Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

Father Nathan Castle 0:08
I live on the campus of the University of Arizona, and I'm not a campus minister by profession any longer. I did that for 25 years. I help out here, and I do some work at a local church that's without a pastor. I do some online courses. I love teaching scripture to people that never really learned it, except maybe, as you know, in little chunks, spots here and there. But the work that we'll be talking about today is with people that died suddenly and tragically, violently. They started about 25 years ago, coming to me in a dream, and then I and showing me something that's a little like a video. It's a dreamscape, and usually it has, you know, it tells me what happened to them without it being horrifying to me. It's sort of buffered. I later get with a prayer partner, and we record the session that we do. I allow them to borrow my voice long enough to talk to my partner and explain what's happened to them and what they've been through, and they're vetted, they're ready to move from one level to the next in the afterlife, and they just need a little assistance doing that. Well, even from childhood, I had the practice of consecrating my sleep before I went unconscious. If you could imagine your consciousness being a ball or an object, like a ball, that you could hand to God and say, Here, take care of this while I'm not using it, because I'm going to be unconscious. If you if there's anything you'd like to do in my unconsciousness with me, I might even be more receptive that way. So feel free. So I had that practice from childhood, and it was reinforced in religious life. There's a prayer called compline at the end of the day in a monastery that completes the day, and it hands over consciousness to the Holy Spirit so that you can be available in the night. It was analogous to being awakened by a pager in the night. Many priests have the experience of being on some sort of rotation if they live near a hospital and it's your turn on Tuesday to take the pager in case there's a emergency call in the night. So I've had many of those over the years where you're suddenly wakened out of his sleep. You're talking to somebody at the Gnosis station. You need to rally yourself and write down a patient's number and room number and all that. It felt like being called into ministry in the night because of an emergency need. I have two books called afterlife interrupted. The first one we used the subtitle helping stuck souls cross over, and it seemed to me that some of them were in a trauma loop. They had died in trauma. People that had been through some usually violent trauma sometimes can't get it out of their mind, and the last scene of it replays again and again, particularly plagues people coming back from work where they've seen horrors, and somehow some little scene just won't calm down, you know, you just you involuntarily find yourself stuck in it, replaying it, kind of like Groundhog Day, you know, over and over again. Some of them were like that and needed to in the afterlife. They needed some assistance from a team of people in the afterlife helping them regain agency, control of their own thoughts. That's part of it. So something, sometimes they're stuck that way. Sometimes they had it. They formed a thought that kind of painted themselves into a corner. It's all my fault. The accident happened, and you know, other people died because I did the wrong thing. And you know, now I don't deserve anything good, and so on. Most of us have had at least a period of time when we had some way of thinking that, in the end, was unhelpful and maybe even not that true, but we lived out of it for a time. A lot of people that suffer with addictions are stuck in something like that, and there probably is a kernel of truth in it, but it gets all made out of proportion, or whatever. It ends up moving away from the truth, even though there might be some little kernel of truth in it someplace I go to sleep, and maybe about one night out of the week, I'll have what I call a contact dream. It's not my regular psychobabble of whatever is going on in my psyche. It's from without, and it usually is, as I said earlier, some sort of scene of somebody dying or being in a precarious situation that might cause a death. Lots of car crashes, for example. But not only that, drowning, shooting, stabbings, plane crashes, different things. But anyway, I'll I'll have this scene that I'm receiving in a dream. I wake up from it, I write it down in a journal that I keep on the nightstand, say a quick prayer for the person. Introduce myself and say, Good job. You figured out how to find me and do the thing you just did. I hope I got it right. I'll be in touch with you. You know, sometime soon, then I have a team of prayer partners, and we schedule regular meetings. And it might seem strange, but we're all busy. And this is not the only thing that I do or that my prayer partners do, so we just schedule each other. When we're together, we first go into what I call protective prayer. I would not do Ouija boards or talk to just any old spirit. I don't think it's safe to pick up hitchhikers here or Hereafter, so I make sure that St Michael, the archangel Holy Mary, a lot. That I have a whole different cast of Saint and Angel characters that are first asked to surround us and keep us safe, and then I just asked the Holy Spirit to help us be in touch with the person that brought the dream, because it's their