Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done well over 600 of them now. And if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there is a donate button on every page of the website, and there’s also a page for other ways to donate other than using PayPal, if you prefer that. My guest today is Nancy Rynes. Hey, Nancy, welcome.
Nancy: Thank you for having me on.
Rick: Yeah, I feel like I know you pretty well. I’ve read your whole book, “Awakenings from the Light,” in the past week, and you have quite a story. So let me just summarize your story very briefly, and then you’re going to elaborate. Some years ago, Nancy had a very serious accident where a car hit her while she was riding her bicycle, and she was dragged under the car and could have easily died or been paralyzed, suffered rather severe injuries. Fortunately, she didn’t die or get paralyzed. She had surgery to repair her spine, and during that surgery she had a profound near-death experience, which really transformed her life. And a lot of wisdom was absorbed or imparted during that experience, which we’re going to be talking about today. So, how’s that for a nutshell synopsis of your situation?
Nancy: That’s awesome. Well done.
Rick: So, let’s elaborate. I realize you’ve told this story a thousand times, and it’s probably in some ways not too pleasant to tell it, because it was such a difficult experience for you, both during the accident and afterwards. But people need to know about it for the context of the whole thing, what happened to you and how you are now saying what you’re saying.
Nancy: Yeah, I think too, as a precursor to the accident, I think it’s important for people to understand where I was coming from before all this happened, because I think it gives a different context to what happened when people know I was a scientist. I was a science writer for a long, long time. I’d been in the sciences and the engineering field for close to 20 years, or even maybe a little bit more, when this accident happened. So, I was well-steeped in the materialist, reductionist way of thinking, and I was a complete skeptic, atheist most of the time, not a very kind one sometimes, I would say, because I just thought that if you believed in anything other than this material reality, you were kind of delusional. But I think there was a part of me that really wanted to believe in something else, because I had–as a young child, I was very spiritual. I wasn’t religious, but I was very spiritual. So, I moved away from that in my teens when I got interested in the sciences. And then going to grad school in the geosciences really cemented it for me. I was really sucked into that culture and that way of thinking. So that’s how it was for me for the following 20 years or so, just being an atheist, agnostic, sometimes experiencing some odd things. But then I would just shunt them aside, get them out of my mind. I didn’t want to think about it, because it didn’t fit into that worldview that I had, that physical reality was all there is.
Rick: You know, it’s funny, atheism and science are very often roughly synonymous in many people’s minds, and yet, in my mind, if you’re really a hardcore atheist, you’re not very scientific, because science is supposed to be a little bit open-minded and open to changing perspective if new evidence presents itself. To just sort of adamantly say, “No, this could not possibly be,” you’re not being scientific.
Nancy: Well, that’s an excellent point, and you’re right on. You’re totally right on. After having gone through all of this, to me now, the quintessential scientist is someone who is open and really curious, and is willing to looking at experiences and data and information across the board, whether it sounds weird or not, because honest to God – and I mean that literally – quantum physics is the weirdest thing anybody has ever taught you. And it’s been proven to be right. How weird is that, right? It’s just, from our perspective, or at least my perspective as someone who had been in the physical sciences, quantum physics is just crazy, weird. But it’s true. And it’s been proven in multiple, hundreds of experiments, even probably in the thousands by now. So, why can’t we use that as an example to really, truly be scientists and look at what’s all of the data, no matter what it is? No matter what it is.
Rick: Obviously, very few people really understand quantum physics. And I’ve heard some great quotes about, I forget who, Max Planck or somebody, saying that if you think you understand it, you don’t, or something like that. But I think one thing that happens a lot with new-age people is they gain a loose layman’s understanding of quantum mechanics, and then they kind of extrapolate it to the macro world, to the world of everyday living. And some scientists cringe when they hear people doing that, because it doesn’t necessarily translate.
Nancy: Well, that actually is not quite true anymore.
Rick: Okay, good to know. Tell us about it.
Nancy: There are several scientists now, and I’m trying to think, I’m blanking on names, but Brian Green is one of them. He’s a string theorist. Michio Kaku and there are a couple other ones, I think Travis Taylor is another. But there’s a lot of movement within quantum physics right now, and especially the younger crowd looks at those rules or that stuff that happens at the very micro level and see if it does actually influence the macro. And they’re starting to find out that it doesn’t just pertain to electrons or subatomic particles. It pertains to molecules, which are groups of atoms. So, we’re getting up and up in scale as to where they’re seeing those quantum effects. But I think it’s going to be years before they completely make that jump to here. Yeah, we can see that it does affect the macro scale, and here’s how. But there’s an opening, and there’s definitely curiosity, and there’s some investigation and research. So that’s a good sign, because we are all made up of subatomic particles and energy, technically all energy. So, at some level, there are quantum effects going on everywhere.
Rick: Yeah, and perhaps an even more fundamental point; and we’ll get to your story pretty soon, but this is fu
Nancy: is the whole argument about whether the brain produces consciousness or consciousness is fundamental, and everything arises from that fundamental field. You’re in Tucson, where they have that consciousness conference at the university, or used to have before COVID. And you also told me you like Rupert Sheldrake’s podcast. He and some of his colleagues wrestle with this topic. But, you know, still the majority of scientists think that, well, the brain produces consciousness. Therefore, when the brain dies, that’s the end of consciousness, and therefore it’s the end of you. But, you know, there’s a flip side where people are saying, no, you’ve got it upside down. In fact, I have a friend, Mark Gober, who wrote a book called The End of Upside-Down Thinking.
Nancy: I’ve read that book.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed him. He’s a great guy. So why don’t you riff on that thought just for a little bit?
Nancy: Well, I would have been in that brain-produces-consciousness camp, before this accident. So, seven and a half, eight years ago, I would have been in that camp. That’s where I was. Even though I had some bizarre experiences that were starting to make me question that just a little bit. I’d shut the door on that questioning again because it was just too, too hard to think about that, because it was just so different from what we’ve been taught in the sciences. To think that way means, “oh my gosh, now I’m going to have to really rethink my entire worldview.” And that’s kind of tough to do, especially when you’re doing it voluntarily as a scientist. It was a bridge too far for me at that point. Now, after having gone through – and there was a point during the accident when it happened, which I’ll talk about in a minute – but when I had that incident that happened, where I was in multiple places at once, I remember thinking, and I was conscious through the whole thing, I remember thinking after this happened, that one point in the accident alone is going to change the way that I think about reality. And I knew that because it was so groundbreaking for me. So now, yes, to me, consciousness is fundamental. And I would say that I go a little bit further than my former scientist would, and even a scientist who actually is a spiritual scientist, I’ve got a number of people that I know are like that. But I will even go so far as to say that, yes, our consciousness is actually creating a portion of this reality, if not all of it. And that to me, that’s kind of where I am right now. I’m just trying to figure out how to touch on that and make that more tenable for people to listen to, more concrete. But that’s where I’m feeling, that’s where I’m going now. It’s a gut sense that that’s the way this works, especially with people like Leonard Susskind and several others who are talking about this whole simulated reality thing. And again, they’re coming at simulated reality from the standpoint of an atheist. I’m not. We can talk about this too, but this is another thing that occurred during my NDE, when I realized that this reality that we’re all living in right now is a simulation or an illusion or a dream or whatever words you want to use. None of those words really are adequate. But as soon as I had died and I got my consciousness into that, what we might call the afterlife, which isn’t the right word either. But I knew that this wasn’t what we thought it was, that this reality is not the be-all and end-all of existence. And we can talk about that a little bit more. So no, I’m definitely into the consciousness-is-fundamental, it’s all connected and it may all be one consciousness, so the non-duality thing.
Rick: Yeah, because if there is an ultimate reality, then what are the less ultimate realities really made of? If you look at them closely and boil them down to their essential constituent, it all ends up being the same thing. And that’s why the Vedic tradition says things like, “That alone is,” and “All of this is that,” and so on.
Nancy: Yeah, and I finally get that now, or at least as much as I can in the moment. I’m certainly not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m starting to understand what they were talking about. It makes sense, totally makes sense.
Rick: Well, I think we’ve teased people enough in terms of alluding to your accident and your experiences you had during it. You did mention that you had a few weird things happen in your life before then, which kind of challenged you a bit, but you brushed them aside. Are those worth getting into at all, or do you want to go straight to the accident?
Nancy: You know, they might be worth getting into afterwards, because I think that it almost makes more sense to talk about them either partway through or right after I talk about the NDE itself. Because they fit better that way.
Rick: All right, so don’t forget to do that.
Nancy: Okay, I’ll keep my fingers crossed, I’ll remember.
Rick: I’ll make a note here, “weird things.”
Nancy: Yeah, “weird things” would be good. Yeah, there’s a couple of them I think that are worth mentioning, because they’re sort of related to all of this. Yeah, so it’s been about seven and a half years ago now that this accident happened. It was in January of 2014. At that point, I was living near Boulder, Colorado, so in the northwest suburbs of Denver. And the climate out there, for those who don’t live in that area or don’t know the climate, in the wintertime, it’s often the case where we could go out on bike rides during the middle of the day because it wasn’t really all that cold.
