adam rizvi for podcast

Close your eyes and imagine. What if the things in life that caused us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth, and I am your host, Brian Smith. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Grief to Growth. I'm Brian Smith, and whether you've been with me from the beginning or you're fighting this show for the very first time, I'm so glad you're here. This show is about making sense of life, especially when life doesn't make sense. We sit with the questions that keep us up at night. Who are we really? Where do we go when we leave these bodies? And could it be that the people we love are far closer than we've been led to believe? I bring on guests to help illuminate the path, no matter how dark it feels. And I'm really excited about my guest today. His name is Dr. Adam Rizvi. Dr. Rizvi is a critical care physician who's spent his career standing at the exact place where most of us are afraid to look. In the ICU, in the Intensive Care Unit. Adam has been present for countless moments of transition, and somewhere along the way, he stopped being able to explain everything he was witnessing with medicine alone. Intuitive knowing, visions, synchronicities, rooms that fill with white, luminous presences that arrive right at the threshold of death. He's a doctor with the credentials to excel in traditional medicine and a deep grounding in metaphysics. And in his new book, Love Does Not Know Death, stories of death, dying, and the miracles of true forgiveness, he brings both those worlds together. Now, what moves me about Adam's work is where he lands, because it's the same place my own journey delivered me. Though we arrived, of course, through very different roads. I came to it as a father who lost my daughter. He came to it by standing at hundreds of bedsides, and we both ended up convinced of the same thing. That consciousness doesn't end, that death is a transition of perception rather than an ending, and that love, the essence of every relationship we've ever had, simply does not die. In this episode today, we're going to talk about what it looks like when a man of science makes peace with the sacred. We'll talk about the experiences that cracked his worldview open, what he believes is really happening in those final moments, and how teachings from A Course in Miracles and Tibetan Buddhism reshaped how he understands the people in his care. And we'll get to the heart of his message, that forgiving death means recognizing recognizing its unreality, and the most real thing in any room is love. So, if you're the one, like me, who has been quietly afraid, afraid of dying, afraid of losing someone, or afraid that the person that you lost is truly gone, this conversation is for you. And I think you're going to leave it breathing a little easier. If you want to continue this conversation after the episode, head over to GriefTheGrowth.substack.com where you'll find an article about today's episode, and you can connect with me and other listeners. So with that, let's welcome Dr. Adam Risveen. Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure. It's an honor to be on this show. Yeah, I'm super excited about having you. We talked a little bit before we got started. We have similar but different backgrounds. I'm a person of science. My degree is in engineering. I was raised in a world that says everything is material. And I know as a doctor, I'm going to assume you kind of got that training as well. So explain to me, like, how did you decide to get into ICU medicine in the first place? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I didn't always want to be a doctor. In fact, one of the majors that I did in college was comparative religion. And I just felt like there was something more going on. Even early on, my mom was raised Catholic. My dad was raised Muslim. And I thought, all right, there's got to be some unifying truth. And so a lot of my college years was in search of that. What's the unifying truth that holds it all together? And I remember at junior year of college, I told my dad, I'm going to apply to be a comparative religion professor. And I actually got an offer to be an assistant professor, just starting. And he was like, over my dead body. That's not going to pay well. He was very Pakistani man, traditional, conservative. He's like, you're going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. One of those three respectable professions. None of this philosophy stuff, which is funny. So I kind of rebelled. And I said, okay, well, if I can't do that, then I'm going to be a barista at Starbucks. So I went off and I did the barista thing for about half a year before I caved in and realized, you know what, there's medicine. I was also a biology major. So I did have some interest in science. I decided to give in and I said, okay, you know, at least it'll give me a couple of years of being able to do something. So I went into medical school and realized that I actually do love this. And what I loved was not so much science, which that was intellectually simulating. But what I loved was the time with patients. I liked talking. I liked to be at the bedside. I liked talking to them. I ended up in the hospital, what they're going through. That slowly became my favorite part of medicine. Wow. Getting, getting into other people. That's awesome. Yeah. Because a lot of people go into medicine, frankly, you know, for the money, the, I guess, the glory. And, and then there is, and I've, I've interviewed a few doctors and talked to people, especially for doctors, as opposed to nurses, I think they're taught a very materialistic view that, you know, we're just treating just to treat the body, just to treat the, to treat the symptoms. And when that person, if we lose them, then they're gone. Yeah. Yeah. So I went into after four years of medical school, I went into neurology, neurology residency. That's another four years. That was, I was deeply steeped into that worldview that you're describing, Brian, which is that the firing of neurons produces consciousness and that if you have a sufficiently complex network, then this, there's an emergent phenomenon that happens in it. And we call it consciousness. That's the dominant worldview of, of medicine and I think materialist science. And it's funny, I, I had already been pretty well versed in spirituality from my parents and also from the comparative religion work with, with Buddhism and other religions that I was all already at a point where I was like, there's something more going on. There's thousands of years of saints and mystics and various masters and all this