LUTHERAN Priest DIES in Church; DOES NOT See JESUS! Who He Met WILL SHOCK YOU! (NDE) with David Maginley

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

David Maginley 0:08
Well, it was the life of an insecure, extremely tall, young, cocky guy who didn't really know who he was in the world, but was taken like most young men do, and stumbling along.

I was very introverted, very shy. Grew up in a family of five, so, you know, you're you're fighting for your place at the table. And so I kept mostly to myself, right? And stumbling upon friends and interesting experiences and topics that sort of made me go and then a big one happened. I was diagnosed with cancer, and I was 17 years old, and this was not a kind of cancer that most people have ever heard of. The full name is paraganglioma, and it's 90% of these grow on the adrenal gland. It's an encapsulated tumor that it's on the adrenal gland, and it's making a molatile cocktail of chemicals. So it's danger is not that it's going to spread out and compromise the body's metabolism and different organs, but instead, it sits there waiting to explode. It's got dopamine, norepinephrine, catecholamines, these are very dangerous, and it's like the trigger the fuse is lit whenever my adrenal gland is activated. So the moment I got excited or angry or afraid, even if I exercised to trigger the adrenal gland and that would cause the tumor to explode. Most people die in about 30 seconds. I was lucky, I would have small explosions, and they looked to me like an anxiety attack, so I didn't know I had this tumor in me. And the thing is, my metabolic response was lower because the first tumor was in my bladder, so I was peeing out the metabolites, and it wasn't going directly into my circulatory system. So I survived it. The doctor said, Oh, it's a paraganglioma. Most of those 90% are benign. Don't worry about it. You're good. But it grew back again and again and again. At it four times, and each time got worse. Well, I didn't process it either, because the doctor said it's benign, right? So I thought I was out of the woods. I thought it was just this weird tumor. And when I went to the library to look up the paraganglioma after the word benign, I just closed the book and said, Hey, I got away with that one. But it made me wake up, and it made me ask some hard questions. What is life all about? That was a close call. Maybe I should stop living small and step out of my comfort zone. I kept asking questions, and they led to better questions. So because of cancer, I went to university and I studied the meaning of life. I thought I was going to be a recording engineer and a photographer, that was what I enjoyed. But no, I studied philosophy and comparative religion and dug deeper and deeper. Eventually that led me to a community, a Christian community, and experienced a lot of fun and a lot of belonging and but couldn't really swallow a faith as it was presented. I knew there was something deeper in there, and I didn't have a vocabulary, a language or a context for it. So I actually went to seminary, where you're trained to be a minister, right, a pastor. And I dug deeper and deeper. I just kept going. I was looking for this underlying the nature of the underlying mystery from which reality emanates, and that the doctrine and the theology seemed like Windows, but there was something beyond that. And then I was on internship, so I had a church. I was a student minister. Though I wasn't a fervent believer, I knew I was in relationship with this mystery, and this mystery was personified in the Christ which I came to understand is a word that means the everything, the consciousness. And so I'm on internship, and the tumors, another tumor is back, and it's getting active, and I'm starting to have attacks and passing out, and my heart is racing, and it was really hard, because I still thought that this was anxiety. It really hit my self esteem. I was blacking out. I was having dizzy spells. Getting in the pulpit, I put a lot of people to sleep on a Sunday morning, but it's not good when the minister passes out. Because I'm the candidate, I asked that question quite a lot, but I don't do that anymore, and because I'm never going to get an answer. I'm never going to understand it from this side of grass. So instead of why did I get this, I now ask, What am I going to do with it? Then it becomes fuel for life, for living, for connection, for adventure. And I am not a thing in the world. I am a thought of the world. So it was on internship. It was that second tumor I was it was really fortunate, because I died in a hospital chapel. That's a pretty good place to go. You got the doctors, you got the nurses, you got the people of faith. And I was getting up to do I was like two, three minutes into the sermon, and I felt it hit. Whenever the tumor hits. Like a punch in the gut, and you get really warm, and you start to sweat, and your heart's racing, and I breathe into it. Breathe into it, pull yourself together. But I couldn't, and I blacked out. I was gone before I hit the floor, which is good, because I'm six feet eight inches tall, and so the concussion is pretty bad. Long. Went down, I passed out, and I was gone. And suddenly, like a lot of near death experiences, you have an out of body, right? You see yourself in both. I didn't have that. I was suddenly in a different realm. And it's difficult to describe. I I'm sure all of your guests talk about that. As soon as you put it into words, you're reducing it. The poverty of words just are inadequate. However, it sounds simple. I was on a grassy hill. There was a tree at the top of the hill. I wanted to run to the tree with every fiber of my being, and I was one with everything. I could feel every blade of grass