Rick: Yeah, and then the next day you could have a foot of snow. And then the next day it’s 70 degrees.
Nancy: Exactly. So, this particular day, it was a Friday, I was off from work for that whole week. I had taken off work for the holidays and just decided to go on a bike ride in town to do some errands. No big deal, I’d done it before, and went out. The bizarre thing, though, before I went out, I got to the garage, got my bike out, and I had that — there was a feeling I had in my gut that told me, “Don’t do this. Don’t go out today.” And I just brushed it aside. It’s like, “Hmm, I don’t know why I wouldn’t go out today. I have these errands to run, and it seems nice, and there’s hardly any traffic, so I’m going to go.” So, I went out on my bike ride, and within probably a half a mile, I think, it wasn’t that far from my house, there was a traffic circle that had just been put in. And at that time, the Denver area was starting to get a lot of these roundabouts or traffic circles put in, and nobody knew how to use them. We all hated them. Nobody knew how to use them. And I was on a bike, and there was a bike lane coming into the traffic circle, and there was one on the other side going out, but they hadn’t done anything to put a bike lane in the traffic circle or a way to get around it, other than go through it. And this particular one was very narrow. There was not a lot of room to maneuver. It was probably a little bit too tight just from a design perspective. So, I get into it. There’s a guy driving behind me in a Subaru wagon type of thing, and then off to my right, there’s a street coming in to the traffic circle that’s going to intersect it, and they were supposed to stop. That road coming in from the right was supposed to stop at the circle before proceeding. So, I’m in the circle, and all I’m going to do is go around and then out the other side. So, I was just going to go straight, basically try to go straight through it. And I get up to where that road comes in from the right, and I notice that there are two vehicles, one, a really large SUV, and then behind that was a truck, a small truck of some kind. Both were coming in, and it looked like they were slowing down. And I’m watching them and watching where I’m going, but at the last minute, I could tell that the front vehicle, the big SUV, which turned out to be a Tahoe-sized vehicle, instead of slowing down, she decided to speed up, and she basically ran through it. Well, I was right there. So, she hit me broadside.
Rick: Broadside of you, yeah.
Nancy: Yeah, on my right side. And I remember putting my hand out. I thought that there was enough room, maybe, I could push myself away from her. This was beyond thinking at this point, but I was trying to push myself off of her. And somehow, I must have done a flip in the air and landed on the hood of her vehicle. So, I’m grasping on the hood of her vehicle as she’s driving around this traffic circle. And the bizarre thing is I’m thinking, “okay, she’s going to stop, right?” And if she would have stopped, it wouldn’t have been that horrible of a thing. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t see me on her hood. She was texting. And she had her phone up on the steering wheel, and she was looking at the phone, didn’t notice that she had just run over someone’s bicycle, and there was a bicyclist on her hood looking at her. And so, she kept driving.
Rick: And weren’t there kids in the car, staring at you or something?
Nancy: Yeah, she had two little kids in the back seat. I could see them. They knew I was there. I think they were probably screaming at her, is my guess. They’re two little boys, I believe. I think the police officer said, they were probably seven and five years old. And if I remember right, the woman’s mother-in-law was sitting in the front seat as well, in the passenger seat. But none of them could get her to stop. This woman was bound and determined to keep driving. And so, she kept driving. And I just couldn’t hang on anymore. I wasn’t far enough up to grab onto anything I could hold on to. So, I slipped off and slipped down, and it’s every bicyclist’s nightmare, to be in this situation where somebody is going to run you over. And so, I fell off the front of her vehicle. I’m trying to grab onto stuff, trying not to get on the ground, because I assumed if I hit the ground, she was going to run right over me. And I just assumed that would be it. That was going to be game over at that point. So, I couldn’t grab on anything, and I did hit the ground with my left side. I heard bones breaking, which is very disturbing. If you’ve ever done that before, you know how disturbing that sounds. I heard my collarbone go and several other — I mean, it was just a mess. We can talk about that in a little bit. But I hit the pavement, and for some happenstance, I was right in between her wheels. And I was positioned such that she wasn’t going to run over me at first. But she was in a turn. And so, I figured that her back wheels would probably impact me. So, at this point, there was a little instinct that took over. I reached up under her — at this point I was under her vehicle, where the axle is. And I reached up and grabbed the axle. It’s the only thing I could think of to do. And then when that happened, I had also had a bicycling backpack on when I was in the accident. And there was a chest strap that went across the front. Well, that somehow got stuck on something on her axle or in that undercarriage area. So that was dragging as well. So that was stuck on something. And then I had reached up and grabbed the axle. So she was, at this point, dragging me underneath. But that funky thing that I talked about a little while ago, when my shoulder and head and hip hit the pavement after I came off her vehicle, that’s when, all of a sudden, I was in two places at once. And that really freaked me out. There was a part of my consciousness – and I call it my human level of consciousness – that was in my body and experiencing the accident. And then, what some people might call a soul or the higher self was a higher part of my consciousness that was propelled out of my body and ended up standing at the side of the road watching all this unfold. And it had a different perspective on everything. And I noticed that part of me was more of my true self, my truest self. It was very calm, very gentle and compassionate and loving and accepting of what was happening.
Rick: Let me ask you a question here. I’ve had accidents where, despite the pain and the trauma of the accident that’s taking place, like falling off a bicycle or when a couple months ago I tripped over something and fell on my face on some concrete, there’s a kind of an inner silence that witnesses it and is not perturbed by the trauma. But I’ve never had one, I don’t think, where I was six feet or ten feet away observing it from the outside, which is what you’re describing. So, what do you make of that after all this time and since you’ve had plenty of time to think about it? Why did that happen? Any idea?
Nancy: Well, yeah, it gave me some pause, really. You know, when I was lying in the ER after the accident, I thought about that all day. And, of course, I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last seven and some years. So, I don’t know, it may not be absolutely right, but it feels close for me right now, but the way that I view it is that, whatever this human body is, it has some level of consciousness on its own. Maybe the brain does produce a little bit of consciousness, I don’t know. But there is a basic level of consciousness, call it personality, or some people call it the ego, that’s really attached and stays with the body. And that was what stayed with me. And that part of me that was in my body was very fearful, of course, why wouldn’t you be? And feeling pain and feeling absolute terror, and it was in that flight or fight mode. That part of me that was propelled out, was almost 50 feet away. It was quite a distance from the accident. That is what I would consider now my higher self or a higher state of our own awareness.
Rick: Or subtle body. Some traditions would say we have a subtle body, which is what carries on when we die, or which maybe, during an operation, is watching from the ceiling or something like that.
Nancy: Right. There are so many different terms for it, and I don’t think any one of them are really quite right. I don’t think we really quite have the full understanding of what that all is at this point. But certainly, some kind of eternal consciousness part of me, or that I was a part of, was out there and separate.
Rick: Irene just sent me a comment that said it’s quite common for people who have severe trauma to leave their bodies or witness it like that. It’s kind of the ultimate coping mechanism.
Nancy: I think it’s a savior mechanism, it really is. But for me it was definitely two very different states of consciousness. One was fearful and traumatized. The other one was very spiritual, very aware, very connected, it almost knew the future, and knew that everything was going to be okay.
Rick: That kind of reminds me of Woody Allen saying, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” So, it’s as if you’re not there, you’ve stepped out.
Nancy: Well, I think that’s really what happens for a lot of people. From my experience of working with people who are in the dying process, I think that eternal part of their souls, if that’s what you want to call it, moves on well before the body actually physically dies. I’ve seen that many, many times. And we can talk about that a little bit later when we kind of wrap up what I’ve done since then. But to me, what it represented was showing me these two different levels of the conscious body. And that’s when I started to really think about and understand that my worldview could very easily change just as a result of that alone. I remember thinking that to myself a lot, especially over the next few days. That wasn’t anything they taught me in school. They didn’t teach me that consciousness can be outside of the body. And getting details that I couldn’t have seen from my physical body. There were things I saw from outside, that, being stuck under the truck, I couldn’t physically see with my physical eyes.
Rick: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? It’s as if we have senses in the subtle body which actually don’t need a physical body to operate. In fact, I’ve heard of people who were physically blind, eyes totally ruined, who actually somehow had the ability to see because they were so tuned in to that subtle body. There was one guy who could ride a bicycle through an obstacle course with his head completely wrapped in a tube and stuff like that.
Nancy: Yeah. Well, now I can understand a little bit more how that kind of thing happens. I can’t do that myself.
Rick: Don’t try this at home.
Nancy: Yeah, I don’t.
Rick: All right. So, we left you under the car and continue.
Nancy: Yeah. So, what my body consciousness didn’t know, but my soul consciousness saw from outside, is that the guy that had been in the truck behind this woman got up to the traffic circle and he saw what had happened, and he managed to drive his truck around the traffic circle the wrong way to try to head her off.
Rick: Wow. Amazing.
Nancy: Which was a pretty dangerous maneuver. But he was bound and determined he was going to stop her, and really, the only thing that stopped her was him blocking the road with his truck. So, you know, I am so grateful to him for doing that. And then when she finally did stop, I think the police officers said that she had dragged me for at least 60 feet, perhaps closer to 75. It was really tough to tell. But anyway, I was under there a while. And so, when she finally stopped the vehicle, my first thought was “I want to get up and run.” And it was weird how I almost couldn’t control that instinct to get up and run. I just wanted to get up and get the heck out of there.
