness can move to other rooms of the same building
or even experience what we call astral projections,
perhaps two hundred or a thousand miles away.
And when we study what they've seen,
very often we can get objective consensus confirmation
that the things that that consciousness has observed
have actually happened, that it confirms something
that is found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead Bardo Thodol,
where at the time we die we become what they call a bardo body
and that body has access to any location on the entire globe.
So it has the freedom to move around
and perceive things happening in the world.
I've had a lot of experiences myself in psychedelic sessions
where I'd had that feeling that it too is happening to me
and that I'd-- that I'd sort of gotten into that afterlife state
and that I'd even been surprised afterwards when I'd gone back
to where I was, where I'd taken the substance.
I'm also prepared for, like, when the time comes,
the curtain goes down and there's this...
When they're playing those cartoons, the Silly Symphony, when it's over,
there's this little guy who goes, "That's all, folks, this is it."
This is what we've been preparing for for years,
that that really nothing like this is going to happen.
And on the other hand, I'm strongly leaning
towards it being an adventure.
And who decides what is reality,
what is delusion, a mask, an illusion?
It's a constantly changing concept...
What do you think? I don't know.
Even the scientific concept is changing.
Even the materialistic paradigm is gradually changing,
and yet there are still people who don't budge...
"Please don't tell me this, this kind of bullshit."
Who decides? What do you think?
And you? Hmm...
And you? Hmmm...
So I had one interesting experience.
I was approached by a guy who said he was a friend of a friend of mine.
He knew exactly which table my friend and I used to sit at,
that we went there for fried cheese,
that I liked it without the tartar sauce,
and the gist of why he was talking to me
was that he had some sort of health problem with his cervical spine
that he hadn't been able to fix for a long time
and he wanted to try the method of acupuncture.
Back then it wasn't commonly known and it wasn't very well accepted,
It was even considered as a quack,
But I'd been practising it already for a long time.
And he asked me if I could guarantee
that I would cure him and there would be no complications.
He asked, "See those two guys over there?"
So I looked, there were these two massive hulks standing,
so in a slightly ironic tone, I added, "I can see, I'm not blind."
He said: "Should anything happen to me, the two will eliminate you."
And I was about to take a breath to say something wannabe funny,
and that moment I realised that the guy was right,
that it was no joke at all.
And I said, "Okay, we're agreed, if it doesn't work out,
now let's agree, if it does work out, if I can have a request."
"Of course," he said, "ask for whatever you want."
So I told him, "Okay, let's agree that in about a year,
you tell them to eliminate me. I want it to look like a sudden death
or an accident because I wanted to take out an insurance policy
to keep my wife and son safe."
At that point, again, the gentleman's features stiffened
and he didn't believe I was serious, but the bottom line was
that I was dead serious,
because that's where I realised firsthand in the real world
that if you have any experience
of that other type of death, you can't be threatened with death.
Because death is no tragedy for you,
but for me it's just something breathtaking,
something delightful that I'm looking forward to,
hugely looking forward to, and in a way I was sorry
that I was successful with this guy, and so I'm sitting here telling you.
So I'm afraid of death, but I also know that when it comes,
I'll only be afraid of it for a little while.
I've experienced what it's like a few times.
Right before the moment before you leave yourself,
but then when you leave yourself, it's okay.
This body, which is actually a piece of matter,
which is like from my perspective,
when I was feeling the freshness and the smells and the pleasure,
it looked like a piece of stinking something
that I had to put on in order to finish what I wanted to finish,
which was to go to my mother and tell her that I loved her.
There's a moment when you're coming back to life or giving birth
you go through a veil of oblivion,
so I didn't know my mom was sitting with me,
but gradually I remembered who I was, what my name was,
and I came back in a lot of pain because my whole body was broken.
So the doctors were shocked, thrilled that I hadn't died,
but the prognosis they gave me was one of lifelong consequences,
that I wouldn't be able to walk and that I would have to undergo
intensive treatment for at least a year and a half
and God knows if the treatment would be successful.
And at that time I was strengthened by the awareness of the source we are from,
I knew that everything manifested in the outer world,
that is, everything physical comes from the source of life,
comes from our home, whatever is out there can be created from spirit.
