experience a near death experience or n d is a period of time when a person is clinically physically disease they visit an afterlife in some form and then miraculously somehow they return for the majority of survivors and are reported as extremely positive and life altering my guest robert packie has written two books and how he survived not  two but three and the he discovered exactly what lives on the other side of our fear about dying and living ready to learn more then state soon as positive three near death experiences you're happy to be and i felt that joe coming into it was still good and still good so you are an author of two books how to survive life and death a guide for happiness in this world and beyond and your second book soon to be released in twenty eighteen how to get to heaven without really dying wisdom from a near death of survivor so your books are about nearly dying three times and what you learnt death is one of the greatest mysteries so i am really happy that you're here to enlighten us and shed some light it is not a somber discussion it's going it's i know it's going to be a fun and enlightening discussion so let's start with a basic definition of a near death experience well yeah i am kind of one of the fun deaf guys such a thing i think you're in a category all your own death guy well i mean just once you realize that there is no death to speak of you're actually we've moved from this body into another existence and so you don't actually die you leave this behind and so that's sad and there is the kind of instincts that you have as a human being that make you want to stay here and continue and like that you know but still when you realize that there is no death it's not quite as daunting as it is otherwise but then you know the near death experience is this a phenomenon that occurs when people come very close to dying like me obviously i didn't actually die or when i would be hurt it's the same case with any near death experience or that they experience something after this life you know that some movement into a greater or different reality sometimes is very specific sometimes it's  very difficult to figure out at all and other times it falls into one of these sort of typical categories or motifs my three near death experiences did that they were all motifs  that are typical to near death experience or is what's commonly reported yeah but there are still the near death experience thing has gone from being something that when i when my first one happened very few people spoke of them or there is very though yeah see my first one was in the eighty's so it was even before that so i didn't talk to anybody about it it wasn't all that well known now there are estimates that up to one in twenty people or near death lamo who's a dutch cardiologist to the study of twenty five hundred people at his hospital and discovered that it was around i think fifteen percent or so of cardiac arrest patients that have had some kind of experience after life as we speak so so you had three near death nearly dying experiences each was distinct and different and separate so tell us a little bit of the story avoided you know and some people have one near death experience and it changes everything for them and for me because of some of the xserve cultural reasons that i described a minute ago i i didn't know what to do with it and i didn't feel like it had really changed my life the first one occurred about twenty years ago or so i was in los angeles and i was driving through a neighborhood that i didn't know very well at twilight and this this will tell you right when it was because something happened to my cassette player in my car and the tape got swallowed and i was fussing with it and just as i reached down to fuss with the tape i glanced off an oddly parked car i was going maybe thirty five miles an hour or so and like straight into a telephone pole boom and i lost consciousness or blacked out briefly but that in the next instant i was back into kind of a different kind of consciousness i was at the top of the telephone pole looking down at the car smashed into the telephone pole with the windshield broken out and this body kind of dripping out of the window and fluid spilling onto the ground and mobs flying around the the streetlight next to me i could look over into people's yards over hedges and bush isn't like and saw people running out of their houses lights going on on the porch and people running out and hollering to get a namby lance and mike and witness this from this completely comfortable easy sort of weightless position that i was in kind of floating as it were a by realize it was me it was my car i tried to move down towards the people when the ambulance arrived and they were loading me in and i was trying to communicate with people but i couldn't and the whole time i felt as though there was and city who are you know somebody with me who was sort of like kind of taken care of me who said then more or less i don't really recall the actual words but you know time to move along and i was shepherded into what was sort of like a cloud back like a good warm gray cloud bank i don't remember exactly my passage but i ended up  in a very pastoral sort of park like setting having a conversation very much like to want to having with you with an entity who i don't really remember exactly i when i tell my stories about m experiences i try not to elaborate too much beyond what i actually remember you know because i know that memory is it can be our demands our rights it's kind of woven into the  so i've tried to really kind of crystallize those memories in place because they're already meaningful enough you know outside of my body like that and looking down on this scene and years later you know after much meditation and study and stuff and i'll get to a little of that later but when i'm able to revisit that experience you know you can't put that genie back in the bottle that's something that's a very unique experience too near death experiences or people who are able to somehow have out of body experiences because it does happen spontaneously or even intentionally yeah people try to teach themselves to do it right to travel astrally and one realizes the reality of being this energetic effervescent diaphanous spiritual being who's inhabiting this human form and that's the part that continues and that's the lesson i call it out of perspective so that now that we're in this human form and where we're on this plane one becomes capable of sort of detaching with compassion and like a compassionate neutrality about things not  cold way but being able to sort of perceive people as vehicles of their spirits and their spirits as expression of this great or what i call divine consciousness that i was entered into on the other  side because i didn't lose consciousness i felt more as though i opened up into it and became part of it unfolded in that some of the opposite of what people expect you actually woke up became more awake you are more heightened yeah a different kind a different form of consciousness and i think of it in