Rick: Fight or flight.
Nancy: Right! It was super strong. And so, I started to wiggle my way out, and I’m surprised that I didn’t do severe damage to my spine at that point. But I was trying to wiggle my way out. And I was able to get my head and the upper part of my shoulders out from underneath of her front end of her SUV. Then a woman ran up and put her hands on my shoulders and said, don’t move. I’m a nurse. I’m a trauma nurse. And you need to stay still. You need to stay safe. And if she hadn’t done that, I might not have survived. Because my spine was in really bad shape, especially my neck. It was in tough shape. The doctor later told me that if I would have just even turned like that, I would have been a goner. Because my spine was just almost crushed up by where the neck meets the skull. So, it was pretty dicey there for a while. But she kept me in one place until the paramedics arrived. And then once they started working on me, they prodded just a little bit, very gently trying to figure out what hurt, which was basically everything. And I remember screaming. And when I screamed, that’s when that part of me, that higher self, that soul part of me that was outside came back in. It was like, boom, the two came back together when the pain flooded back in. And from there on, they got me to the ER, which wasn’t too far away, luckily. It was not even a half a mile away from the accident. And they basically stopped counting bone breaks, because there were just too many, but they thought it was probably at least 24 different bones that were broken, and they were broken in multiple places. And so, my spine was the worst, as you can imagine. It was the worst hit. My L1 vertebra, which is your lower back, was basically blown apart. There wasn’t really much left of it. And my neck was in not much better shape. So, they were thinking, well, you’ve got a couple of choices here. Luckily, I could still feel my legs, even though one was just a little bit numb on one side. I could still move. I could still feel my legs. So, they thought, well, we can do surgery to stabilize all that so that it will heal properly. And if we do that, your chances of being able to walk again are pretty good. The other option was to lie flat on my back in a hospital room for at least six months. And that was not an option for me. I just couldn’t imagine! I don’t like to be a patient in a hospital at all, even for an outpatient procedure, let alone for six months. So that wasn’t going to work.
Rick: That seems improbable because you had all these bones splinters and everything. And how could just lying there prevent those from eventually poking into your spinal cord?
Nancy: Yeah, that was actually my biggest concern because that L1 vertebra was shattered. And those little shards were just all over the place. I think they knew what I was going to choose. I think it wasn’t rocket science to figure out what option Nancy was going to choose.
Rick: So, the juicy part is yet to come because you had this operation in a few days and had this amazing experience during it.
Nancy: Yeah, so they wheeled me into the OR again, fully conscious, and gave me the general anesthetic. And it’s important to note that I’ve had surgeries before. I’ve had this exact same general anesthetic before. No problems ever. Maybe just a little bit of queasy stomach or something, but nothing like what we’re going to talk about next. So, I’ve had this before. Granted, I hadn’t had a physical trauma like that before, but I have had that anesthesia before. But they gave it to me, and I started to drift off. And I noticed all of a sudden, that everything didn’t go black. I was standing up, looking around. And I thought, “What’s going on? Is this it, right?” And I was standing up, and I was outside, which, of course, I wasn’t. But I remembered that I was in surgery. So, I had this concept of, “Huh, I was just in surgery. What am I doing right now standing up? And why am I outside? And that’s really pretty, though.” It was a beautiful meadow up in the mountains. And I was thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t bad. I could be here while they do surgery on me. This is okay.” And then I started noticing what I would call weird things. I started feeling very peaceful. But it wasn’t like it was me. It was like peace was an energy that was coming into me from the outside. And then I started feeling love coming in. That’s the only word I have to describe it is love or compassion or something. It was as if it was coming into me from the outside. As if you’re going to stand in front of a fire or fireplace on a cold day, and you feel that warmth from the fire radiating through you, that’s what this was like. It was like that warmth from a fire, but it wasn’t warmth. It was compassion and love and acceptance. And that’s when I started to think, “Well, this isn’t normal. I don’t remember anybody talking about this during surgery, and I’ve never had this happen during surgery. I wonder if I died.” I’m going through this all, trying to tick off things of what could be happening. And there was that moment I thought, “Well, wait a minute. If I did die, what’s this? I don’t believe that anything happens after death. What is this place? What am I doing here?” And then I went back to my programming that I had as a little kid, because I grew up in a Catholic family, an Irish Catholic family for the most part. And I went back to my schooling that you got in Catholic grade school, which I went to, which always told me that if you don’t believe in God when you die, you’re going to go to hell. And so, I pulled back on that and thought, “Wait, this isn’t making any sense, because my training teaches me that I shouldn’t be experiencing anything other than hell at this point. Why am I being accepted into this place of love?” And I was just struggling with what to do with all of this when there was a voice, but it wasn’t like a physical voice. There was a voice that came through, and it was just generically saying, “This is your home. Welcome home.” And I thought about that for a while, and then I started to remember. Oh, wait, and I was almost, I was looking down. There wasn’t anything to see down below me. I was just looking down, thinking, “Wait, that’s right. That life that I just came from, that wasn’t real. That was the dream. This is my home.” It was starting to come back. “Oh, yeah, now I get it. This is real.” And I really started to weep. It was just so beautiful. I was so accepted, but remembering that I was finally home was just so beautiful. I just was so happy to be back. And it was about at that point that I started to see what I would call a spiritual being, a being just in a very general, vaguely human form, vaguely a woman, but, she said, “That’s not really who I am. It’s just a cloak I’m wearing to make it easier for you to communicate with me.” So, some kind of a spiritual entity or spiritual being came up to me and said that she was my teacher or my guide. I prefer the term teacher now, but she was my teacher, and she would help me learn what I needed to learn.
Rick: Did you get the impression she was saying that she was your teacher for that moment or had been your teacher for a long time or something?
Nancy: Had been my teacher for a long time.
Rick: Okay.
Nancy: And that was the sense that I got, and I kind of remembered her. It was more like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of know who you are.” There was a vague memory there.
Rick: Do you think everybody has a teacher like that who’s assigned to them, or perhaps each teacher, such as her, has a dozen people that they look out for, or anything? Any thoughts on that?
Nancy: Yeah, probably multiple. I mean, I asked her about that a little bit, and she definitely said it’s not a one-to-one thing. So, she has a lot of different people that she helps, not just me. And it makes total sense. Given that time doesn’t really exist in that state of being, the way that it does here, there’s not a sense of linear time. It’s just “now.” And there’s no sense of time flowing or of, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t get it back because now that’s the past and I can’t go there.” So, the fact that she may have, I don’t know, 50 or 100 students doesn’t really matter. She can handle all of that. So, she told me that she was going to help me remember and learn what I needed to learn. And I got stuck on the “and you’re going to go back” thing. I did not want to go back to that life. I was scared. I was scared of what my body would be like. I was afraid that maybe I’d be a paraplegic when they got done with the surgery. I had no idea what was going to happen. Or just having a mobility impairment. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around coming back into that after having been to this amazing place where I was. And she said, “Well, you’ve already agreed to go back, so you’re going to go back at the end of this.” And I reacted, “I don’t remember agreeing to that.” [Laughter] And I actually said that. “I don’t remember agreeing to do that.” And so, if anybody’s seen the movie “The Shack,” which came out after my experience. There are a couple of scenes in that movie where the protagonist is shown a vision of his life, kind of in the air in front of him. And he gets to do what we call a life review. Well, in that moment, I was shown something very similar. It was almost like a video screen in the air. And my teacher showed me myself, before my birth, in general terms agreeing to do certain things. Or agreeing to experience certain things. Or agreeing to learn certain things. So, I wanted to learn some stuff, I wanted to do some stuff. And I had made a commitment that if I hadn’t led a spiritual path or taken a spiritual path by the time I was in my mid-30s, then this event would happen, the one that was causing this.
Rick: Wow, now that’s interesting. First of all, if people want to delve into this notion, you can read Michael Newton’s books. Or I’ve interviewed a guy named Rob Schwartz who talks about between life situations where we decide what’s going into our life. But what you just said, you know, there’s a verse in the Yoga Sutras which goes “Heyam dukham anagatam,” which means “avert the danger which has not yet come.” And the implication is that by doing enough spiritual practice, making enough spiritual progress, you can avert calamitous situations which you will otherwise have to undergo. Because in any case, you will have made the transition or learned what you needed to learn in order not to get smacked over the head to learn it. So, what you just said is very interesting, that had you somehow or other gotten on a spiritual path earlier, this accident wouldn’t have had to happen at all.
Nancy: It wouldn’t have been necessary.
Rick: Yeah, wow. On the other hand, you know, you’ve come out with so much interesting stuff which we haven’t even gotten into yet that you learned in that between life or that near death experience. And maybe you would never have been able to convey such knowledge to people if you hadn’t gone through something like this. It’s hard to say.
Nancy: Yeah, it is. And I don’t waste a lot of my energy considering that, because I’m here, you know. I haven’t figured out a way, at least in this life, to go back in time and change things.