So I actually thought: "Okay, the doctors tell me
it's not going to get fixed, but I'm more than a body,"
so even though I didn't say anything to anybody,
to the doctors and thanking everyone, I was grateful for the care,
but I wasn't eating any pills, that they gave me,
which I was getting a lot of, and I was secretly hiding them,
and since my body was really hurting and because I had no relief,
I started trying to figure out what it meant that I was of the spirit
and that I could make everything out of the spirit.
So I said okay, I'm going to take this knowledge
and I'm going to infuse it into my body as it can make it healthy again.
To help myself from the pain, which was really unbearable,
I imagined that the light, the beauty, the bliss,
the source was going through my body.
So then I started to imagine it as a kind of golden honey
that actually went from my head slowly through my body all the way down,
then coming back again, and I would lubricate myself with this honey,
for hours and hours and hours,
and it helped me a lot, and it actually didn't hurt my body.
And without me knowing it,
something happened that again nobody expected,
and that is that the doctors started to perceive a tremendously fast,
fast healing, they didn't understand it.
So instead of being left unable to walk, I actually got out of bed in a month
and learned to walk again and was able to go home.
I just wanted to get back to life,
so instead of a year and a half of rehab and so on,
I was back at work in three months, but like a hugely interesting experience,
that is, that my body repaired itself without any consequences.
And now it's been 25 years,
I still don't bear any consequences, except I have scars all over my body,
I don't feel pain, I don't feel weather changes.
This is wonderful, the consciousness that we are made of really creates
and really repairs the body as well.
So I decided, since I'm here and I can't die yet
and I've already told my mom that I love her,
I actually decided to carry on the beauty
and carry on the love that I knew in that death.
So I've decided to work with children
who I want to keep that awareness of where they came from
for as long as possible, or rather, not limit it.
I try to help them understand why they are here in the world,
to understand that they are the ones who bring light and goodness and beauty
and that they can make the world more beautiful if they wish.
Walter Pahnke was the other doctor in that, besides me,
in the study that we had with the cancer patients
and he and his family went to Maine to their cottage on the coast.
And he had very shortly before that become interested in scuba diving.
He went on an underwater expedition before lunch and never came back.
The body vanished into the Atlantic Ocean.
His wife had great difficulty with coming to terms with his death,
as it were, because he was energetic and full of life, full of vigour.
We had the opportunity to give LSD sessions to psychologists
and psychiatrists as part of the research,
so she decided to have an LSD session
and see if she could get some insight there into what had happened
and come to terms with the situation somehow.
In the middle of that session, Walter showed up
and had this telepathic exchange with her
where they were talking about the future of their children
and she asked him:
"How am I supposed to live without you?" And the answer was:
"Live as if you never knew me, you have complete freedom."
After that happened, she sat down
and she took off her blinders and she said to me,
"This can't be true, this is my imagination,
he just said what I want to hear, this can't be true."
And she went to the bathroom and she came back
and she put the blinders back on and the headphones back on
and she listened to the music.
And the vision of this Walter reappeared and this Walter said:
"I forgot one thing:
could you return the book..." He named the friend
from whom he had borrowed a book, the name of the book
and where to find it on the third floor where he had his office
and described the easel that the book would be on.
And so then she couldn't wait to get back from that experience
and we both went and found the book.
So again, the question is this, is this evidence of that?
Was it really Walter?
At least it was what Jung calls synchronicity,
a very strange coincidence.
Is it possible to make contact with the world of the dead?
And is it appropriate? Many people are afraid of it.
Oh, it's as if death has touched me,
better not tell me about it.
What is going on when you dream about your dead grandfather?
Have you made contact or not?
Eleven years ago, my mother died.
The passing of loved ones is hard for both parties
and even harder for the dying person,
as they go into the unknown in utter ignorance.
And I wanted to make it easier for her, I always told her,
"Don't worry, life goes on."
On the third day after her death,
she came to say goodbye to me and I saw her etheric body,
and it came up to me and it said to me in an inner voice,
"Evinko."
And I said to her again internally, "You made it."
She was able to detach herself from the corporeal or the flesh.
And after about another 50 days, something happened,
that for the first time there was a note that was actually written
in lipstick that she used in her bathroom downstairs,
and there were a few of these notes.
It was strange that they even had a punch line or a meaning.
The first message was,
"I'm with you." It's weird. The second was, "I miss you."
It makes sense. Christmas came and it was, "Merry Christmas."
We left the apartment as we didn't want to be here,
we went to a relative's house, we came back and it was,
"I'll come with you."
