TRANSCRIPT
[This is] something I rarely talk about in public. I [wrote] about this 20 years ago in one of my books, and I have not talked about this very much. I had two near-death experiences, both of them in the same year of my life, when I was five years old.
One of them was with electricity, and I remember very consciously taking a wire, with scissors I scraped the insulation, so this bare copper wire, and I walked to an electrical outlet and I plugged both in the outlet and I was severely burned. Even today, I have scars. It’s black. My face was burned. My eyelashes were gone. My eyebrows were burned. And it was in the middle of the day, like this, when it happened.
And I was placed in my bedroom while the doctor was coming to the house. My mother called the doctor, and they said, wait, wait here. And while I was waiting, broad daylight, I began to see things in my room that I did not see before the electrical experience.
So the shock literally shocked me into an awareness of another reality that I had not seen before. And for me, the experience was a very positive experience. It was the opportunity to, there were beings in my room that were healing my body. And one of them was behind me, even though there was a wall, there was a being where there should be a wall, and one of them is at my feet.
And when the doctor arrived at my room, the burns were already beginning to heal. So it was an experience for me: it told me that there is another way to feel, and when I feel this way, the world looks different, another way of seeing.
Okay, later in that month, I was in a swimming pool. My mother was with me. She had gone with friends and I was left alone, and I walked into the water in the shallow end, and I began just to walk and the water was deeper and deeper and deeper, and I went to the very bottom of the deep water. And I remember that it felt very peaceful.
I opened my mouth, I let out the air, and this peace and this calm came over me, and I could see the beings that were with me and they were telling me that I had to make a choice, that either I come back to this world or I go to another world, and it was my choice. It was my choice.
And I made a choice to be in this world, and then suddenly people were pulling me out of the water and they were pumping on my chest and that was when the pain began. The pain was when I came back to this world, but when I was in between, and I don’t know how much time there was, there was no pain at all. It was very peaceful. It felt very good.
And it taught me what it feels like to let go, because when I was in the water, I completely let go. I let go of my breath. I let go of this world. And that was it. And it taught me that when it is time for me to go to another world, it taught me what that will feel like, that it is a peaceful, a calm feeling of letting go.
I don’t have to cling to this world when the time comes for me to leave. So those two experiences, one taught me that there is another reality and what feeling I can make that shows me that reality.
The other experience in the water, it taught me what it feels like to let go, to absolutely let go, and to know that that is available to me, when I leave this world, not to be afraid.
I think it’s different for different people, and different people, I believe that we have the experience that we need in that moment to help us, give us the tools that we will need from that point forward.
At an early time in my life, it was a very difficult life. My family had a difficult time. My father was an alcoholic. Our family was very dysfunctional. It was difficult for me. I’m the oldest.
I was five and I have a younger brother who is four years younger, so he was only one at the time, and the family dynamics were difficult for me, and I think it was a way for me to escape, I thought.
But what I discovered was it was a way for me to be more in this world, because I learned I could feel, I could have a feeling and the world looked different, I could have a feeling and it would be a calm, a peaceful feeling of letting go, just to let go.
We don’t always think about this. This is very interesting. To be in this world, there is a tension that we hold that keeps us in this world all the time. It’s subconscious. It’s a tension. It says, oh, I’m here. When we’re awake, when we’re asleep, we hold that tension, but we don’t even know it, until we have the opportunity to release it. And when we release that tension, that’s what it feels like.
Now, as an adult, I study ancient traditions, indigenous traditions and native wisdom, and what I learned is that, in many traditions, when people reach the age, old age, and it’s time for them to die, they don’t suffer. They call it conscious death. They simply let go. And in Egypt, the Egyptian traditions, on the temple walls, they actually talk about the ceremony of letting go, so conscious death, letting go.
So I learned that feeling for myself when I was very young, and so I don’t fear that time in my life. I’m not ready for it. I believe I will be here a very long time, and I told my mom, my mother, after those experiences, I told my mother, I will be in this world for 200 years. And she said, why 200 years? And I said, because I want to see the change that’s happening in the world. Well, this was in the 1950s, and my mom says, what change? [Laughs] I said, the big change that will happen in the world.
Now, we know, I have been with Tibetan monks, Tibetan nuns, that are 120 years old and they’re very healthy and very strong, and I expect they will continue to live as well.
The best science now tells us that every organ in our body has the ability to heal itself, every organ, even the organs we were told could not (so brain tissue, spinal cord tissue, heart tissue, pancreatic tissue) — all now are documented with the ability to heal themselves if they are given the right environment, and that environment is directly connected to thoughts, feelings and emotions, how we feel about this world.
And if we are frightened, if we live in fear, that is a form of stress, and the stress is what steals the life from our bodies. If we have that stress, if we’ve learned to heal the stress, then our bodies are able to heal and reproduce, the cells reproduce and heal themselves all the time.
So, I have always told my mom, now my mom’s health, she is declining. Her memory has disappeared. And I visited my mom the day before I came on this trip, I went to see my mother, and at first she doesn’t recognize me. And then I said, Mom, it’s Gregg. And she says, oh, you’re going to live 200 years [chuckles], and she remembers that. She still remembers that after all this time.
[Music]