Rick: And actually, what I just said doesn’t make sense, because there are plenty of spiritual teachers who are saying the kinds of things you say without having had a car accident or a near death experience.
Nancy: Yeah, and who knows? Maybe I would have learned it, maybe not, I don’t know. But I went through it and here I am.
Rick: So, let that be a warning to everybody, better get on the spiritual path, you’re going to get hit by a car.
Nancy: Well, I think that’s an interesting point to bring up, because if I look back, if I would have really delved into my spirituality in my 20s, actually, when I first had my first inkling to do so, just because of the kind of personality I have, I would have dived in head first and just glommed onto it. I probably wouldn’t have needed this accident.
Rick: Yeah, and that’s just one more point I’ll throw in, and then you can keep telling the story. But some people would see an accident like that as either an accident and there’s no meaning to it, it’s just stuff like that happens, or they might see it as some kind of punishment from God or some such thing. It can be interpreted in negative ways, but what you’re implying is that an obviously unpleasant and traumatic thing can be, in the bigger picture, in service to our spiritual growth.
Nancy: Right. Yeah.
Rick: Perhaps that’s true of entire societies as well as individuals.
Nancy: We can learn, and it’s unfortunate that, with me, as I think with a lot of people, a lot of humans learn best through the school of hard knocks. This was a real hard knock.
Rick: Yeah, whamo.
Nancy: But we do, and I did, and I honestly, as painful as it was, I will say that I wouldn’t trade it for anything. You couldn’t take that away from me right now. There’s no way that I would give it up, even with all of the pain and the recovery and the anxiety, once in a while, that came with all of this. I still wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was that transformative for me.
Rick: True, but if you could really play with time and say, “All right, I’ll get into spirituality in my 20s and get really into it,” then you’d probably prefer that to having had this happen.
Nancy: It would have been a lot less painful. Yeah, so she showed me this view of me agreeing to certain things and saying what I wanted to experience and learn and do. Then I was like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that now. Shoot, okay,” and I just sort of played along with it. Honestly, I was still hoping that I could pull one over on her at the very end and just stay there, but I just played along and learned. Whatever she decided she wanted to teach me, I just went along with it and learned as much as I could. Not that I had much of a choice, by the way, because I was there with her and I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I guess I could have just stood around and enjoyed the scenery, but I just let her teach me. A lot of the stuff made sense, but a lot of it I hadn’t ever really thought about before. A lot of people ask, “Well, what’s the most profound part of it?” Depending, but for the most part, on most days, I will say it was my life review, and that’s not what I just told you about. I had a real-life review, which happened a little bit later in the process. She used the surface of a pond, a virtual pond, but the surface of a pond as kind of a movie screen, where there were a lot of little different scenes, I call them little YouTube videos of different parts of my life, where I could, if I looked at one of those little scenes from my life, I could dive right into it and be right there again. She showed me this for a specific reason. She wanted me to see the impact that my thoughts, my feelings, my words, and my actions had on not just me, but on people around me and the world around me. So, I examined a point in my life where I had said something intentionally to hurt my sister. It was just one of those spiteful sibling comments that was awful. It was when I was in my late teens, and she was really hurt by that, but I didn’t know it at the time it actually happened. But in this review, not only could I see it like it was a video, but then I dove into it, and I was back in it again. And I wasn’t back in it only from my viewpoint. I could experience her viewpoint at the same time. So, I was experiencing her hurt and her feelings of betrayal at the same time – and this always gets me – at the same time as I was spewing this garbage out at her. I could feel like it was me, like I was being hit with the stuff that I was spewing out. And I could feel how horrible it was, she was just devastated by what I said. And to me, it wasn’t that bad, but to her it was, and I had done it intentionally.
Rick: And you never realized that until you had this during an NDE.
Nancy: Yeah, and part of that teaching was just how connected we all are. You know, I can’t say or do anything without it impacting someone else. Even if you don’t want to think about it, it still impacts other people. So today, that whole lesson around what I learned during that life review really, truly does impact the way that I deal with other people just on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes I slip up and get a little bit out of that conscious state, but I’m hyper-aware of how what I say and do impacts other people. It doesn’t mean I’m a doormat or anything like that, but you can certainly take an extra couple of seconds to be kind to someone and not rip them apart. So, I have a more conscious way of communicating these days as a result of that one experience.
Rick: Did you go through a lot of little vignettes like that in your NDE? Or were there dozens of them and you went into this one and this one and this one?
Nancy: Yeah, I usually just talk about two because it doesn’t really do any good to talk about each individual one. So that was a negative one, where I said or did something negative and saw how that impacted other people. Then there was always a balance. So it was always balanced out with something good, something positive, something loving. And that one was balanced out with a time that I was at the grocery store. And it was during the Christmas rush. It was just a few days before Christmas one year. And this was in the Boulder area. The teller, the checkout person, was having a really bad day, I could tell. There were screaming kids and the woman who was in the checkout line ahead of me was, honestly, she was being really nasty. I think she was having a bad day. So, she was just taking it out on the checkout woman. So, when I got up to have my stuff checked out, I just looked at her and gave her a big smile and said, “Thank you so much for doing such a good job and for being so patient with everybody. I know I really appreciate it and a lot of other people do too.” So just giving that little bit of love as much as I could to help her feel better, I was able to feel how much that lifted her up in that moment. It really helped her. It lifted her spirits enough that she could go home on a positive note and not take that negativity with her home to her family.
Rick: Yeah. In your book you explain nicely how the influences of our actions spread out like ripples on a pond and how they, through destructive interference, can cancel out the ripples of negativity that others might be emanating. And there’s no limit there, I think that every influence we generate goes out, ripples out through the whole universe, actually.
Nancy: It does.
Rick: It might be hard to understand the mechanics of that since we’re separated from things by light years, but I think they do.
Nancy: Yeah, they do. And that was another piece of this teaching, your words and actions go out and influence the physical world, yes, but they also have a spiritual energy, a spiritual echo that goes out as well. It isn’t just on the physical level. It’s on all levels and it goes out across the universe. I still do meditations pretty much every day. I guess, I don’t know if they’re considered meditations, but I do send out energy, loving energy, at least to my neighborhood, as much as I can, because that stuff really does make a difference. It really does have an impact. Yeah, so that was, I think that for the most part, that life review overall was probably the most transformational aspect of this, because it was just so obvious and visceral and I could experience other people’s thoughts and feelings. How does that work? Well, it works because we’re all connected, we’re all one, especially at that spiritual level.
Rick: It’s interesting how people who have NDEs often report having life reviews, even though they’re not going to die. And the guide that has met them knows they’re not going to die, but it’s time for a life review, you know?
Nancy: Yeah, well I think it’s a good way to get yourself set back on a good path when you come back.
Rick: Yeah, it’s like a tune-up or something.
Nancy: Right. Do you remember? You’ve got to remember this lesson. As if to say, “this is an important one. If you don’t learn anything else, learn this.” Just how connected we all are. That was my biggest lesson. And how much there’s no separation, really. There is no distance. It’s all one. It’s all love. It’s all compassion. Yeah, a lot of us have to have that, I think, to get ourselves back on a healthy, good, conscious path when we get back. And those who have an NDE, I’m not going to say every NDE-er I’ve talked to, I would probably say 90% of those I’ve spoken with personally will say that their life review absolutely was the most transformative thing. If they have one. But, yeah, it’s profound. There is a part of me that wishes I could figure out how to allow people here in the physical to have one of those without dying first.
Rick: Well, I don’t know about having life reviews, but I think that people who do a deep spiritual practice for a long time end up processing a lot of stuff. And, in my own experience, meditating for 53 years, I often have gone through things where I’ll flash on something that happened when I was 7 years old, or 17, or something like that, and I’ll work through it and learn something from it. It’ll just bubble up spontaneously, and then dissipate. So, I don’t think we have to have a near-death experience to undergo the kind of learning that you had. There are other ways.
Nancy: Well, I think that’s probably the gentler way to experience those things, and to process them. Let them happen on their own.
Rick: Yeah, and of course there are therapies that people do, and there are things like ayahuasca and various other things that people do to explore this stuff. And everything has different effects.
Nancy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I would again say, that was probably the most transformative one thing. But the teaching was all interconnected stuff, it was about love. Not just loving other people, but being love, giving out that love energy on a daily basis. Loving yourself, because that’s important too. A lot of people are good with the loving others, and they’re not so good at loving themselves.
Rick: Can you really be good at loving others if you don’t love yourself?
Nancy: Well, they think they can. They think they can. And I think to some extent people can feel kindness or compassion toward other people without loving themselves. But I think that deep love is probably not accessible until you really fully embrace who you are and love yourself. And that was hard for me. You know, I went into this experience not really liking myself very much. So, that was directed at me. I understood what people meant. I just didn’t have that view of me as a worthwhile person. So, there was, that was another one. A big one was loving the earth. Now, even if this is some kind of a simulated reality or a dreamlike state, we still have to take care of this place we’re in, whatever this is. And that was a big part, too, of what I was taught, not that I wasn’t loving the earth or loving the planet or whatever. But one of those messages was really for us as a society, as a humanity, to learn how to get back to that place where we saw the earth as a part of us. We took care of the earth as if it was us. So, that was a big deal for me.