as it moved. I could feel the light flowing, and the light was infused with love, and it was flowing through me. I could feel the tree drinking in the light. But even more important, I felt complete. So as I'm talking with you, there's a massive amount of material in my subconscious that I'm not aware of. And you know, I'm thinking about how good the chicken smells downstairs for supper, and I'm thinking about the day that I just had at the hospital with cancer patients, and I'm not fully here, no disrespect, but there I was completely integrated, congruent, completely aware there was no aspect of myself that was suppressed or that I was blind to. I think that's why people say they feel that they were home. We don't realize how lonely we are here. We don't realize how profound the sense of separation is but there, the connection to everything was indescribable. And I'm just walking on a grassy hill, and I was me, right? So did I have an ego? Well, I don't know if, maybe I didn't. It was integrated. After all, I feel like I only touched my toe on the doorstep of whatever's out there, but I was still me, and I still had a body, a biped humanoid, but not like this. Yeah. It was not like this body. No way. I was not alone. There was an entity. There a being human, and yet not so much more than whatever I am. And it was a masculine figure. If I were to describe him, I couldn't visibly. It didn't matter what he looked like, he looked like love and power and wisdom and compassion and beauty and wonder and authority. That's what he looked like. I mean, he felt like my best friend, like he had known me all my life, and I had known him. A lot of people ask me, since I'm a Christian minister, sounds like Jesus? Did you meet Jesus? And to be honest, I never presumed it was the big guy. I thought, okay, it's a junior apprentice from the warehouse or someone, right? But it didn't matter who he was. He was no less infused with that, that character of the Christ consciousness, or the divine love, or whatever you want to call it. We had this relaxing conversation. He said I was jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas. I was saying, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home. And he said, Yeah, it's great to see you, David, welcome. It's great to see you. And I said, it's great to see you too. Come on, let's run to the tree, so I'm behaving like a kid. And he said, Oh, no, you can't go up there, but let's walk and talk for a while. So we're walking through the grass, and we're talking about my life. And he says, you know, things are going really well. I know he's talking about my overall life, and I know that I have a life here, and I'm not here anymore. But I didn't care how well things were going. I kept saying, that's great. Come on, let's go to the tree. Says, No, you're doing great, but you have a lot more work to do. It's important. And I said, I don't care. I'm here, I'm home. I wasn't being disrespectful, right? I was just enthusiastic and overjoyed and filled with more life and vitality than I've ever experienced here. And I said, No, come on, let's go play. He said, because I knew if I got to the tree, if I got to the top of the hill and saw what was on the other side, I'd never come back here, which is common. There's all there's often this boundary, this border in near death experiences. Yeah, I really wanted that, because I didn't want to come back here. No way, no way. And he said, Look, the work you have to do is really important. And I knew that wasn't specific things. That was about growth and love and not only my own, but to help others. And I knew I felt the significance of that, and he knew that. And he said, Don't worry. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. We'll be with you. And I knew I wasn't going to win the argument, and I said, please don't, please don't send me back. You can't do that, not after I arrived. I I just got here, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt this love flow into me, this compassion. He said, It's okay. We will be with you. We'll be with you every step of the way, and it won't take long. We'll see you later. Boom, you're back. I wouldn't consider that a classic life review, as in most other accounts in a near death experience, but imparted the importance of my life, the significance of what was to come, the gravity of that and coming back is the hardest thing. It's miserable. I so appreciate that you summed it up. That's exactly. Exactly it, and I'm not allowed to remember that information. What those specifics are. I just knew. I mean, he showed me, told me I knew the nature of this work, but I had to forget it all as soon as I am back in this which means you're stumbling along as much as ever before. But it's kind of worse. On top of that, you are forever homesick for what you had become, and yet I know that I emanate from that. I'm never separate from it, but it sure feels like I am, because I'm left in this reality, the one you're embedded in. As soon as you get reconstituted, as soon as you're re embodied, you feel the density of flesh and the pull of gravity and the muck of words and how thoughts have to come one after the other, and how they're totally inadequate. And that reality, which is so much more real than this, I think it descends into your subconscious. It it goes into the core of your being, because you cannot integrate it right away. You're going through existential dissonance. You've moved from this level of consciousness to one so expensive, and then you're compressed back into this. That's what happened. I felt myself back in the hospital on the floor. I heard the voices of the doctors and the nurses who had been trying to resuscitate me, though my chest didn't hurt at