terms of not being limited by the physicality of being a human being we experience our consciousness through the filter of being a human being no naturally so that was my first one that was your first one yeah i do want to continue and give you of yes give a brief synopsis of the other two alright i after that it kind of lost interest in what i was doing i was very busy as an illustrator and designer and teacher at that time in los angeles and my wife and i had to time left we dropped everything we travelled for about a year or so around the world we were not spiritual people but we went only to spiritual places we went to  ruins and explored the mayan underworld and looked for tiki in the south pacific and went to buddhist temples and others all of these a spiritual places and on my return  to san francisco we went to my my aunt who had played a very large role in my life who had been very helpful to me died and i was at her bedside when she died and it sort of knocked me out of my out of alignment a little bit my marriage was kind of on the fritz i ended up moving to new york city and i led this sort of riotous lifestyle in downtown manhattan not turn all kind of like i was an artist you know but when and it kind of caught up on me and you can call it a drug overdose  or a kind of a cascade of toxic events or something but i fell out on my my apartment floor and completely lost all sensation in my body i couldn't move and i didn't go any place like i had in the first time but instead a place came to me a white clouds filled in all of my experience the whole room filled in completely  brilliant white cloud i was no longer me in my body but i was there i was still me you know and we always are able to see in our near death experiences so we always remain ourselves in some sense of it and i had this kind of presence behind me again that said look and i looked and there was nothing there at men opened up this kind of a screen and i ha what's called a life free you where these scenes from my life and these were not golden moments you know this was a highlights real these were these sort of seminal pivotal moments perhaps had not been as present for as i could have found and i can't remember exactly what they were i do remember one fairly distinctly being that i was hurting someone and i didn't realize how much i was hurting them at the time or i didn't want to realize it and i had maybe five or six of these sort of serial events shown back to me in a way that wasn't like a movie screen but more like this more like this kind of box of reality that i was was reliving again and then the the external reality of my girlfriend at the time hollering at me started to kind of enter in started to kind of seep into it and slowly this the whole experience has kind of faded away and i was back in my apartment on the floor and sat up and was able to to move around and think again and stuff and calm my girlfriend down that dia the first one i would i was out for about eighteen hours the first car accident the second one this was only about an hour or so this whole event so that was fairly interesting because i mean i've heard about the life review before and i've read about that and i've pondered it very often myself in terms of what it can teach us i've never heard someone who's went as far into death that they had a glimpse of that i was although they say in movies all the time my life flashed before the focus of presence i realize when i think about my life that it's not very much different right in this very moment as it has ever been the externals of all change where i am what you  know shape i didn't stuff is all different but my experience from in here is not all that different than it ever was so this is the moment in which we have the opportunity to focus ourselves and to be there for one another this is the one that counts so you're getting into it so just talk a little bit more now i think about the lessons the most important ones about living because your books are primarily talk about applying these lessons from dying into this current life because hello here we are we're here i don't want to wait til we apply them after death we want to apply them now make it better this have a life there's not that big a difference between different light is seamless that's what death teaches as well they are it's a continu perspective to be able to back off from people and see that consciousness expressing itself through the filter of a person's experiences in life through the human form and being be able to identify with that that we're all the same thing here trying to do the same thing and the second one is the second lesson is is that of presence that i can make the most difference in my life right now always it's always right now that i can make where i can plan for that moment when it comes so that i can be there for you to be able to fulfill my purpose which is my third or third last of it i'll get to that room with her experience so that's when you talk about karma that's your definition of karma is that the choices we're making now if you want to affect your future and change all of your experience as you start you have to be present you have to start living in the now this is causing a ripple effect in the trajectory going forward and it's impacting your experience of death as well even though as you say death is not as big a deal as not lives not the culmination right it's in the can to continuity of life yeah well you know i think that the be selective of your choices that you make yeah i think that the tibetans and and buddhists all are absolutely right about this i'm not surprised that they have it right because i think they have a lot of things right about this karma of course can have a tremendous influence before you're even aware of it and oftentimes because you're not aware of it i was not aware of the karma i was creating in my life even after that second experience when i when i realized that there were these moments that had gone by that i had dropped the ball so to speak that i had created something that i needed to repair somehow in my life up to that point i had not realized that life was this a series of causes and effects that i was exercising my own will to create this body experience that was designing my life yeah you know real direct experience of that so how is it ranged you i'm sure you could talk forever about you know give us a couple of practical ways where it shows up in your life how are you living differently because you died three times yeah it was it didn't change me that much at that point because i still did not have a community or i didn't have a language to speak about it i took a while for yeah for you to understand and realize and talk to others and get some kind of sense of if i talk to people about this other people around just looked at me funny and they did that a lot anyway but in any rate i realize i mean that that the gift of presence that lesson of presence made me realize that the very thing that in each moment i am building my life i am either hopefully making up i have an opportunity to