type of saying that there's more to life than the body. We are more than the physical body. So I went into medicine. I kind of, I jokingly said this to my mom, I feel like I'm going in the belly of the beast. Yeah. I knew materialist perspectives weren't the whole truth. They, they were helpful because look how far they got medicine, right? Yeah. Medicine is helpful. I practice it. I can see the benefits of certain prescriptions and certain surgeries and whatnot, but it's not the whole truth in my opinion. And so I went into all of that and holding that perspective loosely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you saying that. And it's really, it's really interesting. And I kind of looked at the same thing myself, you know, when people in modern times think this is the way it's always been, we've always been this materialistic society. And I don't mean that in terms of like, we like stuff. I mean, in terms of the materials, all there is, but the fact is that's a relatively recent phenomenon. It's been the last couple of hundred years that we've become so enamored with the physical and saying that that's all there is. So when you do study comparative religions like you do, you realize that this whole history for the vast majority of man's time on the earth, we've always believed we were something else. It's been this relatively recent phenomenon that we think were, were actually less than what we are. Yeah. Yeah. You know, no one's ever said that, but in, in these interviews that I've had, but you nailed it, the vast majority of the time our species has believed and experienced that we are more than the physical body. And you know, it sort of does something to you when you live life knowing that the body as it ages and decays entropy and it plays its role, that it's okay, because there's a part of me, the me that I really am, that will keep going on and on. And the same thing with how we relate to, and this is the whole premise of our talk and my book and your, your show, which is that when the physical body dies, that's not the end. That's not the end. So I think, and I'm only coming to this realization now as I'm talking to you, part of the, the trouble that the modern society has that the lack of a mythos, the lack of this like underlying substrate of, of understanding who we are in the universe, people are lost these days. They're so lost because they don't have a context. They don't have a spiritual framework and it doesn't matter what it is, but some framework is better than nothing. And I feel like we're, we're in the search for trying to find how the world works using material as science. We've lost a framework. We've, we've, we've lost a spiritual framework. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, um, I was interviewing a guy who's a, he's an actual electrical engineer and he's really into what we, what we call now metaphysics. And he was describing to me what metaphysics means, because when we hear it, sometimes we think, well, that's just woo woo. That's just the, the author's stuff. But what, the way you describe it is like, you know, physics, biology, chemistry, they study a very important part of the universe. You know, the part that allows you to practice medicine, the part that allows us to use the technology to speak back and forth. But what they, what scientists did kind of when consciousness, when they couldn't solve the problem of conscious, what they call the hard problem of consciousness, they basically said consciousness doesn't exist. It's not even worth looking at. We're just going to set that aside and we'll let religion handle that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and the meta, I'm sure metaphysics is like, okay, once, once we've all made the attempts to answer everything from this plane, now we have to go beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's kind of where we both are. And it's really interesting that you had that, that background going into it, but then you get inundated with like the physical. So as you're in the ICU, as you're having these experiences, tell me about some of the experiences you had that really like demonstrated to you that there's more. Yeah. Well, it's, it started off, I've had a handful of people who have had cardiac arrest, meaning their, their heart stopped. And it's such a weird feeling, Brian, when as a physician, you are trying, you're doing resuscitative efforts. And I remember this one particular story of a, of a gentleman who was getting worked up for getting a heart bypass surgery, he had heart issues. And before he was able to get the surgery, his heart stopped in the ICU. And I remember we were doing resuscitative efforts and we had gone maybe 20, 30 minutes or so. And in between the way you run a code blue or a code is you pause every two minutes to check for the pulse, you know, you check in the femoral artery, the carotid artery. And then sometimes in our case, we have an ultrasound probe on the heart itself to see if the heart is actually beating or if it's at a standstill. And I remember we had the ultrasound probe and this gentleman's heart was at a standstill 30 minutes in and, you know, we all decide, we decided to call it, you know, and, and we said, okay, time of death, whatever it was. And, and I asked for a moment of silence and, and we, we paused. Then this is typical for the most part honoring him. And when everyone started after the moment of silence and, you know, the respiratory therapists and the not, the resident who had the ultrasound probe on the chest, he was just, I don't know, he was just looking to learn a little bit more. And while he was looking, he noticed the heart started to beat again. And he's like, Hey, Dr. Rizvi, his heart's still beating. And then so I look up at the monitor and sure enough from from the zero, it started to show that there was a rhythm. Now, having a rhythm doesn't necessarily mean that you're, that you're back alive, because you can, you can have brain death, which in many states is legal, equates to death. But if you have a pulse, then that's different. So I asked him to check for a pulse and he had a pulse. So as soon as he had a pulse, we said, okay, well, disregard the time of death, he's still alive. And, and that, that's an odd feeling when you have to take back what you said about the time of death. And so we, we, the nurses got back on it, we had we've restarted the medications, we helped him. And he had a breathing tube in. So we had to wait for another day or so before we were able to lighten sedation and help him wake up. But he woke up and we got the breathing tube