turn. Today, we say we're ready, and a lot of times I'll ask for The Guardian Angel of the person to give clarity and just to do something like a mic test. You know that at the beginning of podcast, you know, can you hear me clearly? You know, do do we is there any are any little questions that we need to clarify before we get started? Sometimes, for example, a dream might have a lot of characters in it, and I'm not absolutely sure who's the one we're helping that sometimes more than one person crosses at the same time, because they can sort of be in a group. So sometimes I'll ask about that. Sometimes something like the gender wasn't clear. Somebody died at the wheel of a car, but in the telling of the story, I really couldn't tell whether they were male or female, so their guardian will kind of come on, and we'll have a little bit of a chat, and then they'll slide out of the way and say, okay, the one I guard in love is ready to do this thing. And so I'll be right here praying with you, but I'm going to slide to the side so that they can talk after we go into our protected prayer, the first thing I do is read the dream as I wrote it down. And many times they're only a paragraph long. Sometimes not, sometimes they have a lot of detail, but sometimes they'll just be maybe a sentence or just a few ideas, but I'll, I'll read that. So I pause it. We go into prayer a little deeper. We read it a second time, just to let it kind of soak in, sort of like a tea bag, you know, just just to be still in the story and allow it to to move in us. And when we've done that, that's when I say, Okay, could we have the Guardian please, of this person or the person themselves? And let's get started. They usually comment upon because we just read this dream story as they related it. They usually comment on it because it's the last thing we were just talking about, and the prayer partner might say, did we get this right? Did we understand clearly? Sometimes there'll be symbology that you didn't quite understand, and they'll make it clear, and then they'll sometimes remark about the process. They've never done this before, either, and they'll talk a little bit about what it was like. I'm told that my consciousness looks like a green, sparkly river. And that one guy said, they bring you there, but you still got to launch the boat, you know, like you got they bring you to the edge, but you still have to get in it. And some something like current, you know, it's funny the way we use the word current to talk about money, currency. It's something that flows. We talk about electric current. What you and I are communicating the occurrence right now and then at the subatomic level, that's what we are. You know, our body, we're an energy field, yeah. And so anyway, that's what they say. And the session normally doesn't take more than half an hour to 40 minute stops maybe a little bit longer if they're chatty, but usually we when we schedule, we plan on doing two in a row in a couple of hours time with a little break time in between. So the we just listen to their story, they often tell us what it was like to leave the body you know, whether sometimes they're conscious during that process, and other times not. Sometimes they are. They awoke up in a new place. Many of the ones that we deal with because they went through trauma, are through in something like a healthcare continuum in the afterlife, similar to what would happen if you or I were in a wreck on the freeway and weren't able to care for ourselves, someone would come in and take care of us and take us where we needed to go to heal. And then, even in a healthcare setting, you move from maybe the ER to surgery to ICU to a step down room, all the way to the end of the line. And I think of myself and my prayer partners as like the discharge staff the day you leave the hospital, because you don't need this any longer. You know gathering up yourself. You know your meds. Do you understand when your physical therapy appointment is do you mean who's coming for you? Partly, we supply the ride. We help them figure out who's going to take you. They're going someplace they haven't been before. So a guide is necessary, and they understand that. So we help them, oftentimes, choose a person they'd like to have come for them. Early on, I asked I coached my partners to do that all the time. And then I found out that over time, people that are led to my on it kind of briefed. This is the way these people operate. If you do it this way, they're going to want they're going to ask you this question, so they come prepared to answer that question anymore, it's either somebody that they knew in their lifetime, that they opted for. Sometimes they'll take luck of the draw. They'll just say, I don't care whoever is the right person. Sometimes their guardian angel is already there. So they'll say, Well, my garden is already here. I don't really need anybody else. Other times, they'll just take the luck of the draw and the funniest people show up, somebody from your first grade class, some kid you played with. You know, once upon a time, or most of us in high school had at least one person die while we were in high school, and there was an assembly, and maybe we planted a tree and their honors, I've had that show up. It can just be lots of times. It's grandparents, once in a while, it's celebrities. It can just be, just about anybody. The folks that I live with, I live in a mixed community of four men and three women, and some of them are interested in