Rick: Yeah, you know, some people misinterpret Vedanta to say that the world is an illusion and we shouldn’t really take it very seriously. But really, in traditional Vedanta, they have a term called vyavaharika, which means transactional reality. And it refers to the world we live in, which, you know, is not ultimately real, but is relatively real. And it needs to be dealt with seriously on its own level. You know, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. So, I think it’s a misinterpretation of some of these spiritual teachings to just sort of brush off human concerns and earthly concerns as being illusory. And it’s a spiritual bypassing kind of thing.
Nancy: Yeah, I would agree with that. I like that term, transactional reality. I think that really, that hits home. You know, if you’re on, say, for example, you get on an airline flight from, I don’t know, Phoenix to New York City, what are you going to do? Is everybody going to trash the place while they’re on the airplane because they know they’re going to get off in a couple of hours? No, that’s not what you do.
Rick: These days, some people actually do that.
Nancy: I know. That still breaks my heart. But that’s how I look at it. It doesn’t matter what this reality is, ultimately. We’re in it now. And we’re in it for kind of a long time. And our kids are going to be in it and our grandkids. So, let’s take care of it. Let’s see it for what it is. It’s a part of us. We’re all one. It’s not separate from us. We’re a part of it.
Rick: I think it’s not an accident or a fallen state or something that we’re here. It’s a school. It’s a learning opportunity. And actually, a precious one at that. People might want to watch an interview I did a couple weeks ago with a guy named Christian Sundberg. I won’t go into any great detail, but in that interview, we did speak in detail about how it’s a rare opportunity to have this human life and this tremendous potential of what one can actually achieve in one’s spiritual evolution. And so, take advantage of it.
Nancy: Yep. Yep. It is an awesome opportunity. Yeah, so those were the first three ones. I’m going to open up my book, because I’ll pull them out in the order that I wrote them in here. You know, a lot of these lessons or teachings were just woven through my whole experience. So, it’s not, okay, now we’re going to learn about the earth. Or now we’re going to learn about love. It was just all woven together. And I pulled them out as separate topics just to make it easier for people to understand in a book form. But so, when I talk about this stuff, realize that these concepts were just littered through or woven through the entire experience. And I’m doing my best here to pull each one out as an individual lesson.
Rick: Yeah. And I got the impression that when you were having your NDE, it wasn’t like the guide was speaking English to you or something. It was more of a psychic transmission or just a nonverbal heart-to-heart or soul-to-soul resonance or something.
Nancy: Right.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: Yeah, that’s a good point. It was a little bit amusing. There were times when I just couldn’t understand that communication you just talked about. It was beyond telepathic. It wasn’t telepathic. It was soul-to-soul. It was concepts and visuals and feelings and ideas from who knows when and who knows who, all coming together into my heart region. That’s where it felt like it was coming into. Sometimes that information was coming in so quickly that I couldn’t process it. It was just overwhelming. And sometimes I stumbled. Sometimes I took a step back. And so, my teacher said, “okay, well, I’ll just tell you.” So, then she tried to vocalize it in English, and it was as if, “I can’t believe I have to do this.” I could just see her, doing this.
Rick: Oy vey.
Nancy: “But I will.” So, we had a little bit of a joking relationship. It was very fun and very friendly. As if we had known each other for a very long time and we could joke around. But she would get frustrated sometimes and sometimes would just cross her arms in frustration, as if, “oh, my God, I can’t believe that I have to tell you this.” But that’s the way it happened. And there were times when I could hear or feel communication coming from someone else other than her. As if she was a filter or a funnel for other voices that were there. And I asked her about that. I said, “well, I only see you. Why am I getting the feeling that there are other people here in the background?” And she said, “well, there are.” I don’t know, but it was about 1,000 or something. It was a lot.
Rick: Wow.
Nancy: And they want to talk to you, but because I was in an in-between state, I wasn’t fully dead and I wasn’t really alive, I couldn’t handle that level of communication. I could barely handle the one-on-one with her. So, she acted as the filter or the relay for a lot of that so that I wouldn’t be completely blasted by it.
Rick: I sometimes get the feeling that someone having an NDE like yours is kind of a special event on the other side. It doesn’t happen every day that you’re going to have somebody like that who’s going to go back. And so, they kind of say, “oh, boy, we have this opportunity to prime this representative of higher knowledge, so, let’s imbue her with as much wisdom as we can in this short space before she goes back.” And so on. That’s the idea that came to mind when you spoke of these possibly 1,000 other beings, and she’s just the representative or the conduit for them.
Nancy: Yeah. That’s an interesting way to look at it. I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: “Let’s give her as much as she can handle.”
Rick: Yeah. Because I really do think, and I’m sure you would agree with me, that whoever they are, whatever they are, they really have our best interests in mind. And it must be a little frustrating, if they can experience frustration, to see all the trials and tribulations we go through when they know that it could be so much better. And the veil that shrouds us when we’re born can be so thick. And then when we have an experience like you had, and the veil is gone temporarily, we go, “oh, yeah, this is my true home.” But then, boom, the veil can come back again. So, an opportunity to catch someone when the veil has lifted and send them back with some higher knowledge must be kind of special.
Nancy: Yeah. Well, and I was lucky. Well, maybe not lucky. Maybe that was planned this way. But I was lucky in that I remembered everything.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: You know, I remembered the accident, all of the accident. I remembered all of this. And that is not —
Rick: You mean when you were there or after you came back?
Nancy: After I came back.
Rick: Right, right.
Nancy: Yeah, I remembered all of it. And it was a lot. I first tried to block some of it out because it was just too crazy weird, when I came back into my body. But then I just let it roll. And when I let it roll, I wrote it down. And it was just all there, you know. And I — we can talk about that later. But I did tell people right away what had happened and I got really detailed with it. So, it was all right there when I came back. And I didn’t know this at the time, but Eben Alexander, after he had his NDE and woke up from it, the first thing he asked for was a notebook and a pen or a pencil, so that he could start writing stuff down. And I did the same thing. I asked one of my friends, can you please bring me a sketchbook and some pencils or something so that I can start writing this stuff down and drawing sketches. So, he did. And it was hard at first because I still had a hard time, lifting my arm enough to write. But I did the best I could and wrote it all down as soon as I could. So, I have all that, which is awesome. I came back with all those memories right there, which I shouldn’t have had because I was under anesthesia. And they had given me an amnesia drug to boot while I was in surgery. So, I shouldn’t have remembered anything. So anyway, that’s another story. But, yeah, I came back with all that information and did as best as I could to put it all in a book, mostly for myself, because I knew I was going to have to reread this stuff every once in a while.
Rick: That’s helping a lot of other people, too.
Nancy: It does. You know, and it helps me.
Rick: I’ve always liked these NDE books. I’ve been reading them for several decades, even though I’ve never had one and don’t particularly want to have one. But, it just kind of thins that veil that I was just talking about. You just get a visceral sense that this deeper reality is not that far away. And that this life is not so short as you might think, that there’s a much more long-term reality to our existence and all that stuff. It’s handy to have that perspective as we go through life.
Nancy: Yeah, that we’re more eternal than we give ourselves credit for, that we’re more powerful than we think. Even in this life, even as human beings, we’re more powerful. The biggest thing that gets in the way of that is our own thoughts and beliefs. You know, that was another one. And I’ve talked about how we’re all connected and not just connected to each other as humans. This is a hard one for a lot of Westerners to really understand, but connected to what we call other animals, to the rocks, the trees, the landscape, everything is all part of this spiritual consciousness, all of it. You know, I’ve given talks in the Midwestern U.S. and have had people from the Sioux Nations in my audience. And then afterwards we’ll compare notes, and well, that’s what they’ve been taught for many, many generations.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: And it’s just part of their culture, and it’s part of the culture of a lot of indigenous people. It’s something that we’ve forgotten for a lot of Western, Caucasian, European-centric people, that we are connected to everything around us.
Rick: Yeah. Interesting that we Europeans came barging over here and regarded them as heathens and tried to convert them to our way of thinking and all, and didn’t even recognize the wisdom that they had.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a shame. It really is one of those heartbreaking things for me.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s a comment from someone that pertains to something we were talking about a few minutes ago. This is from Helena in Montreal. She says, “I remember Paramahansa Yogananda said, ‘If one is following the spiritual path, even if there’s past karma creating an event which is supposed to happen, the impact or outcome would be annihilated to a minimum, instead of serious injuries, only a scratch.'”
Nancy: Hmm. Yeah, back to that same point.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: Now I wish I would have read all that before my accident.
Rick: Oh, well. All is well and wisely put, you know.
Nancy: We learn it in different ways, right?
Rick: We do. And, you know, you’ve been given a certain assignment, and here it is.
Nancy: Yeah, here I am. Mostly, it’s just being. The main message for me was to come back here and get my life back on track and live a really good life. Learn how to live a good life. Learn how to be love. Learn how to show others love, show yourself love, be compassionate while at the same time not being a doormat. Just how to do all of this stuff. If all I did was spend the rest of my life putting into practice what’s in this one book, then that for me is a life well lived. It’s hard because when I came back, it bothered some of my friends and family. And I lost friends because of this, and they just couldn’t follow along.