out. And I remember, I don't think it was that day, I think it was a few days later, talking to him. And he told me that he was somewhere else. He, he was in a very well lit room, it was a huge room. And he said he was talking with all of his family members, aunts and uncles who had passed away his one of his grandparents. And he said it was very bright, it was very bright. And he said he felt so at ease and at peace. And he doesn't remember coming back, he doesn't remember going there, he just remembers that he was there. Now, as a physician, when there's lack of blood flow to the brain, the brain's electrical activity ceases. And 30 minutes, that's a long time not to have adequate blood flow to the brain. I've had patients with massive brain injury with less downtime than that, which it's hard to explain. And that was one case. And there were many others one case, but it was a very clear one that told me, we don't know the full story, we do not understand how the brain works and what its relation is to who we really are, which I my experience is something that's eternal, something that is non physical, that clearly still is able to have experiences of others of selfhood. And that extends beyond the death of the physical body. Yeah, you just touched on a couple of things there that really intrigued me. One is the time of death that we call what we call death. There's, for my answer, there's not a moment of death. It's like, it's like, there's this gradual shutdown of systems, there's the heart, there's the brain, you know, etc. So when doctors call time of death, it's not arbitrary, but it's, it's not a single moment. But the other thing I think is very interesting, a lot of times when people have near death experiences, we get the mystical, they're out of their body, they have this and that. But sometimes we can't even explain their medical situation, like lack of oxygen in the brain for 30 minutes, this should have been brain damaged, right? Yeah. And doctors can't, I mean, you're a doctor, you tell me, can you explain how that happens for some people, but not for others? Yeah, I mean, I could I could put on a hat and try to, you know, some people have better arteries going into the brain, some people have arteries filled with with plaque. And so some people are more susceptible to lack of oxygen than others. But the truth is, some patients like this gentleman, let's go into the science just a little bit if you're okay with that. The ability to perceive visual phenomenon has a correlate in the occipital lobe, right? This is the visual cortex here. Even if you're dreaming, if you were to measure the occipital lobe with electrical for electrical activity, you'd pick up electrical activity that is corresponding to what it is that you're seeing, whether your whether your eyes are open or dreaming with your eyes closed. So there is electrical activity. And the idea is, what you see correlates with electrical activity. If there's no electrical activity, as in the case with this man and others that I've had, I've had others who were actually hooked up to EEGs while they died. And there's no electrical activity, we use the term isoelectric, which means on the EEG machine, there's there's there's flat, there's no electrical activity. And yet, they come back and they report experiences that have visual components. Yeah, they have auditory components, they have feeling and sensation. How do you account for that? The brain is not capturing a felt experience on there on, you know, from the subjective side. That to me is fascinating. I think it is. I think it's very fascinating. And it goes back to that premise that says that the brain, because it's sufficiently complex, generates consciousness. And that's and so we can't, therefore, you can't have a conscious, conscious experience without a brain or without brain activity. And we know that people do have these experiences. So and the word you use the correlate, that's, that's the thing, I think, where people get caught up, you know, materialist, they say the correlation, that's it. That's, that's what's caught. That's what's, that's what the experience is, is the brain activity. Whereas it seems to me a better model is that correlates to something is going on. So there's a there's a model of the brain as a receiver, or the brain as a filter of consciousness, which to me makes more sense in the brain as a generator of consciousness. Yeah, yeah, that this is, we learn this in, it's funny, we actually get taught this in medical school, not to confuse correlation for causation. Exactly. Yeah, we get taught this, but we don't, there's certain areas we just don't apply it to. And there's such a stigma. I mean, I got to tell you, there's such a stigma to talk about this in medicine. And for this, I could have written this book a lot earlier, but there's so much fear that came up with me, like, what are people gonna say? What are my colleagues gonna say, like, should I bother, you know, like, a lot a lot came up for me. But I got to say, in the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a shift. I have these conversations about what happens after we die, the non physical stuff with colleagues of mine way more now than I ever have. There's an opening, I think happening in medicine in, in the world in science. Now, we're not there yet. I think by far and large, most scientists and physicians see things from a materialist standpoint, but there is an opening. And I feel like I don't feel as much of a fear that I'm going to lose my license by talking about this, I think more and more patients and others are open to it. And the other thing is, and this is probably relevant to your listeners and to you. So when I'm at the bedside, and I see what patients and families go through when they face death, I see tremendous opportunity for healing. I've seen some families do miraculous things with, with how they embrace death. grievances that have been held, people who have been estranged from each other, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers, they've never talked to each other for years, finally coming together, healing old wounds, death can do that. And, and I saw it happen so many times in the ICU that I thought, people need to know, they need to know that when, when their loved one is dying, when they're dying, that there's an opportunity here that can't be lost. There's an opportunity for healing and for growth, like, you know, the whole premise of your show grief to growth, they can embrace this for growth. And that that in itself, I think, was the genesis for my book, I wanted people to know, if you're facing