And then there was a period of time when I was sad,
I was crying here, and I found a new note in the afternoon
and it was, "Why did you cry again today?"
And one time I felt like the mirror downstairs was pretty full already,
she didn't have anywhere to write,
so I took her lipstick into the upstairs bathroom,
and it was weird, that day, in the morning I was thinking there,
"What if she wanted to write something?"
And it was snowing that day,
and my son was cross-country skiing around the house,
and I went into the bathroom in the evening, and there it was:
"Lukey is a good boy for having gone cross-country skiing."
And that was proof that she was actually parallel to us.
She could see what we were doing and communicated it in parallel.
These messages started on Dec 8, 2008, and ended on Feb 9, 2009,
and they were done with this lipstick.
Well, I was scared at first, that's like a given, right?
But then I got used to it, and I used to go and see what was going on.
I even told her on her deathbed here, after the death,
"Mom, let me know it's working." I always told her,
"When you see yourself from above,
you're leaving the body, that's it, be calm."
So all this like, well, she kind of fulfilled it.
An experience like this can be incomprehensible to many people.
Yet indigenous traditions around the world believe
in communicating with the dead.
Voodoo in Haiti, for example, is directly based on this.
Just as the spider wraps its victim in fine threads of webs,
so we too are wrapped in the fine hypnotic threads
of a system of power, which,
using progressive orders, bans, limitations, and notions,
that tries to make us into a kind of function of the system,
a kind of robot that, under the mirage of self-realisation,
actually becomes an obedient puppet, performing the tasks entrusted to it.
We become a kind of zombies.
Just as zombies are created in voodoo ceremonies in Haiti.
We'll show you what we've got in a few minutes.
The different things we do with ghosts.
But it's a major secret, we've never shown it to anyone before.
It's very secret!
Zombies are not human like us,
they are our own people who have died
and we protect them from being used by someone else.
It's a rarity to put a spirit into a human body and make it work.
What's a zombie?
After the death of a person and their burial,
the next night you go to the graveyard to the grave of the person
and call them by name so that they wake up.
He appears before you as a person.
Then the voodoo priest summons his spirit, catches the zombie
and takes it away.
The zombie has enormous power.
For example, it can do the work of six people in a single day,
and the next day it can work again.
But she knows nothing and acts like a child.
The individual himself should not awaken the ghost,
because it can be very dangerous.
We're actually kind of weird, new-age zombies
that don't need to be controlled by magic or herbs.
We let ourselves be controlled by loans, mortgages,
by fears, scares, terrorism.
All we need are various diagnoses, illnesses, and then we worry...
We worry about some lives that aren't really even happy...
So why are we so worried about them?
What might help is some proof
that death is a passage, a gate, a continuation.
But where to get such evidence?
Perhaps it could be the phenomenon of shared death
that Raymond Moody talks about.
When there's a time during a call, when we stop resuscitation
or don't even start it, as it's impossible to resuscitate those people,
when at that point I have time to pray for them
and focus there for a moment just on them, I do that.
I imagine maybe the light that they're into
or that it's just shining there for them,
clearing the space,
or that just that light is giving them love, trust, care.
I feel the light is on around me.
Sometimes I feel like there's a crowd of beings behind me,
sometimes I feel like a complete release and joy
that goes through my whole body
and I feel like the whole room is saturated with this feeling,
like the weight of things is disappearing
into complete lightness.
Of course, one might try to argue that it's hallucination,
but those individual experiences
are often experienced by multiple people at the same time.
Medical staff, doctors.
It can even involve someone who is not fully present at the dying.
And in retrospect,
the experience of those individual people in that particular case is identical.
So it can't just be wiped off the table somehow.
And it's not just Raymond Moody who first described it in his books,
thousands of professionals have experienced it.
When I've talked to people who have accompanied a loved one like this,
they've all really said that they felt a tremendous joy in that moment.
And such a deep peace
that they couldn't even properly put into words.
We started talking out of words
and my mom started telling me about the beautiful colourful garden
and she took me to that garden.
We were surrounded by a large, yellow, white light
and the garden in full bloom,
filled with something indescribable in words.
For most of those people,
actually that moment of their loved one's death,
that experience that they shared with them, they actually described it
as going partway with them, to the other side.
So that's actually one of the most powerful experiences
they've ever had in their lives.
As I lay down, I closed my eyes, it was right away.
The light came back on so fast, and I was like, "Dad, you're here."