Rick: Because you were saying this woo-woo stuff, you mean?
Nancy: Yeah. I went over to the woo-woo side of the house. But the funky thing is that now, it’s been seven and a half years, I’ve had a lot of time to think, especially the last year and a half with COVID. There shouldn’t be this separation or this gulf that we have between the spiritual people and the scientific people. There shouldn’t be this gulf that we have right now. And I know that viscerally, it should not be there. And I think it’s healing. You know, there wasn’t a gulf up until probably the end of the Renaissance or even into the Enlightenment. At least in the Western world. Now, I’m guessing, that gulf never really existed in India. Maybe not even in China, or in other parts of the world but I’m talking about the European cultures. There was that gulf between proper science and people who believed in a spiritual view. And never the twain shall meet. Well, to me, that needs to heal. That absolutely needs to heal. There are a lot of things that need to heal on this planet. But that’s definitely one of them that I feel very strongly. Because I had been in that camp on the science side before. So, I felt that very strongly, especially in the last couple of years. Just thinking about all the stuff that I learned. And there’s nothing in it that precludes science also having an impact in this world. I mean, they don’t cancel each other out. They can actually enhance each other. At least that’s how I and some other people are thinking.
Rick: Oh, absolutely. I’ll send you a link later of a talk I gave on this about six, seven years ago. But I feel as if spirituality explores realms that science should be interested in, that science really wants to understand how the universe works, but doesn’t have the tools to explore. And science, on the other hand, offers an empirical, rigorous way of thinking, methodical way of thinking, that can save spiritual people from getting lost in imaginative, fanciful realms that are not what they are actually looking for. So, I think that a marriage of a scientific way of thinking with deep spirituality can enrich both. And perhaps 50, 100, 200 years from now, we’ll look back and think, “Why did we ever think of them as separate? We really just have this one unified approach to gaining knowledge, which includes both subjective and objective technologies.”
Nancy: Yeah, I like that. And that’s absolutely how I see it too. You’re better at explaining that than I would have been.
Rick: Well, thank you. I’ve been pondering it myself for a while. I’ll send you a link to that talk, you might enjoy it.
Nancy: Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, we can go into some of these a little.
Rick: Sure, anything that comes to mind. Yep.
Nancy: Another one that was really strong for me was, let’s just say, what’s coming to me right now is intuitive ability. So, listening to your heart, listening to that intuitive sense that we all have. And I really do believe that we all have it, but some of us listen to it and others don’t. And as we’ve alluded to before, I’ve had that all my life. I just didn’t want to listen to it.
Rick: Right. And if we ignore it, we tend to numb it. And if we listen to it, we tend to enhance it.
Nancy: Right. Yep, yep. I saw that myself. You know, we talked a little bit earlier about a couple of incidents where, earlier on in my life, I had stuff that happened which I just shunted aside because they didn’t fit into my world view at the time and I didn’t want to deal with them. Two of them happened during the last year of my father’s life. He had been dealing with cancer for seven years before he finally passed away. About a year before he died, I had this really bizarre incidence, and this was back when I was still an atheist, and I was meditating because, I thought, “you can meditate and be an atheist as long as you tell yourself you’re just helping your brain think better, right?” That’s what I was telling myself. So, I would meditate pretty much every day, and it did help with stress and anxiety and that kind of thing. So, I did it. I went out to visit him and my mom. They lived about a six-hour drive away from me. And so, I went to visit them for a long weekend in November, about a year before he finally passed away. And he was a big outdoors guy. He loved to go fishing. He loved to go hunting. Even if he never got anything, he just liked to be out there. So, he always wanted to be outdoors. And he was bound and determined, you know. He’s pretty frail at this point. The cancer’s beaten him pretty hard. He wanted to go deer hunting. And I thought, “what, are you nuts? You’re crazy. You know, you can barely walk.” And I said, “No, if you want to go, I will take you, and I will walk out there with you, and I’ll make sure you’re safe.” Because I wanted him to be out there, out in the woods experiencing just being out there in the woods. And I wanted him to be safe. And I was going to go out with him on a Saturday morning. I got there Friday afternoon and got settled in, did a little quick meditation. And while I was meditating, something really weird happened. And I normally didn’t have weird things happen during my meditation, but this was bizarre. I experienced memories of my dad from the standpoint of him as a young kid from somebody named Sidney who was a friend of his. And they were both in their teens, and this vision was of the two of them with a couple of their other buddies. They were going to go deer hunting. And they were gathered together around this campfire. They had a camp up in the north woods. Their parents had this camp where they would just go out there and hang out and go hunting and fishing. So, they were up there. And I was seeing this whole thing happen from the standpoint of this young man named Sidney. And they had this back-and-forth conversation. And I didn’t know a Sidney. I’d never heard of my dad’s friends. I knew a couple of his friends from when he was a kid, but certainly not a Sidney. And then there was a flash from there to Sidney in Korea. He had volunteered and gotten tour of duty over in the Korean War and was killed in action in Korea. And I saw the whole thing. I mean, I was there experiencing it, right there with him. And I came out of this and went, “what was that?” I thought maybe I was making it up. That was the first thing. I thought, I’ve never heard of this Sidney. What is all that? So next morning, my dad and I go out to the woods, get out of the truck. And I knew I couldn’t talk about this in front of my mom. She would have freaked out. So, I said, you know, there’s something really weird that happened to me last night. I really need to just ask you about this. And he said, okay. Because I knew he had some bizarre beliefs that he wouldn’t talk about a lot. But I thought maybe he’d be open to listening. So, I said, “did you ever know a kid named Sidney?” And he did this shocking look. He said, “how do you know about Sidney?” And I said, “well, I think he came to me yesterday when I was meditating. And he said he used to call you Willie,” because my dad’s name was Bill. And I could just see the blood drain out of his face. And he said, “I’ve never told anybody about Sidney. How did you know about him?” I said, “well, he came to me yesterday.” I said — and so then I relayed the conversation that they had had over this campfire at their camp, and they were going deer hunting. He just was like a ghost. He was just so white. His eyes were like saucers. And I said, “well, I think he just wanted me to let you know that he is okay.” You know, he wanted to say that, he had actually told me, “Tell Willie,” my dad, “Tell Willie that I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get back from Korea.”
Rick: Oh, he died in Korea.
Nancy: Yeah, he died. He died in a firefight in Korea.
Rick: Wow.
Nancy: And apparently he felt bad about that, because they were best friends.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: But, no, he never told my mom about Sidney. He never told anybody else. So, the fact that I knew about this kid was crazy.
Rick: That’s really cool. And this happened before your accident.
Nancy: Yeah, this happened, oh, boy, I was only 34, so 12 years before my accident.
Rick: So, you really had something going on.
Nancy: Yeah.
Rick: You were destined for some kind of spiritual breakthrough.
Nancy: So, yeah, and I had that happen, and then I thought, I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know who to ask. My husband at the time was an atheist, too, and it just would not have been something I could talk to him about. And so, my dad and I just shared that, and I said, “I don’t know what to make of it, but he came to me and he said he’s okay, he’s sorry, I don’t know what to do with it.” And so, I just dropped it. It’s not that I forgot about it, I just didn’t know what to do with it. So, I just set it aside and let it go. I was just so consumed with where my dad was and his illness that I didn’t have much of an emotional space to really think about the implications of stuff like that.
Rick: Yeah.
Nancy: Yeah. And then, the morning that he died, again, I was six hours away at my home and I knew that it was coming at some point soon, but I woke up at 4 in the morning and I saw him standing at the foot of my bed. And then I just saw him kind of disappear behind a curtain almost. It was as if he was walking behind a curtain and then was gone. And then I realized, “that was him, he just died.” And just as I said that to myself, the phone rang. And it was my brother calling us and saying, “Dad just died.” So, it took us a while, obviously, to get over there. But when I walked in the front door, there was, again, one of those things that was just challenging my view of the material world. I could hear music and it wasn’t coming from the house. Nobody else could hear it either, which I was thinking, well, I must be hallucinating. But it was this ethereal, beautiful choral music that was just everywhere. It was joyful. It was so welcoming and joy-filled and peaceful. And I heard it for about, I don’t know, 20 minutes, a half an hour, and then it kind of faded. But I heard that again. I heard that again when I died, and I experienced that music again.
Rick: During your NDE?
Nancy: Yeah. And it was explained that it wasn’t really music as we hear music. It was so hard to put into words. It was a soul energy, love energy that was coming from us. It was as if it was an embodiment of gratitude and love that we could hear, but that was coming from each individual soul that was a part of this whole. And it was just this beautiful, almost circular, not circular, but there was a give-and-take chorus of this love and gratitude from all of us throughout the universe, to the universe and then back from the universe to us. It was the sound of our energy of interconnectedness, I guess. But we experience it oftentimes as a sound, as a chorus. And a lot of people hear that. I didn’t know what it was until I died myself and heard it again and went, “I remember that. I heard that when my dad died.”