grief, if you've lost someone, like I lost my father, you can embrace that as a stepping stone for for a lot of healing. Yeah, well, I want to say, I'm sorry for your loss. I also want to thank you for your bravery for for doing this, because I was going to ask you that question, you know, how have your colleagues responded this, because there is such a materialistic bent, especially in that world. And one of the one of the ways that people, the gatekeepers keep the gate closed is by shaming people that dare to step out and, and talk about the afterlife, or I work with Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona, who studied mediumship for the last couple decades. You got to be a brave person to be working at a university and say, I'm going to study something like mediumship. Yeah, I don't funny I lived in Tucson for for many years, and Gary Schwartz at the U of A. I he doesn't know me, but I know of him and his work. And it's fantastic stuff that he's doing. Yeah, I am mediumship, all of that stuff. It's really not talked about. But in the maybe six years that I've been a little bit more vocal about this, and what I've been seeing, I've only had maybe one, possibly two physicians say something that was a little bit diminishing or dismissive of my interests, but I just take it in stride. By far and large, and this has surprised me, I've had people open up. I've had nurses and physicians and patients say, Oh my gosh, I'm so I would love to talk to you about this, Dr. Rizvi, I had most most doctors aren't into that kind of stuff. It feels so good to be able to talk to you. That's been the response. 90% of the time. That's awesome. I'm so happy to hear that. And it doesn't shock me that you say nurses respond that way, because I've spoke with a lot of nurses too. And they're the ones that are typically by the bedside when people are actually transitioning. So they see even more than the doctors a lot of cases. And it's just undeniable the things they see terminal lucidity, you know, they've seen phenomenal phenomena in the room, you know, light, you know, things happening, you know, physically happening in the room. So they're like, I can't really deny what my eyes are telling me. Yeah, yeah, I, I'm so glad you mentioned that. I want to give a shout out to all the ICU nurses out there, all the hospice nurses out there. They they know far more than I do. I mean, yes, I've had my own fair share of experiences. But there are some nurses that have been doing this for decades. And they know what they're doing. They know how to guide a patient now back back before there were death doulas and that sort of thing. There were nurses at bedside that that knew what was happening that the new, they knew the body was making its transition that the soul was making its transition, and they knew how to how to be there. And it's funny, I feel like we're slowly relearning the the wisdom that was shared in the past. The Tibetans have this thing called the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And they're not unique in having this. There are other traditions that recognize when someone is dying, there's a process that's happening. And it's a process of leaving the body and transitioning, as you said, early on, a shift in perspective, a shift in perception. And I feel like if, if we could understand a little bit more about that process, we would be at the bedside radiating love, radiating a sense of freedom, like really letting the person who's dying know that they're cared for, they're loved, and they're free to go. I mean, imagine making this huge transition. And either on one end, you feel terror, grief, I mean, there's nothing wrong with Greek grief, but like, anger, jealousy, siblings, bickering and fighting with each other. Or you have a bunch of friends and families giving you the permission to go, letting you know that you're loved, that you're forgiven for all the mistakes that you've made in the past that you are truly honored. Imagine making the transition in that vibration. That's a whole different ballgame. And I think that's something that we can, as a gift, we can give to those making their transition. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that 100%. And you know, the thing is, we I work with people every day who have lost someone, and we don't, we don't like it. No matter how long, no matter how long we've been with them, no matter how old they are, we don't like it. But a lot of the reason I think we don't like it is because we think it's a black box. It's like, they're they're going into either the unknown, or they're just ceasing to exist. They're like, they're like a light switch, you turn the light switch off, and they're gone. If we had a true understanding of who we are, and what what death is, then, as you say, we could forgive death, right? Because we we rail against death, we think death is like, it's the worst thing ever. But it's it's something that's in all of our futures. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I see you have a beautiful statue of Jesus Christ up there on your bookshelf. And there's a reason, in my opinion, one of the last lessons he gave was that death can be overcome, not as an enemy, but that just in the recognition that it's not the end. Yeah, yeah. It's it's so important. Yeah, it's well, I have a former Christian, I'm not I don't identify as a Christian anymore. But I'm still a huge follower of Jesus. And Jesus, no matter what else he might have been, you know, Son of God or whatever, was a great metaphysical teacher, who gave us these lessons. And you're right, it's like, death is not the enemy. Death is not a thing. It's, it's nothing. It's, it's, it's a transition. It's, you know, I look at it now, it's like, we graduate from childhood to adulthood, and adulthood, and old age, and an old age, you know, death is just the, it's the opposite of not the opposite of life, it's the opposite of birth. It's it's our way out of this world into the next world. So it's not something to be feared or to be to be fought even. I love that. I love that. It's not it's often portrayed as the opposite of life. Thank you so much. It's Yeah, it's maybe the opposite of birth, but not of life. Life keeps going and going. Yeah. You know, it there's also another two things that came to mind. In the Indian tradition, there, there's a group of sacred texts called the Vedas. And one of the Vedas is called the Katha, or sorry, the Upanishads. One of the Upanishads is called the Katha Upanishad. There's a story of a young boy. His name is Nachiketas. He, his father gets upset at him for a long, long