make up for bad karma that i've created in my life which i am seriously trying to do every day that's a great message for people to hear it's never too late absolutely never too late right everything occurs in this eternal moment regardless of what life where in so time is an experience of our biological form i think it's something different when we get on the other side where all of this stuff can kind of happen einstein like you know so i have gone from world right so the perspective and pres of really changed the way that i live my life but it took some time for that to happen i had to have my third near death experience which let me tell you about that just briefly yes ok with that one i was  i was out west and i was moving from new york to arizona and i was assaulted by what we called skinheads at the time but the thug right this kind of a neo nazi sort of a kid assaulted me and when i was fighting back i was knocked unconscious from behind with something a blunt object like a tire iron or something and i was stomping kicked for the better part of an hour by a group of these a gang of these guys this was my least favorite way to go so sorry that happened by the way i'm glad you're here in retrospect it's not so bad but at the time it was pretty awful although i got knocked unconscious right away and i went to another place that wasn't nearly as heavenly like it was much more elemental it was kind of darker and i had the feeling of being in the earth in a funny way and i was surrounded by a group of benevolent entities and still this feeling of being folded into consciousness and love fully loved fully supported right and i did not want to leave and they were telling me that i needed to because i hadn't done things  right where you know i hadn't gotten it right up to the back and try again and the look in my memory they lifted me up and pushed me through something was the sensation that i had and almost like popping through a membrane kind of you know all the while telling me to go back and you know do it right i my eyes opened up i was laying on my back on the sidewalk in arizona town and there was an emergency medical worker over me who said he's back and it took me some time to recover from that i needed reconstructive surgery and stuff i was in really bad shape i had been out for about three or four hours and i came back to this world realizing i had to be in this world for some purpose and so that's my third lesson that i talk about  particularly in the book how to get to have an without really dying so their perspective presence and purpose that each of us does have some unique yeah we're not here by accident we have something to learn as well something to and in fact spiritual success is very different from material success very different you know happiness is not created in the material world without spirituality so i know that you've been going around talking about your books and giving this message i think just sort of in closing what has been their response to that and what is the main message if there was just one that you would want people to really go away with the main message i can tell you is to remove the obstacles to love in your life that's kind of the nature of being in this outfit is that it brings all this stuff up that makes us think one way or another if we can detach ourselves from our serial thoughts and meditation is a great way to do that meditation and prayer make ourself of service to others recognize the terminal in one another primarily and don't sweat the small stuff i've heard it said right then we can be present in a way that we can remove the obstacles to live which i see as this field that's the mater of divine consciousness that expansion into consciousness i experienced was experience of love as a field of being that's constantly arising in different forms in this life it's constantly presenting to you the directions to go the things you need to work on that kind of stuff and  that yes i would imagine yeah as well and if you can get away from the demanding labeling comparing judging the voice in your head there is a place of call marie is an intuitive intelligence that you can inhabit that i call your authentic self and that's your spiritual self when i go out and talk to people about it now i don't really care so much what they think about what i'm saying but i also find myself often in this community of like minded people where i feel right at home talking to people about this is no coincidence that it's fun to talk to people that are skeptics i really enjoy that because i like to get a little scientific about quantum physics or the nature of consciousness in the scientific examination of what could be to bring to life in the matter what is going on right here right now so that's a lot of fun for me i enjoy talking to yeah i bet i bet you can see in their eyes maybe that little bit of an aha moment where they open their minds to something absolutely that must be extremely rewarding to you and part of why you're out there doing what you do and maybe part of why you're back why you didn't leave forever and why you're still here right and so it's a really really important message you know for people to experience that what death teaches us is how precious and how wonderful a magnificent this life really is and that there really isn't anything to fear absolutely i love that it always comes back to love i love that it comes back to love it does because that's what it's all about the one of the things that i've been really lucky to be able to do is to help people that are dealing with issues around death how to survive life and the first book really is about that it's really to help ameliorate the kind of fear and grief and difficulties because when we show up for death with this kind of understanding that the soul requires it for spiritual growth and it's not the end of anything whatever kind of whether you lose your job or you lose your life there's this passage that we have to go through to be able to become teachable and grow from so what i can be with people who are at the end of their life or in situations where somebody has recently died and be of help to them be a service to them i really enjoy doing that it's a beautiful spirit of course are available to people should people should really check out your books for more on your story and see if that really resonates for you but i just want to thank you on behalf of everyone then for the work that you're doing in the world and i really enjoyed the book i look forward to reading the next one and i really just want to thank you for being here today on positive energy so thank you thank you so much for having shawl it's been a real pleasure thank you we're wrapping up another enlightening show i hope we brought you some comfort and that you remember there is nothing to fear around them your true purpose in living is to live well lived fully as long as you are alive please visit michelle gramberg dot com thank you monday morning flowers for the beautiful floral arrangement thank you for watching and join me next time on positive energy