Rick: There’s a phrase, “self-interacting dynamics of consciousness.” We talked earlier about how everything is consciousness, but then, if we think of consciousness as an ocean, then there are all these currents. The ocean is in motion. There are all these currents interacting, flowing this way and that. Somehow, what you just said reminded me of that phrase.
Nancy: Yeah.
Rick: There’s also a verse in the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna, who is supposed to be God, says, “Curving back on myself, I create again and again.” So, there’s this sort of self-referential thing where consciousness interacts with itself and that gives rise to all the diversification, all the universe. But anyway, I don’t know how I got that from what you said, but it reminded me of it because you were mentioning that there is this interactive flow between all the different levels of creation that you interpreted as music.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the only way we can process it if we’re still in the human state.
Rick: Yeah, we have to interpret it in a way that fits our understanding of things.
Nancy: Yeah. So, it makes sense that it would come across as a musical note because it is energy. It’s a vibratory type of energy. Yeah. So, it makes sense that it would be experienced as sound. But it’s unearthly, and it’s one of those things that I wish hadn’t happened. I wish I hadn’t heard that on some level because I can’t listen to music now.
Rick: Because it’s so crude by comparison or what?
Nancy: It is. It is. I listen to it maybe at most for 10 minutes once in a while, and I mean once in a great while. I’ll get the hankering to listen to something unusual. But it doesn’t last very long. And it gets to the point after a few minutes, where human music is like nails on a chalkboard.
Rick: Yeah, even some beautiful Mozart or Eric Satie or, one of these–
Nancy: Yep. Once in a while I can get into listening to some of what they call spa music, where it’s just this floating sound in the background.
Rick: Right, yeah.
Nancy: That’s okay as long as it’s soft and melodic. But even after about a half an hour of that, I’ve had enough, and I’ve just got to turn it off. So that’s the only thing out of all of this that I wish had been different. But at the same time, hearing that music was just unearthly. I mean, obviously unearthly, but it was just so beautiful. And to know that we’re part of that, it’s not just that it was music coming from somewhere else. It was all of us. That’s a part of who each one of us is. We’re contributing to that beautiful energy. And the more we go into that space of love, of being aware and conscious in our lives, being in the now moment, and just being love as much as possible or being grateful or helping other people, every time we do that, we’re contributing to that love energy that comes out to a lot of us as music. We’re just contributing to that energy flow of that love and compassion in the universe. So, we’re a part of it. It’s not some separate chorus. It is part of us, and we can all contribute to it. Some people can actually hear that vibration in deep meditation. I have not been able to achieve that state since I’ve gotten back, but some people have been able to do that.
Rick: Yeah, people might want to check my interview with Suzanne Stryker. She reported hearing that kind of stuff all the time, and Harry Alto too, perhaps. But it’s interesting because traditionally people all talk about, all the different traditions talk about angels singing and celestial choirs and playing harps and all that stuff. But I think that’s probably an interpretation of experiences people had. But I bet you a lot of people throughout history have experienced what you’re referring to. In fact, just to add to it, it’s said that there is something you’ve actually alluded to, you’ve experienced it, there is a celestial level of life. There is a really subtle dimension of life which isn’t commonly experienced by people, but can be, even while they’re alive and functioning. It doesn’t have to be an NDE. I’ve spoken with people who have had visual and auditory and other sensory experiences of that field, some of them quite commonly, because they’ve refined their capacity to have those experiences to such a degree. It’s well within the human field of possibilities.
Nancy: Yeah, totally. It totally is. And I can see, once in a while, it’s easier for me sometimes to see that energy than it is to hear it now. There are many times when I’ll be going hiking, usually when I’m out in the boonies, I’ll be able to see that energy rather than hear it. …
Rick: Can you describe what you see? Is it a glowing kind of a thing?
Nancy: It’s like a glowing … it’s usually like diffuse tendrils of energy connecting stuff. It isn’t like a big fog. There’s a little bit more cohesiveness to it in that it’s more like, but not like ropes. It’s diffuse tendrils of energy flowing everywhere and through everything. It’s a little more toned-down version of what I experienced during my NDE. Because during my NDE, what I “saw” – I use “saw” in quotes – experienced around me as a visual was just these energy fields all through everything. So, there’d be a tree, but that tree would have multiple layers of energy flowing up and down it in all different colors. And I could interact with that tree and interact with its energy, and then the colors would all change. So, when I’m here now, I can see it, but it’s not that vivid. It’s usually one color. So, there’s another photo … I don’t remember how long ago it was taken, but it was actually a visualization, I think, of radio energy of the early part of the Big Bang, where they’re showing, as the stars were forming into galaxies, there were these tendrils …
Rick: Tendrils, yeah.
Nancy: … very much like that. At a different scale, it also very much looks like how electrical energy gets transmitted in your brain as a thought. Not that the brain is causing the thought, but the brain is experiencing the thought. But when they map that and when they visualize that, it looks like these little tendrils of glowing energy. So that’s what this looks like to me. It’s very much like that.
Rick: That’s really cool. And I think that’s a very genuine experience. I think it’s, again, within everyone’s capacity to experience if that gets awakened, but you’re actually experiencing the sort of subtler reality of the world, and subtler mechanics of what’s actually going on in the world. And it’s probably easier to see when you’re out in nature than it would be walking down a city street or something like that. Although even there, one can see stuff like that.
Nancy: Yeah, I bet people who are more attuned to it in the city could see it. I grew up in the country, so I’m not really as attuned to living in the city as some people are. So, cities make me feel a little bit claustrophobic, and I always feel as if I want to protect myself. So, I’m able to let go enough when I’m out in nature. But for people out there who are more attuned to living in the city, you could probably see it in the city, too.
Rick: Yeah. And, you know, we should probably add that it’s not like a big important thing that people can see this stuff, and you’re really missing out on life if you can’t. But it’s just interesting because it suggests what some human capacities are that are not common, but that could be.
Nancy: Right, and … our view of our day-to-day life right now, for the most part, is pretty limited.
Rick: Yeah, to say the least.
Nancy: But it can be expanded. We can expand on that and experience this reality, this life, in a more expansive way.
Rick: Yeah. Probably everybody’s heard the notion that maybe we’re only using 5% of our full mental potential or perceptual potential and so on. So, it’s just a matter of unfolding the full potential, which is not that difficult.
Nancy: It just takes some dedication and persistence.
Rick: Here’s another nice point among your points that you listed. You are never alone. Do you want to dwell on that for a minute?
Nancy: Yeah, that was one thing that I had been struggling with in the months before my accident. I just had always, maybe even most of my life, I had just felt like I was an alien on this planet, like I was somehow alone. And I didn’t really ever feel like I fit in. I just didn’t know how to relate to most people. I don’t know, maybe that speaks to somebody out there who’s a psychologist or something. I don’t know. But I just never felt comfortable on this planet, even from the time I was a little kid. But I dealt with it okay, for the most part, until I was in those months before my accident. And I was really starting to feel it then. My marriage had broken up and I was living alone. And I don’t know, I was getting into a funky…
Rick: Mindset?
Nancy: Mindset, yeah. And I just didn’t feel connected to anyone or anything. I just felt as if I had been abandoned on this planet, like I was some alien abandoned on this planet. So, one of the things that I was taught during my NDE was just what you said, we’re never alone. And it isn’t just the human contact that I’m talking about. It’s that there is no separation between what we experience as reality here, what we call the physical realm, or what I tend to call the physical realm. And what a lot of people would call the afterlife, or what I call the spiritual realm. It’s not the afterlife, by the way. If you’re ever around me, don’t use that word, because that’s a button for me. That’s not the right word, because it isn’t the afterlife, it’s our life. This is life too. There’s no difference. It’s all connected. There’s no separation. We are surrounded constantly by those in spirit who are in that spiritual phase. Some will never have an incarnation in this human form. Never. They may never want to, they may never need to, they may never have the opportunity to. But we can still interact with them, because we’re all part of the same space, the same spirit, spirituality, the same spiritual energy. So, there is no separation. And finally, after I got back and really started thinking about that, it has really allowed me to open up that communication. Not that I want to be a medium or anything, but just so that I can continue to get intuitive guidance. So, I can continue to access my own intuitive space, but also maintain that connection with those beings who are what I call my spirit friends or my spirit peeps. They are always with me, and I know they’re here. I don’t want to get into ghost stories or anything like that, but doing that has actually allowed my sister, who died a long time ago, to come visit me every once in a while. Not like we have a conversation or anything, but I know when she’s here. And she just drops in. I think she just checked, she’s my older sister. So, I think she’s just checking up on me like an older sister does and wants to see if everything’s okay. And then she’s gone.
Rick: Well, even Willie checked, or Sidney checked in on you, you know?
Nancy: Yep, exactly. So, we’re connected to all those people, whether they’re physically here with us or not. And just being open to that in a healthy way, at least for me, has allowed me to maintain those avenues of communication. And just giving them the opportunity to show up every once in a while, I’ve had friends of mine who have passed away in the last couple years. One who came in, I actually didn’t know that she had passed until I was in the kitchen one day. And somebody was flipping my light switch on and off. Literally flipping the switch on and off, and I was the only one in the house. And I looked over there and saw it go on and off.