story, but he gets upset at him and says, you know, you can just go to death. I don't want to deal with you anymore. And the boy takes it literally, and he actually goes to the Lord of Death in the in the story. And the Lord of Death makes him wait for three days and feels bad for doing so. And then I'm speeding through the story really quickly, just to highlight. And he says, I will grant you three boons, three wishes, kind of like a genie, you know, and the young boy asks that his father be happy. And then he asks that I forget exactly that he learned more about himself. The final wish that he asks for is, what happens after we die? And the Lord of Death says, don't ask me that one, that that's too complex of an answer. You can have anything else you want. And the boy persists. He persists to the point where the rest of that sacred scripture for the Hindus is this huge treatise about who we really are. And it's funny that for that tradition and many others, the gateway to understanding who we really are is death, at least in that in that philosophical tradition. And the the ancient Greeks and Romans, they have this term memento mori, remember death, right? It's not a coincidence that for many traditions, when you remember death, when you embrace death, when you when you look death at the face, it's a gateway to learning who you really are, the nature of self, the nature of reality itself. Yeah, yeah, I well, that lines with my belief is that and I know you speak about the course of miracles, that this is a dream, in a sense, this is, you know, people can call it a simulation, which I really don't like for because it kind of diminishes the importance of it. But this isn't the ultimate reality. And we forget who we are when we come into this life. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for the forgetfulness. But death is a remembering, it is a coming back to like, oh, yeah, this, this is what the real deal is this, you know, this is why all these things that we went through all this pain, all this trouble, the tribulation we go through in this earth, know why it's all worth it. So I think your work, and again, because you're there, and you've got the credibility, you've got the MD, people listen to people like you. So I really, again, want to applaud you for stepping forward. Evan Alexander, I'm sure you've heard about, you know, had this near death experience, and he writes his book, and then he just gets, you know, eviscerated, you know, people are like, he's a fake, he's a fraud, you know, you know, people come after him, because it upsets this material material is paradigm. There's a lot of investment in this, keeping us forgetting, keeping us in the dark. Yeah, yeah, I'm waiting. I know his story. I've read all his books. And I'm grateful for him, grateful for the work that he's doing. I'm waiting for the shoe to drop, honestly. So far, I've had a good experience with everything. But yeah, that sort of worry is always there. But you know what, it's okay. I feel like the alternative is we all stay lost in the dream. We all stay forgetting who we really are. And it takes you, me, other people to talk about this, for people to slowly start to wake up. And I love the dream analogy and the pointing, because when you're in a dream, you really feel like this is it, like that this is real, and that for the dream to end, all existence would end and you would end. And it just feels like it's a terrible thing. And then when you wake up in the morning, you realize all of it was just a dream. None of it was real. None of it, like all the fears, the monsters, the mistakes, it was all ephemeral. And I imagine that same sort of thing happens in the moment of, now, I'm heavily into the metaphysics here, but enlightenment as sort of a goal is ultimately the recognition that we never left. We wake up to the realization that we've always been that. And a lot of the wisdom traditions, they say that what you're looking for, you already are. But then the enlightenment moment, the realization is the realization that you're already there. You are that. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's one of my favorite movies from the time I was a small child, is The Wizard of Oz, right? And it's like you've never left home. And that's interesting, because that message really resonates with us. And I think it comes back to that remembering. It's like we come here, it's kind of a game we play, we come here to forget, to remember. So we want to wake up in the dream. And I practice lucid dreaming, and every once in a while I can't control my dreams, but I can become lucid my dreams. And sometimes I'll just look around, I'm fascinated by, this feels so real. But then there's always a clue. It's like, I can't remember how I got here. And then it's like, oh, it must be a dream. And at that moment, it's when I wake up. But there's all these, going back to correlations, there's all these correlations that we can see as we look at what's going on in our systems, even with dreams, that tells us that you can have a perception that for all intents and purposes is 100% real. You can feel things, you can hear things, you can see things, you can taste things. And you wake up in the morning and you realize, that was all in my head. I was still in my bed. I wasn't somewhere else. Yeah, I love that you you do lucid dreaming. I love that. I also practice lucid dreaming. One of the one of my first lucid dreams, I was I was in college, or maybe late high school. And I read a book by Stephen Laberge, exploring the world of lucid dreaming. And he talks about this thing where you do reality checks during the day. And you ask yourself if you're dreaming repeatedly. And and a lot of his things were look at digital numbers or letters or words, look away, look back, and you see if they've changed. I've gotten the habit of just doing this all the time, all the time. And that habit, the idea carries into into your dream. I remember when my first major lucid dreams, I was doing a reality check. And I looked down at my digital watch, and then the numbers started to melt, and the watch itself melted off my wrist and it like dawned on me. And it's hard to explain. But I'm so glad that you know this, the exhilaration that happens with the realization that you're dreaming it, it's like hard to describe like this sudden joy, like, oh my gosh, this is this is a dream. And sometimes the joy will be so intense that it just pops you out of the dream altogether. But you have to learn to like control yourself. And I remember I was in a barn, and I walk outside and I saw these aspen trees. And if you've ever seen an aspen tree, the leaves are sort of like these sort of flat discs that kind of shimmer. And and the leaves have the shimmering quality. I felt like I was looking at high resolution, high def, I was just just staring at the leaves thinking, holy crap, my mind is making all of this up. It was wild. Like, how do I have the capability to create an entire world of exquisite detail? And then I take that to this world. How do we know our minds aren't doing the exact same thing? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I have a little thought experiment. I play with people. I'm like, if you were your doctor, you know, if you were if I were a brain in a jar, someone could take my brain and put it in a jar and somehow connect my nervous system to that brain or to connect to my brain like my nervous system is how would I know the difference? How would I know if I'm a brain in the jar from a person, you know, sitting or having this experience? And this is an interesting thought experiment to have because I don't believe this is the ultimate level reality. I don't I don't think I'm a brain in a jar. But I also know that I'm not this body. And that really frees frees me up to not fear death the way so many people do. Yeah, yeah. And and when you start to realize how much of a how important of a role the mind plays in not only producing the experience of this reality, but if we can truly get behind the idea that we are not our bodies, then then the mind becomes so important because this sense of self that continues on is what is what you're left with is what you have. So then the cultivation of the mind becomes very, very important. It becomes the beginning of the path. And what I go towards in the book is, once you have a taste of the realization that you're not the body, then doing the inner work is is the only game in town, that the healing of of the of the self, you know, all those grievances that the the angers, the judgments, the resentments from decades past, that becomes the work that becomes the only thing that really matters is to do that healing work, healing ourselves, forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and maybe forgiveness isn't the right word. Some people don't like it. I've had, I've had a lot of people actually email me saying how how dare you say that my that I'm supposed to forgive someone else. Like there are some things that just cannot be forgiven. And I and I get that like, bad things happen to people that shouldn't ever happen. But if it's okay with you, I just want to share what I mean by forgiveness is not condoning actions. You're not saying what happened to you is okay. You're just saying you're not gonna let that story define who you are. Yeah. Yeah, it's a big difference. I have the good thing about getting to do the things I do, I get to talk to people who have forgiven things. And someone says I could never forgive that you don't understand. I'm like, could you forgive your father if he were a pedophile and it raped you when you were young? Because I interviewed a woman who had a near death experience. And that was her experience with her with her father. And I interviewed a guy whose father murdered his mother. And he's forgiven him. Now it's interesting, because he said, I will never have anything to do with him again. He will never meet my children. But I don't let that hold me. You know, I don't let that define me. I love the way you put that. So forgiveness is not for the other person, necessarily. Forgiveness is you releasing yourself from what they did to you. So that's why forgiveness is so important, because it's for us, it's for ourselves. Yeah, you said it so well, Brian. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. It's for you. It's for you. I've dealt with very difficult physicians in the hospital. I remember early on, there was a surgeon that many years ago now that was just so difficult to deal with. He would throw things across the room. He would say very demeaning things to the nurses and to me. And I remember feeling so angry at him. And I, you know, well, before I go into that, I did so much work on going within. I realized so much about myself, because when he said things to me, the anger was hitting the anger was covering a fear that what he was saying was true, that it was uncovering the doubt I had in my own capacity as a physician. And for him, I'm so grateful for him, because I learned so much about myself. I learned about that self doubt, I was able to heal it and own my abilities as a physician. And, and I was able able to heal my anger towards him because I saw in my mind, I thought, what must he have gone through to be this way? What must he have experienced as a kid to be who he is? Right? Just a little bit of compassion. Now, and I use the story because it did not change what I did. I did report him to the to the hospital. He underwent anger management. He's he's not allowed to throw you can't throw medical equipment across the room. That's never okay. And so that's that's the key. Like, I'm grateful for him, because I learned about myself, and I was able to heal. And it doesn't mean that you don't actually do something in the world, your actions can still mean you do the right thing, you say the right thing, you, you still take action, and you and you perform justice. But that's different than what happens inside. That is that was so well put. And I think that's such a great lesson for for all of us. You know, and it goes to even, you know, to get even deeper into the metaphysics, some people believe that everything here is planned, or people are sitting here to serve a role. And one way to look at it is sometimes, you know, our worst enemy might be one of our best friends, on the other side is here to teach us a lesson. And so when someone attacks you verbally, and it stings, it's probably because you feel like there's some element of truth to it. And so to go within, like, why do I, why does this even bother me? Because there's certain things people would say to me that that wouldn't bother me at all, you know, if someone said you're a 35 year old white woman, I wouldn't that wouldn't offend me, because it's like, that's, there's no element of truth to that, right? But but there's some element of it hits you. And it's, it's an internal thing, right? So then you start working on yourself, like you did. Now, again, it's really important. That man I was telling you about whose father had murdered his mother, he's like, he will never be his father's in prison, but he will never meet my children, I won't have anything to do with them. So I forgiven him by