I headed out to Venice and found Jeremy Kagan, my victim--errr--the interviewee. Jeremy isn't a nut. Actually he's a highly respected gentleman who is an internationally recognized director/writer/producer of feature films and television and is a professor to boot. His credits include the box office hits HEROES, THE BIG FIX (one of my favorites - yes I do watch the television with my mortal friend, Ezra Thornberry, on occasions) and THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN. Loved his film ROSWELL, THE UFO CONSPIRACY which received a Golden Globe nomination. And there's so much more he's done. I'm sure you 21st century mortals have heard of DR. QUINN: MEDICINE WOMAN. Yeah, he directed that, too. I could go on and on but I wanted to give you an idea of who we are about to speak to.
I was at the Venice boardwalk watching what they called a snake charmer perform when a kindly gentleman sat down on the bench beside me. I had to materialize for him to see me and was pleasantly surprised that he showed me no remorse at being a ghost and was not even afraid. Henri loves it when that happens and it makes for a much better interview.
"Good afternoon," he said, holding out his hand. "I'm Jeremy Kagan and I suppose you are Henri?"
I shook his hand eagerly and said, "You are right, Mr. Kagan. I appreciate you meeting me out here despite it being quite crowded even for January. Shall we begin?"
"Sure, go ahead. Ask what you want. I'm an open book."
And so here is the interview:
Henri: First, I have to ask. Do you have a problem with being interviewed by a ghost?"
Jeremy: Only if you are an angry ghost.
Henri: Are you afraid of ghosts?
Jeremy:Only the angry ones.
Henri: Before you wrote your book, MY DEATH: A PERSONAL GUIDEBOOK, and before you had your near death experience, what were your views of the afterlife?
Jeremy: I didn’t think about the afterlife. I had enough to do with the now-life and concerns about my future life. My parents, my father in particular said there was no heaven or hell and I took that as fact. I trusted my parents.
Henri: And why did you decide to go to a sweat tent in the first place?
Jeremy: I had gone to sweats before. As I mention in the book these experiences were intense and challenging. You are in the dark, it is very hot, you sweat a lot, its really uncomfortable, but I had powerful visions doing these sweats and felt cleaned of worries, as in the kind of sweat lodges that I had gone to, you are asked to tell the truth and to speak to wishes you have for yourself, for others and to give away those thoughts and emotions that are possessing you. Powerful stuff. And this was the night before my birthday, so I thought it a good idea for a kind or pre-birthday preparation.
Henri: At what point did you start to lose consciousness?
Jeremy: I never lost consciousness. This was the unexpected and remarkable part of my experience. I lost control of my body and my senses. Physical movement, hearing, sight – they all ended. But my mind did not. I have to be careful here because I say my mind, and yet the my part also ended, in the sense that at one moment I relived at the same time all that I had in my memory, then this dissolved, the me-ness was gone, and all I was then was awareness itself. The witness who is not commenting, but being. Now there was a moment when even this awareness dissolved and that was when everything, the infinite, contracted into nothing, and once the nothing happened, consciousness ended, or the sense of the witness was no more.
Henri: When you knew you had gone to the other side, what was the first thing you saw?
Jeremy: As I said, the initial stages of this journey had me lose my senses so I was only in a feeling-mind state. Even feeling is not quite the right word as I couldn’t feel physically anything, but I could still think. But these thoughts had no vision. And even when I went to hell, it was a feeling-mind state rather than some place to be looked at. I didn’t see shit, I was shit. But when hell dissolved as the illusion it actually was and is, I then “saw” and on reflection later, what I saw was similar to other recorded NDEs. I was in motion through a tunnel of cloud like substance and to my right and left were vague statue-like cloud beings more like cloud monoliths and I wondered who they were – my dead relatives? Thoughts forms of people alive? Ghosts? They never became defined but I knew they were beings there that meant me no ill will. I even felt in the fuzziness they were aware of me.
Henri: Is that what you thought you would see?
Jeremy: Not believing in heaven or hell, I had no thoughts about seeing something after dying. I do understand though how others on these experiences see images that they have grown up with, so a Christian may see Jesus, his or her image of Jesus, and a Muslim see Fatima, and a child see a rainbow horse. These images that we have in our lives precondition us in the transitions into the other realms. They are like illusory guides who greet us.
Henri: How did you know what to do to come back and how did you do it?
Jeremy: I did not come back through my own will. During my experience, I was challenged continually to let go, and did let go, to the point that I was a passenger on a whirlwind ride that I had no control over. And the last of the many stages I went through was the contraction of infinite galactic space into nothingness. And it was perfect. And then, again not from my will, I had no will by then, just pure blissful surrender. When I surrender to the infinite and then it contracted into nothingness that was an end of my awareness and then there was a snap of consciousness returning and like a movie playing high speed in reverse I returned through the cosmos to the solar system to earth to the Malibu Mountains of California, to the being lying on the ground next to the sweat lodge, to my former self.
Henri: As a ghost, you know I have experienced death, only I didn't get the chance to come back. I was kaput. History, as far as my mortal life was concerned, but I found out that life does go on just in another form. If you had not come back, do you think you would be earthbound or heaven bound?
Jeremy: In this specific journey, as I went through its stages from loss of body, to hell and out of it, to loss of ego, to revelation of all time and history as one time and all illusion made up by the indefinable absolute Creator that I was a part of, to a final realization that I was about to become a celestial essence like a radiating star in the multitude of stars. There was no sense of an earth return at all.
Henri: Thank you so much for this interview, Jeremy. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, how should they do it?
Jeremy: Please visit the website – http://www.theneardeathandlifeofjeremykagan.com – and there is a drop down menu for messages. Looking forward to reading what others want to share directly with me.
Henri: Saving the best for last, your experiences are all in this wonderful book, MY DEATH: A PERSONAL GUIDEBOOK. Can you give us your Amazon link so that other mortals might want to purchase it?
Jeremy: Of course, and thanks in advance for taking the time to read and see the illustrated e-book. I purposely priced it at 2.99 so it could be affordable for almost anyone. I recommend downloading the PDF version from Balboa Press http://goo.gl/lES9Z and here is the Amazon link http://goo.gl/cPphfW
I thanked Jeremy profusely but as my materialization time was slipping away, I had to scram. Jeremy shook my hand again and walked back down the boardwalk from which he came. I had to marvel at the guy.
Watch him talk about his experiences:
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