And he really started talking to me, and it wasn't like I could hear him,
it's not something you can hear with your ears,
it's more like mental speech.
He was telling me all was fine.
And he started showing me,
like realistically the mind is transported to some new space.
I felt like it was more real than that.
I've felt ever since then that these are like weird backdrops.
And that's when I really started to perceive what he was perceiving.
There were these creatures that were like out of the condensed darkness,
kind of folded over each other in different ways.
And they had completely black eyes,
even blacker than black, and very expressive.
And they started coming towards me, and I was like, "Oh, my God!"
It started to get really cool, the situation.
I was like... I was fully living it at that point,
and as they started to get closer, they were this close,
the black eyes started to draw me in,
and now I was fully immersed in that darkness
until I ceased knowing about myself.
There was a total nothingness that consumed everything.
And that's when I got so scared,
I was like grabbing onto the bed and going, "No, no!"
Spasmodically, like mentally, with all the exhaustion, I was like,
"No I want to go back, I'm not going to make this,
I'm scared, I'm not into that."
At that moment, as I caught myself, I said "no," it started to fade,
the image, and I started coming back to myself on that bed.
Once or twice I had the feeling that the patient was telling me
that actually they were already... Like why am I doing this to them,
that they were already this happy,
although I didn't know anything about them at the time,
what ailment they did or didn't have,
whether they were young or old, it simply didn't matter.
It was such a strange feeling, as if I was breaking in somewhere
with my skills, with my knowledge, with my expertise,
where the patient's personality didn't want to go anymore.
However, I spoke to some paramedics who said their feelings were similar.
They feel equally uncomfortable since our mission is to save
and now all of a sudden something comes along you don't understand,
you just feel it and it's against it.
But at the same time, of course,
it must not deter him from doing the urgent work that is required.
He told me what happened next.
That when he got out of it, and I really don't know how.
Then it was like the Garden of Eden,
he was really describing it to me as paradise
and I started to see a different world again.
I saw it as a garden with lots of life, greenery, people.
And my dad was suddenly, so healthy, so full of vitality.
He was very overweight before he died.
He was so run down, his joints were aching.
And all of a sudden he was just showing me he was running, jumping...
And there was a great joy, freedom, liberty, so it was a wonderful world.
So then we said goodbye, and the experience faded away.
I still felt a kind of satisfaction that everything was okay.
I had this overwhelming feeling that my dad wasn't actually dead,
that he hadn't really died.
I met my dad again and he was like,
"I gotta go, this is the last time I'm gonna see you."
I'm like, "Well, Dad, bye, then."
And he's like,
"Hey, I gotta go over there now, I got a new place now."
And he's pointing upwards in the sky somewhere and singles out a star,
I could feel the star shining with the colour of the clothes
that he was wearing and he says, "That's where I'm gonna be now,
On that star."
And I was like, "So don't get lost!" I'm like, "Okay, Dad, thank you."
And so I said goodbye to him one last time.
It seems that the way we live is the way we die.
And that's why it's probably tactical to prepare for death.
It's just that for a lot of people, it's unimaginable.
How can I prepare for death when I have so much to worry about in life?
It's just that for some cultures,
the entire second half of life has been used to prepare for death.
To go out balanced, in harmony,
and cleansed.
Let's accept the idea that we accept the fact
that death is not the end of everything.
Does this help us to come to terms with, say, the death of a loved one?
Can we imagine coming to terms with the death of our own child?
For many people, such an idea is completely unacceptable.
And yet there are people who have done just that.
When it was my turn two hours later,
they told us that the baby's heart was not beating
and that our baby girl was dead.
That we have two options: a Caesarean section or stillbirth.
We decided, based on some experience, even from friends and distant family,
for the second option.
Well, I was so scared, I wanted a C-section,
I wanted to be able to not see and not hear.
Luckily I had Peter there who actually supported me
and told me that we could just do it together. And we did.
It was totally unbelievable because I actually promised
to like cut her umbilical cord, so I did,
and then I held her and everything and like,
what you feel, it's unbelievable.
When I held that daughter in my arms, I felt a very deep peace.
Something that you've been trying to get to all your life,
like I mean close to yourself and that peace inside,
was automatically there.
And I have to say,
I actually experienced that for the first time,
with the encounter with the death of my own daughter,
when I was holding her and bidding her farewell,
I actually felt what I thing everyone should be getting closer.
And sometimes it's not easy to find those ways to yourself.