it and ask about it. And others just don't. We all have our work to do, and we we casually keep, you know, each other, informed about what went on today, but we don't necessarily Delve so it really depends on the level of a person's interest. As a child, I was raised to believe that I could be anything I set my mind to. A lot of people have had that kind of parenting, and I remember asking I went to Trinity in San Antonio, in Austin. I just thought college was a candy store. There's just everything there that the whole universe, you know, on one block of land at the university. And I, eventually, I asked this question to God, what does the world need? One more of that I could be? Could I think of myself as a pluripotent stem cell? You know, those are running around in your blood system. And if you cut the tip of your finger, there are cells in your bloodstream that know how to become a fingertip. And I just thought I could become what I needed to be, would have helped to make the world better. And being a priest turned out to be my path. At first, I thought that it must be uniform, that there must be one way everybody precedes time or doesn't. And I learned over time that it really depends that for people that want to pay a lot of attention to events on earth, that's a possibility open to them, and then they become more conscious of the passage of time. Others look away from it, and they can re enter it like for example, if you ask a person, what year did you die, you would think they'd have that at their fingertips. One thing that's important as these, these souls might have been stuck or moving slower than others, is they're not made to feel like the dumb kids. There's not a one size fits all sort of chronology you ought to have this accomplished by this amount of time since your death. It's nothing like that. They just work at a fast pace or a slow pace, depending upon what they want to do. There's still sequence, even if it isn't happening in time. We're used to things happening, one after the other after the other, and we keep track of that with a clock. But in the afterlife, there's still things that happen as a consequence and subsequent to other things, even if it isn't measured in time. I'm a member of ions, the International Association for near death studies, and I'm around a lot of experiences. I haven't had a near death experience of my own. I've had what they call a spiritually transformative experience, an Ste. So if you go to their conferences, they always ask everybody in the room who's had an ND, everybody raise your hand, who's had an Ste, and my hand will go up. I haven't run across and the people that I've helped in this form, I haven't had people that said this is the second time I died, or I nearly died once, and then I did. I did die this time. I haven't had that happen. You and I would have been in the same classroom because I was sitting there thinking the same thing. Kids around me, you know, the other kids were doing the same thing. There's another way of look, of looking at what's I call the outer darkness. There's there people can still choose to be belligerent, and they can still choose to inflict harm and not to play well with others, all of that, and they can still do that in the afterlife. And I believe that they have to move off on their own. They're not allowed to stay in polite company if they're going to behave that way. I do believe that there is something of a hell, but the idea that God created it in order to have a place for his enemies. Jesus taught us not to even have any. He taught us if you have an enemy, love them. And so I believe there's that there's security. I don't believe you're gonna have to lock your doors in the afterlife. I believe that the people that I deal with have all made that choice, that they want to be a part of the light, and especially of truth. Well, I've been doing it for 25 years, and just some commonalities in it. I'm a Dominican. Our orders motto is Veritas, which is just Latin for truth. And I'm only telling the truth. And whenever people do want to confront me or something, I at least have that as my comfort. I'm only saying the truth as I experience it. I just believe that I'm here to receive love, and I can do that on my deathbed. I can do it on my best day and my on my worst day. I just try to stay focused on that if everything falls apart around me, they'll still be people to love. In fact, there'll be more need of it then perhaps. And I like to think that I was put here on purpose at a specific time and place, if I end up in a place where there's lots and lots of calamity and whatnot, well, okay, I'll do the best I can to receive love, magnify love. Give love. I'm around a lot of thinkers that see both all of the painful stuff, but also sense some growth in human consciousness. I believe we're created. I don't believe we're accidental. And I believe that the universe existed in the mind of its creator, and you and I were part of that imaginative work. Even in the Bible, on page one, when the curtain opens, you meet God, and the first thing God's doing is creating, you know, a creative guy, and so am I? I think we're just chips off the old block. We're doing what comes naturally because we came from a creator, and we're given the opportunity to create so and then I just think, Didn't your parents teach you to try to leave, live, leave the world better than you found it. I just think you can do that every day of your life. You do that on a death bed if you have to.