What REALLY Happens Right After You DIE? Shocking NDE Insights with Curtis Childs

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

Curtis Childs 0:08
I had been going through some struggles. I had some mental health issues. It was like 18, 19, like everybody does at that age, I was depressed. I had all these negative thoughts, and I was constantly worried about things. I was just a mess. And it was around that time that I had heard of Swedenborg before. My parents had actually read Swedenborg. I knew what that it was around. But it was in that time when I began to realize, oh, this is describing my mind and how it works. This is actually a really powerful like, what a lever that could pry me out of these sort of pits that I'm in. Swedenborg up until his mid 50s, just a successful renaissance man, polymath guy. So he was in Sweden, which was a world power at the time, and he was doing everything. So he was a assessor of mines, which was Sweden's mining industry was one of the most important industries on the planet. He was in this position where he was overseeing a lot of the mining there. He was an inventor. He had invented military equipment for the for the Swedish military, as well as mining equipment, all kinds of things there. But he's also a very well respected scientist. Had written these huge principias on anatomy. Founded the scientific branch of crystallography, first person to suggest the nebular hypothesis, first scientific journal in Sweden. He started that he was part of the Swedish government house of nobility, so on and so on and so on. Very smart guy, and very well known to the point where, as I understand it, he would show up in London. Let's say the newspaper would say Swedenborg came to London. The entire thing is documented from the time when he was in his mid 50s to the end of his life, in his 80s. In his mid 50s, was keeping this travel journal just because he's saying, I'm going from London to Amsterdam or something. And it was just keeping track of that. Back in the day, it was dangerous to do that. You could your boat could sink. There was actually pirates. There's a lot going on. So you want to keep track of your travels and where you're headed. But in that, he starts to record his dreams, and he starts to analyze his dreams, which was back before dream analysis was a thing, actually. Nowadays, psychology has been very influenced by Swedenborg. He started to write down his dreams, and they got vivid, er and more strange. And eventually he started to have experiences that were outside of that dream box, like just in the hypnagogic state when he was waking up, he would see something or talk to someone, and he writes every one of them down, and writes down what he thinks the interpretation is. And then at some point, he has a couple of really powerful experiences and visions which really changed the trajectory of his life. And something seems to have, like snapped open, because from then on out, for the last three decades of his life, he was having these experiences at will every day and catalog the entire thing. So it's between then and the end of his life, he wrote 30 volumes worth of material that he's accustomed to writing big, long, scientific work. So his afterlife stuff reads just like that. It's very organized, it's very it's both descriptive, like he will tell stories, but he's also very philosophical and will tell it's like a physics lesson on how the afterlife works and why people see what they do when they go where they do is it from the story of him waking up being shown what it's like to wake up in the afterlife. He wasn't his body wasn't in physical danger like you have with a lot of near death experiences. But he says that he was shown it, but kept in a state of consciousness enough that he could recall it and write it afterwards. And he said that at first he could feel his body shutting down, and his breathing slowed a lot, but his spirit, he could feel his spirit breathing, and that started to rise. And then he said, it felt like there was a pull, and his spirit left his body, and then went through this series of awakening steps in the spiritual world. According to Swedenborg, all of us are in the spiritual world right now. You have a body, and then you have consciousness. And your consciousness is your spirit. So that part of you exists in the spiritual dimension, or he called it the spiritual world. So that's the terminology I like to leave the spiritual side of life. You're already there in terms of the spiritual part of you. And he said that your spirit has all the features that your body has. So you have spirit. Your Spirit has eyes, just like your body has eyes. So to him, initially, he was surrounded by what he calls angels. But I know in Christianity that word sometimes means these specially created beings that only live in the afterlife. But to him, angels, that just means people who had been living here and who have died and crossed over to the other side. That's Angel. He's surrounded by these really loving angels. He called them celestial angels, which those are people who are particularly devoted to love, and they made sure that when he was experiencing this transition, that nothing, no disturbing thoughts or feelings came into his mind. They were kind of shepherding him, protecting him, and just sitting with him there until he was starting to stir in the Spirit. And then from there, new kinds of angels came up to him because his mind was starting to stir. And so there's, there's angels that are more mind focused. And so those he said, he said it seemed like they pulled a covering off of my left eye, and that's when I received the gift of spiritual sight. Because everything is symbolic. There's so much symbolism in the afterlife, I think that's part of why I know that. I know you. You started, and are still in film. And in movies so much there's like, here's the scene where