I don't think it's easy for other people to understand it.
They're like, "This is tough,
I'd like to get rid of it as quickly as possible and so on."
But we think both think, that the experience we had there
was one of the most profound experiences of our lives.
It was same encounter as the birth of all of our other daughters.
I felt at that moment that the daughter was somewhere
where she was much better off than if she had been in that earthly body,
but actually it automatically flashed through me
that the daughter was not dead, that this was just a body
and that her soul was still, so she was with us for a while...
We even did a ritual afterwards
where we actually said goodbye to the soul to let it go,
let it go where it was supposed to go,
so that we wouldn't hold it down with our earthly sadness down here.
And that helped me so much because I knew,
that if I was tying her down with this sadness, saying to her:
"Gee, why did you leave us, Jesus, what did you do to us?"
That's not going to help her.
I could transform my motherly love into actually giving her the freedom
that for some reason her soul had decided to leave early.
And I just respect that,
and that helped me to accept the situation.
I was pregnant with our fifth child
and I was in the last weeks of pregnancy,
so it was like the whole, it was amplified by that.
My husband struggled for so long, especially with the pain,
that was probably the worst part.
Then it was clear that nothing could bring him back.
So I decided to actually transfer him home immediately.
So those last moments were actually... if I can say they were beautiful,
I mean, I think so, because we were together until his last breath.
That moment of leaving, that was so powerful.
It was clear to me at that moment that, just at that certain moment,
one moment, there's just the body, the soul having left the body,
but it doesn't disappear.
I went to the maternity hospital the very next day.
That was like half awake,
and then all of a sudden I knew he came to see me and I was like,
"Peter, you just can't do that,
I can't be here like this,
I can't be alone with these kids, I just can't do it."
And he was like, "Oh, yeah, you can do it."
I was like, "Let me come to you." And he said, "That time will come."
It was a very powerful experience for me, because I was convinced
that he was coming to tell me that he knew about us,
wherever he was, that he was taking care of us, in whatever way he could.
And I just know that he's with us, that he's always with us.
Even my kids, sometimes totally unexpectedly, talk to him,
like my son, who was less than 3 years old at the time,
sits down with a picture and talks to him.
I can actually think of him all the time and I can think of him as pain free.
I think that we just had a wonderful ten, eleven years,
that we just made it to the end, at least to the end of one of us.
So I still have him in me, still.
And maybe without too much sadness.
When one is as it were in the pain, one can either transform the pain
positively, creatively.
Or he can transform it destructively.
And then it's up to each person which side they join.
I have to say that when we said goodbye to my daughter,
it was actually thanks to my husband that I said goodbye to her.
And we actually had two hours alone and because of that,
my mental state was actually, if I compare it to most mothers
who didn't actually have that closure of parting with the child,
they are mentally far worse off.
Since then, we've started to appreciate more
how the family works and what we do and it's, I would say, liberating.
So I think for us,
even though it may sound for some not quite understandable,
it's been a positive experience.
It's perhaps presumptuous to say,
but I feel like it's been one of the greatest gifts I've received.
That actually, I feel an awful lot of unconditional love in that,
from our daughter, what she did.
That she had to come in order to help us leap somewhere higher or further.
I personally have never experienced more peace in my life
than when I was holding this Amalia.
And when I was there with her, I just...
Nowadays whenever I want to calm down or something like that,
I remember that moment...
Exactly, it's hard to put into words.
It was like when a lightning bolt comes and suddenly it lights up...
It lights up here, here,
and suddenly you know what you didn't know before.
The questions that I had before...
How is this possible? Why is this happening? And so on...
Suddenly questions weren't needed, suddenly there were just the answers.
So I knew that nothing in life is a coincidence
and I totally accepted it.
Thank you for letting me experience this.
It gave me a huge strength
to work with my life a little differently,
because I realised how important is to be in the here and now.
When I look at death in this moment,
to me death seems the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.
I really saw it as one big orgasm.
It's really like looking forward to seeing my beloved friend
that I haven't seen all my life...
I'm so excited, and the thought brings me so much joy.
I'm also looking forward to the possibilities
that will open up next because now I know
that nothing will be over.
So I'm looking forward to that, too.
JULIA CROMPTON (TWO WEEKS BEFORE DEATH)
This just goes to show
that one shouldn't take anything too seriously.
Not death, not life,
not even yourself.
Thanks, guys.