don't condone his actions. And I won't let him continue to, you know, to abuse me because his father mentally abuses him, he gaslights him. So we can do both things at the same time. We can, you know, it's interesting. And it just occurred to me right now, but maybe there's something the resistance that comes when we say to forgive the other person is based on the way the language is formed. When we say I will forgive this other person, rather than saying, I choose to release myself. Yes, exactly. From from that story from that pain, and I choose to release myself from the from the hatred and the heaviness of judgment and resentment. That's another way of looking at what's happening when we forgive. Yeah, well, you shared a story with us about you know, one of the things with the guy that had the heart attack or the, you know, you brought him back and his other experience. What are some other experiences you've had that have really physically are, you know, where you've seen something that's really convinced you that there's a lot more? Yeah, I remember the case of a gentleman who had COPD, it was a obstructive pulmonary lung disease. And he went came into the hospital short of breath, and he declined pretty rapidly. He wanted to know whether his son was okay. He wanted to reconnect with his son. That's the only thing he cared about. Eventually, he got to the point where he couldn't talk anymore. And we had a mask on his face. We were able to get a hold of his son after trying for several, several days, but he had slipped into a coma. He was, I think, hours away from passing away, his heart rate had slowed often right before someone's heart stops, their heart rate starts to slow before it stops altogether. And his oxygen levels were declining, and he had refused getting put on a ventilator, which means having a breathing tube down down their throat. He just wanted the face mask at most. His son was never able to make it in time, but we were able to get a hold of him and tell him that his father was passing away. And he said, Could you just tell my dad that I love him and that I'm going to see him soon? He was physically on his way over. He never made it in time, but we, me and the nurse, were able to go to him. And for the past 24 hours, he had been unresponsive. But I remember holding his hand and the nurse was holding his other hand. And I told him, Hey, I spoke to your son, I kind of leaned in and I told him by his ear, spoke to your son, your son says he loves you very much. And he's on his way, and that everything's okay. He hadn't talked to his son for years. And his son told me to tell him that he has a couple of kids, his kids are happy and that everything is taken care of. And his son did him such a justice. He said to him through me and through the nurse, all the things you want to hear when you're dying, you want to hear that your family's taken care of, you want to hear that they're doing fine, you want to hear that you're leaving them in a good place. And he received all of that through me and through the nurse. And I saw the faintest of smiles through that mask. And I just felt like he was able to let go in that moment. And a few minutes later, his heart stopped. And the interesting thing is, the room felt like someone had dimmed the light. It got dark, kind of like when a cloud comes over the sun, and it kind of gets like little dim. And I remember, in my mind's eye, I kind of felt like there was a sense of confusion. Like, it's funny, I got these images of like, he didn't know what was happening or where he was. But then the light in the room got really, really bright. And I could see him almost felt like he was sending love to his son and grateful. And then I just saw him moving, like moving to light. It's funny how these images sort of into my mind, unbidden. And above him, and I know this because the nurse noticed it too, we saw a swirling light where the television monitor was kind of like a whirlpool. And I could see that while the light was dimming. And then when the light got really, really bright, the whirlpool disappeared. I don't know what that was. I'm not a specialist in this field, but it's not the first time that I've had lights flicker or dim, or see things like, you know, visions and shapes. But in this case, this was unique. I had never seen a whirlpool of light before. That was unique. Interesting. Yeah. And you said the nurse perceived something as well. The nurse did too. The nurse did too, in the same area to the right of him, over his right shoulder, right where the TV monitor was. The TV was off, for the record. Yeah. It's really interesting to me. A couple of things come to mind. I was thinking about Jeff Olson and Dr. Jeff Olgisco. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but Jeff also had a near-death experience. His wife was killed in an accident. And the emergency room doctor, when he came in, saw this guy's wife, and they didn't know each other. They actually, they speak together now. So similar experience. And for people that don't know, it's called a shared death experience. Sometimes it's like the portal, the area somehow gets kind of thin, I guess. But the other thing I was thinking, as you were saying that, I was listening to something the other day. We were talking about objective experiences and subjective experiences. So in our world, we value what we call objective, objective things. But everything is really subjective. I mean, everything is, we all perceive whatever it is, we're perceiving it through our eyes. But it's really fascinating that you and the nurse shared that as well. But yeah, I think because you are a sensitive person, obviously, and you've got your eyes, that third eye, it's open, you were able to have that experience, which is just amazing. Yeah. A lot happens in the moment of death. And I feel like we, when we're at the bedside of someone passing away, whether you want to or not, you're connected with them. And your state of being really matters. And I did not used to, I was not very good at this when I first started. But now I take it as a point of duty. For me, when I'm with someone who's dying, I am very conscious about my emotional state, and my mental state. And I try my best to be as supportive as possible, as loving as possible, exuding a feeling of freedom, letting this permission is allowing for them to make their transition. Most importantly, of everything that I do love, even if I don't know who they are, there's no reason why I can't love another human being. And I feel like when we can be loving with someone who's passing, I don't know this for sure. But my intuition