the hero finally grabs the sword, and it's like, there's just, it's meaningful beyond this, oh, now he has a sword. This is like, there's meaning in this moment. Swedenborg would call that a correspondence, because to him, a sword is a symbol of the truth and the power of the truth. So when we see somebody, when you know King Arthur, or I've just been rereading Lord of the Rings, so I'm thinking about that a lot, oh yeah, like Aragorn has got that sword. And why does it matter so much? Because this is a symbol of the kind of power that the truth can have in your life. So the spiritual world is full of that symbolism that we actually get our appreciation for it by, sort of that spiritual world seeping in. So they pull the covering off of his left eye, and then from there, it's kind of choose your own adventure. So you get angels are there, and they'll show you anything you want do anything, but you get to follow your heart then, and you kind of gravitate toward people who love the same kinds of things that you do. So love on the other side plays a role similar to the what gravity plays here the gravity. So that's a correspondence as well. So in the physical world, why am I in this chair? It's because of gravity. Why is why is the earth around? It's because of gravity. I'm not a physicist, but I think that's the basics of how it is. So gravity is what pulls you to where you are there. Love does the same kind of thing, so people who love and care about the same sorts of things will gravitate toward each other, and this forms spiritual communities. It's the reason why you end up with sort of your soul mates, or your people or something. Because love, love, there is absolutely a primary force that shapes everything, because that whole afterlife is spirit based, rather than physical based, and Spirit is love and thoughts and things we experience in our consciousness. So it's like both similar to the world we have here, but yet fundamentally different in the way that it's organized and what it does. So after you wake up, you then are free to go. Freedom is a hugely important thing. You're free to go and pursue what kind of things do I want to love and what and what kind of people do I want to hang out with? And then from there, there's as many different, you know, afterlife situations as there are different people, because everyone is is unique. And the the spiritual world, because it's spirit based, so because it's consciousness based, even your surroundings are a reflection of what's inside you. So the kind of house that you have, you know how people will have dreams, and in dreams, they'll be in this house, and you'll be like, well, this is my house, but it wasn't really my house. It didn't look like my house. And almost, from what I can find in almost every school of dream interpretation, house is a symbol of the mind. And I know if I have dreams where, oh, like the attic is getting expanded. It just feels like, Okay, I'm I'm learning something new. I'm thinking of something so there the things that are in you, so the kind of things that you love and the things that you think about, that creates the environment so that the home that you're in is a reflection of your mind and heart. So when you die, you start out in what he calls the world of spirits, which he talks about heaven, the world of spirits and hell. Heaven and hell are psychological states. This is another way in which he wildly diverges from the traditional Christian understanding, yet still uses similar terminology. Heaven is fundamentally a state in which you enjoy doing what is good to other people. Heaven is the joy of doing what is good to other people. Hell is the joy of harming other people. In the spiritual world, after life, things get sorted out. So the world of spirits, he says, Is this midway between heaven and hell, where you have a chance to really get down to the core of what you what you want to do and what you want to love, and then you go and you kind of commit to one or the other. Am I going to be committed to ego, or am I going to be committed to love? Because those two things need to be separate. Because if you're committed to ego, but still have some good love and you and stuff, that's actually going to be painful for you and the other people you're interfacing with, and then, if you're committed to what's good, but bring ego along, that's going to be painful. So So you have this chance, and everyone takes a different amount of time there. Some people just know right away, like, No, I'm going to heaven. That's what I want to do. Some people, they have to sort out and find out who they are. But nobody gets forced to go anywhere. You go your own love leads you to go where you want to go. So you get into the world of spirits. You spend your time figuring out who you really want to be, basically unpacking and uncovering who you've become throughout this life on earth based on what you loved and what you believe and how you acted on that. And then you go and you find your community, because where are the people who are most living the same kind of life that I am, and not just live like we all like to, you know, play golf, but like what, who loves the same kind of thing that you love, and who, who has the same kind of belief about life that you do? And those people, like I said, that gravitating force of love pulls you in to this community, and that's where you. Get to begin your eternal life, or your meaning, your your timeless life in the spiritual world, there's not time and space the same way that there are here. It sort of seems like it, but it's really more about your psychological state. So if you're excited about something, you're eager about something, it will seem to go faster. But so you get into these communities, and then you start to play your part in the bigger I talked about the human body. It's like each each little cell is like one of those