all if they give me CPR. And my wife at the time, she was mad and scared, and she said, You were gone like 15 minutes, no heartbeat, no breathing. I didn't care about that. I just felt lousy. I had a headache. I felt confused that reality I touched upon was quickly removed from my conscious awareness. They wrapped me in a blanket. I felt really out of sorts and strange. They checked my vitals. They couldn't find anything wrong, and they sent me home. The first thing I did was I crawled into bed, I pulled the covers up, and I grieved. I didn't know why I was grieving, and I don't play it well, lift, repeat, don't you don't have to believe it's going to do anything. Just do it, and the muscle will grow with sleep and Nutrition. In this game, I'm not competitive, I'm not aggressive, but I always felt the separation from the ground of being, and so it reanimated my faith in a completely new way. I was no longer lifting my prayers as petitions to an external God. I was now participating in the consciousness of God, and God was not an old man with a beard sitting on a throne. God is a word for the ground of being from which all of reality emanates. So how can I honor the divine light in everything, the sacred, ordinary moments, because you're stuck in this and you're longing for that, you still do stupid things to fill the hole. Make really unwise choices, but that's hard, because you know they're unwise, and you do them anyway. Well, I like to think I was a pretty decent human being before it happened. It's not like my principles changed very much. I also didn't talk about it. I didn't share it with anyone for years, but I did find that within a few months of returning from internship back to the final year at seminary, that I had developed a sensitivity to energy, and so I explored that, and was trained in therapeutic touch, energetic healing modality. And even as I do this, I can feel it between my fingers. Was different, and the road ahead was different because I began to have mystical moments, coincidences, things that I couldn't shrug off. Sublime. Oh, you know, it's the typical ones where you think of someone and they call or you can read the energy of someone on the thoughts, and they're so fleeting. I didn't think of it as an ability. I would just think, Oh, that's weird. But now as I look back, it's like, Oh, wow. So my conclusion was, I've got a lot of growing up to do. Well, what I did with it was learn how to love, learn how to grow up and wake up. You look at integral theory. I honestly, I didn't do that without making a lot of mistakes, because when we don't know how to love, we injure the people we love. I did that just being selfish, not being considerate, and here I am now ordained, right, a minister, but I didn't know what I didn't know, and I had a lot of maturity. So yeah, cancer did that. There's some tension there. But see, I'm a Lutheran minister. So if you know Anglican and Catholic, Lutheran is very much like that. So you got your Protestants and your Catholics and Lutherans started the mess 500 years ago, but at its heart, the Lutheran faith is a reform movement. Always upgrade the faith. And so that's what I do. And my language focuses around consciousness. And my Work cm hospital chaplain with cancer patients and palliative patients in the ICU. So I engage people to use suffering as a functional process that deconstructs the ego as a process of waking up and moving towards transformation. It's very effective at doing that, and triggers, of course, ego defense mechanisms for self preservation, and we don't like it, but that's what suffering does. I'll share a tool that I use really powerful, and it's from the Buddhist tradition meditation called Tonglen. This means receiving and giving. You're the expert in your experience and what it's like to struggle with this. Close your eyes. Breathe into it. Identify the greatest like a strong facet of what's hard about this. So maybe it's fear or die. Where do you feel it? It's right here in my heart. Okay, breathe into it. I love. Allow it, let it live, stay with it. Now, breathe in. More of it from that patient in the next room. Draw it out of their body into yours. Increase yours by taking theirs when you breathe out, send back your compassion to them. Could be light, could be the words I understand. I'm with you. I get it. I'm right with you. I say only you can do this. Breathe in, take it in powerful because compassion is not some wishy washy nice thing. Don't lose hope, because in the end, love wins, right? And love is not an emotion. Love is the highest state of consciousness, and we are all on an exponentially accelerating path that's embedded in evolution to become that, to wake up and be that practice where you're planted. Let love be your spiritual practice, and trust that you make a big difference in the world with the people you're around. That's the ripple effect. And be serious and creative and have fun with it. And hang on. I know it's a wild ride, but it ends well. So keep shining. The world needs your light. Keep shining and don't panic. You'll be hurt. It's all gonna be okay. Realize that you're the product of your life. So be kind, be gentle, and be able to distinguish what's your homework and what's their homework, and do your homework. God is the ground to being the love, which is the underlying consciousness from which reality emanates to grow up in the evolutionary process of becoming mature human being, and then to wake up this way towards that which you are, a sacred one of a kind, manifestation from a realm of pure consciousness, dimension of absolute love. You're never separate from that. So waking up from it moves you from the material realm to the causal, the subtle, the astral and the non dual.