is that it helps a lot. It helps in the transition. Yeah, I think so from the studies I've done, people having their death experiences, a lot of times we'll talk about they could see or feel the prayers of people around them. In fact, sometimes loved ones, I forget who I was. I don't know who I was. It was a really recent name, Denny Tolbert. I can't remember his last name exactly. But his brother commanded him to come back. And the next thing he knew, he was back. So if we believe like you and I do, that energy is real, that thoughts are real, that yes, we can influence things around us for better or for worse. And we can all support people that are making that transition. And you talked about him feeling a feeling of confusion, a lot depending on what people believe, when they step out of their body, they're very confused, because they don't expect to exist without their body. And they're looking at their body and they're like, is that me? Or where am I? How is this possible? So you talked about the Tibetan book of the dead. And it's something that I haven't read the book, but I've not been confused because some people do end up confused, like, am I alive? Am I dead? Am I dreaming? You know, what's going on here? Yeah, I, one of the things I like about that particular book, and there are others in other traditions, is that the nature of your experience after death has to has to do with what you carry within the unhealed hurts. And it also has to do with the habitual tendency of your mind. If you are, if you tend to be pessimistic, judgmental, and that's just a habit of your mind. It's like a train, when the body stops, your mind will keep doing what it's been doing. And if it's been judging and blaming and angry and hurtful, it'll, that'll keep happening. And then reality, as far as I understand from all the stories I've heard from patients and others, reality on the other side conforms to the nature of your thoughts in many ways. So it really behooves you to be much more mindful of where your thoughts are and what your emotions are. In my book, I share really early on the first two chapters, a practice that I have done that is very helpful. And I wanted to share that with you. Please. Every night, not every night, but many nights before I go to bed, I pretend I'm on my death bed. I know it's kind of morbid, but it's helpful when I really take it on. I pretend I'm, you know, in my 80s, 90s. Hopefully, I've had a full long rich experience of life. And that I'm moments away from making my transition from, from dying. I'm taking my last few breaths. And I imagine looking back over my life and asking myself, how do I feel about my life? Is this a life that I was glad to have lived grateful for, or is there resentment? Is there something left unhealed? And usually when I do that, when I take stock of my own life and where I am, something comes up to be healed, something that I have been pushing down. And then I embrace it. I embrace it in the way that I probably will when I'm about to die. And I just love it. I let it go. I drop all the tension. I forgive. I forgive it all. And I make sure that there's as much as I'm able to, that there's nothing left. That my heart is wide open. The Egyptians say, when you, when you die, you will come to a scale. And they'll place your heart on one side of the scale and a feather on the other. And the question is, is your heart as light as a feather? And I love the metaphor because I kind of do that to myself. Like in that, in that deathbed meditation, I ask myself, is my heart as light as a feather? And if it isn't, let me do the work so that it is. And then I go to sleep once it, I've released any sort of pain from the day and the sleep is deep and peaceful because of the healing work that's, that, that gets done. And, and that's the power of death. When you embrace that idea, what, what could we do at the moment of death to heal our, our life? So I invite your listeners, maybe just once, try that, go to bed before you go to sleep. Imagine this, these are your last few breaths. Is there anything left to heal? And if so, heal it. I love that. I think that is a wonderful practice. You know, we talked earlier, I just turned 65 and you're in your 40s and we're talking about, you know, the past of time and aging and stuff. And I've come to the conclusion of our bodies, the reason why our bodies do what they do, you know, as I'm getting older and, you know, losing hair in one place and growing in another and all those different things. It's a reminder that we're not going to be here forever. I think it's, I think it's actually a mercy. And, you know, we like to think we're going to live to 70 or 80 or 90, but my daughter was 15 and she transitioned suddenly, you know, in her sleep. So we never know how much time we have. And one of the things we can do, what you're doing is what I would call life review, which people get to do at the end of their lives. You can start doing that every day and you can let go. You can let go of these things. And so, you know, if you were to happen to make your transition, you don't have a lot of work to do on the other side because, you know, some people end up, they leave a lot of work for themselves to do once they cross over. So you can start doing that work now. Well said. That's really well said. Yeah. Well, we're coming to the end of our time. I've really enjoyed getting to know you and talk to you. Remind people again of the name of your book. And if people can reach out to you where they can find you. Yes, absolutely. The book is Love Does Not Know Death. And people can find me. I also have a sub stack. AdamRisby.substack.com. The name of my sub stack is Adventures and Kindness. Basically, I share stories of the things I learned in the hospital. And I'm working on AdamRisby.com, just a generic author website. But for now, sub stack is the way to go to find me. Yeah. Well, it's again, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. And I wanted to say, I appreciate what you're doing. I think it's extremely important work. I hear, you know, in the scientific world, there's insane that science advances one funeral at a time. So as the old guard dies out, you know, we get to come to the front and you know, someone like yourself, you're young compared to me. You being in this field and doing this, it's going to change lives going forward for the next how many decades. Thank you, Brian. And thank you for what you're doing. Everything you're doing, every podcast, every episode, every article is helping shift this society. So thank you. Yeah, thanks. Well, have a great afternoon. You too.