communities that starts to do, do what you do. And to Swedenborg, the thing that makes human life interesting, as well as the afterlife, is the joy of doing something good for the human race. So it's we were talking about. You can't just go live in a cave and meditate, get bored of that, and you can't just have money. You can't just sit there and have a ton of money. The only thing that's like evergreen in terms of the joy it gives is the joy of doing something meaningful and useful. Because back in his day, I don't think that reincarnation was he does kind of offer a sort of solution to the idea of, why do so many people experience past lives sort of unprompted because to him, okay, so spiritual world has a lot of characteristics to it, and one of them is lack of time and space. One of them is the gravitation of love, but in the other one is the fluidity of mind, so there's a much more effortless transfer of information and feeling there. Here we can talk you, and I can talk and it can go into this microphone and go all the way through the servers and get there, and people can listen and then try to picture what it is I'm talking about. If you go into a community in the afterlife, you start to think sort of like they do. You're influenced by their talks about auras, like the emanation of your life in mind going out from everyone. So you're able to do that, and you're also able to share feelings. He talks about people who are feeling a certain kind of joy, being able to just really tangibly and directly pass it to somebody else. So there, and not only that, that we we actually were constantly surrounded by spirits, because we actually couldn't have consciousness, that the link of consciousness goes from the Divine through the spiritual world ends up in the physical world. So we're constantly surrounded by spirits. Actually, our spirit, even now, is traveling from community to community based on the way we change in our life. When with the reason why little kids are like they are, that why are they so spontaneous and open and joyful and free? Is a distinctly different phase from what I remember, of it than what we have now is because when you're little, your spirit is around those celestial angels, or the deepest angels that Sweden talks about. As you grow up, your spirit changes, and it starts to go around more spiritual or intellect oriented angels. And you have to have that if you're going to be able to build a mind and grow, but your The point is that your your spiritual company, changes what you experience, and there's enough permeabilities usually, when your your mind interacts with spirits, you do so out of your own memory, so that you they they don't bring in what they've experienced from their life into the interaction. They actually take on some of your memory and from there influence you in certain ways, hopefully, to do what's good sometimes though, the equivalent of a leak or something where you can actually experience someone else's memories as your own. So it would be like my wife's friend one time was describing to my wife and her friends, remember when we did this thing? Remember when you were over there and we went to this, and we went to that, and they were all trying to remember what she was talking about. And finally they were like, oh, no, that was an episode of friends that you're talking about that didn't happen like you think it happened. So that that can the idea that you can get a feeling that you've been somewhere, just even through the crudeness of media, but that there is the possibility for you to experience someone else's memories, and so you feel like I've lived that life now. So to Swedenborg, it was like, No, this is it's like the womb. Like you develop in the womb for nine months. And there you set up the big you don't set up who you're going to be, but you set up the basics, like the foundation of who you're going to be. And then you're born, and you go and live your life. So this life is like the womb to the spiritual world. So you don't define who you're going to be forever. So we had to take, like this master kind of sorting, take these people, put them, put everything in order, so that people can't harm each other, and that there's freedom restored so people can choose. Spiritually. There's this whole complex process that Swedenborg describes over many, many books of what was going on there, but essentially it was to create balance again, so that we would have the freedom to choose what we want to do and what we want to love and who we want to be, because that's essential. You can never choose anything good if you don't have a free choice. Because you think about love, if anyone says, Hey, let's love me, or else there's no love there, like it has to be freely chosen. If you say to your kids, like you have to visit me, it's not, you know, it doesn't work. So the nature of love is that it can only happen when both parties are free to accept it. So people have to have the choice to love what's good or not. And that was that was going to go away if Jesus didn't make a move right then. So it was kind of like the last last ditched effort, but it really worked. So God is love and love is love, is you? Moment. So the everything that that I strived to try to become, is to try to imitate and emulate that humanity, and the thing that I recognize in other people, that I love, that that is all kind of a reflection of this, this God who is, is a person, is somebody that that I can love like I love other people. The ultimate purpose to life is to create a world in which everybody is cared for in every way they need to be cared for, and to take joy in doing that, we would all be in this state where it's like, no, we're not happy unless every kid has got a table of friends to sit with. Everybody's got their health. And just the effort toward that, the constant effort toward that, is, I can't think of anything better.