Rick: Could you actually see the physical switch moving up and down?
Nancy: Yeah, it was going up and down.
Rick: Wow, that’s spooky.
Nancy: And the lights were flickering on and off. Well, at first it wasn’t, then I thought, well, I wonder. I knew one of my friends was ill, was seriously ill. And that’s when I decided I needed to check up. And I checked in with her daughter, and she had just passed away. So, I’m thinking that’s who it was. Because this friend of mine was kind of a jokester. She liked to play practical jokes and fool around a little bit with people. She was the sweetest person, but she just liked to have fun, too. So, I think that was her.
Rick: That’s interesting that she could physically flip it up and down, even though she was just in her spirit body or whatever.
Nancy: Yeah, I was surprised at that. But I think it does happen occasionally. I think that was the only time I’ve ever had a spirit visitor interact with something physical.
Rick: Yeah, there are stories of that. Obviously, movies have been made about it and everything. Speaking of movies, I mean, we love movies of E.T. and Close Encounters and things like that. And imagine what big news it would be if aliens landed on the White House lawn. It would be earth-shaking. But ironically, the world is teeming with life that we don’t even know exists because it’s subtle and we don’t perceive it. And the vast majority of people don’t realize it’s even there. So, it’s kind of funny that there’s all this stuff going on, and we just kind of waltz through our lives oblivious to it.
Nancy: It reminds me, we had horses when I was growing up, and once in a while they’d have to have blinders on when we rode them. And most of us go through life with these little blinders on. We’re focused down on what we can see right in front of us. And that’s how I was. It’s not that it’s a, you know, that’s not a ding against anybody, really. It’s just how we tend to be. And I was certainly there.
Rick: And maybe it’s how we need to be in order to live life. I mean, as you said, it was almost more than you could handle. They were giving you so much information, it was like, “Whoa, whoa, cool it.” So, I think, in fact, with psychedelics, they say that people who study psychedelics and talk about them a lot say the brain is like a filter, which actually limits the amount of experience we can have. And psychedelics seem to thin or shut off the filter for a while, so we get flooded. But we couldn’t function that way all the time. But I would say that spiritual development cultures the ability to be more open and all-inclusive and perceptive in a natural way, which can be stabilized so that you can drive a car and do whatever you need to do while yet in a very perceptive, open condition.
Nancy: Yeah, yeah, to me, that’s the good balance to achieve, is expanding your awareness just a bit, but yet still remaining grounded enough to function and do what you need to do here and learn what you need to learn. Because we’re all here for a reason. At least that’s the way that I look at it. Yeah, I have a friend who sometimes sees it as a blessing or sometimes as a curse, but her filters are kind of gone. They always have been. She was born with this different set of abilities. She has a lot of memories of her other lives. In her belief system, there are other lives. So, she came into her life with these tons and tons of other memories. And sometimes it’s hard for her to focus in on the now moment, I think, and get done what needs to get done, because there’s all this other stuff that she has to just consciously set aside and focus in on what’s going on right now.
Rick: Yeah. I interviewed a guy named Jim Tucker a couple of months ago who studies children who remember past lives, and sometimes in incredibly vivid detail, naming the name of the battleship that their plane took off from and the names of the buddies who were with them on the battleship, and all that gets verified and so on. But we had quite a bit of a discussion about how we do need to have that turn off at a certain point in life, in order to live this life.
Nancy: Yeah, because you can get too wrapped up in that stuff. I’ve never, since this happened, I’ve never really been all that interested in trying to figure out past lives, or I call them other lives because past, present, and future doesn’t really hold any meaning. But if I’ve experienced other lives, which I think I have, unless they have a direct bearing on what I need to do and learn now, they don’t really make any difference to me. I don’t really care to dive into that stuff.
Rick: Right. I had a spiritual teacher who used to say the past is always a lesser developed state and there’s really not a lot of point in trying to figure out what your past lives were and all that.
Nancy: No, I would agree with parts of that anyway.
Rick: A question came in from Helena again in Montreal who asked a question earlier. She’s wondering, could you describe the pitch of the music? We were talking about that music. “Was it very high frequency?” She said, “I did hear thousands of angels sing at an extremely high pitch when my mom passed away on the third day.” I guess she means the third day after her mom passed away. “I knew her soul had entered heaven at that point.”
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah, I think it was high pitched, a higher frequency, although it was more complex than just a higher pitch. The complexity is really difficult. I’m not a musician anyway. But it was a lot more complex than that, although I would say that I would agree that it tended to be more on the high pitch side of what we would call the sound spectrum. So, I think what you heard was kind of the same thing that I heard. You know, that’s fairly common. It’s called a shared death experience where people somehow have experiences surrounding the death of a loved one. It doesn’t have to be right when the loved one dies. It can be days afterward. So, humans always have to have names for stuff, and that’s the name that we’ve chosen to put on all that. Yeah. So, in fact, my friend who flipped the light switch on and off, that would have been a shared death experience, too, according to the definition. But I just say she visited me before she moved on. That’s a great thing to experience, though. It’s beautiful when you can hear that, Helena. And it can be life-altering for people just to hear that. To me, that’s a blessing. So, I’m glad you shared that. Thank you.
Rick: Great. Perhaps before we run out of time, you want to say a little bit about gratitude.
Nancy: Yeah. So, gratitude is another form of energy. But it’s a form of love, really. It’s an energy of loving appreciation. I remember that when I was in that spiritual place, whatever you want to call it, the teaching was really that we’re sort of misunderstanding what gratitude is. It’s love, pure and simple. Gratitude in its highest form is love. It’s compassion. It’s appreciation. All that is part of love. But in some teachings now in the modern era, there are some people out there who are teaching people how to try to use that, what you want to call it, lip service gratitude to try to somehow trick the universe into giving them stuff. And to use gratitude as a tool or as a manipulative tool, that’s defeating the purpose. That’s not what gratitude is. It’s not the highest form of that concept of love. So, I was being encouraged to just be grateful as a form of love and appreciation. That’s it. Just don’t try to use it for anything. Don’t try to manipulate someone with it or try to manipulate the universe with it. It’s just love. And to share that from your heart, because that is, again, it puts you, gratitude puts you into that heart space faster than almost anything else. If you’re really needing a quick way to get into the present and to get into what some people call a really positive vibe, a positive mindset or a positive spiritual state, go through a gratitude exercise. You know, really dive into five things in your life that you’re grateful for right now and just really consider them, not just off the top of your head and just let them go. Really feel it. Get into the feeling of that. And it can be, you know, being super grateful for having a house that you’re living in. Having food on the table. Having a loving family around you. And what I wake up with still, every morning. Every morning. I am so grateful every morning that I can walk. Because it was not looking good for a while there. So, every morning before I even get up out of bed, I just go into that space of deep gratitude for being able to get up and walk around. And that I don’t have a lot of physical leftover challenges from my accident. Because that’s surprising to me still. I have no pain really. And so just be grateful for what you do have. Because that will put you into what I call that state of present moment awareness. And that state of love. And that’s all it is. It’s just love.
Rick: Speaking of love and gratitude, I guess another quality that’s somewhat related to those would be forgiveness. And Catherine from San Jose, Costa Rica was wondering whether that driver faced any consequences for what she did. Or did she ever even apologize to you?
Nancy: Actually, she did not apologize. Not that I ever asked for it. She had had a history, I think she was 29. She had had a bad history with vehicles. She was constantly in accidents and injuring other drivers. I think that she had 30 days, but I may be getting this wrong. She had a short time in jail, and then she had six months’ probation. As far as our justice systems go. But I learned very quickly that I had to let go of that. And I had to just, not necessarily be grateful to her for hitting me, but I had to let go of any negativity that I was carrying around toward her. Because she did what she did. I couldn’t change it. I did the best I could to avoid the accident. I know that in my heart. And she’s probably, at least for a while, lived with it. I’m guessing. But that was up to her to live with. So, I knew I had to just release myself from that attachment to feeling any bad feelings toward her. So, if you want to call that forgiveness, that’s what I would call forgiveness, is just disconnecting myself from any of those negative feelings. Because I couldn’t change anything. In a way, she helped me. She didn’t know it, but she helped me become more aware and awake in my life.
Rick: Sometimes the people who talk about planning our life before we are born say that we actually work out arrangements with people, like “Oh, I really need to experience being abused by an alcoholic or something. Would you be that person, please?” And the guy says, “I don’t really want to do that,” “but please, you know,” “all right, I love you so much. I’ll be the alcoholic and I’ll come in.” I don’t know if it really works that way, but you hear people offer those kinds of explanations. So maybe you had some pre-life arrangement with this woman.
Nancy: I don’t think so.
Rick: Yeah, maybe not.
Nancy: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think the way that I’ve seen it and have come to understand it, at least for this one instance, now, the pre-arranged stuff may happen, I’m not going to discount that, but for this instance, for me, I think we were both guided to be at that place by our own teachers, our own spiritual teachers. She had a lot of learning she needed to do, and so did I, in different ways. And coming together in that way gave us both opportunities. So, what I was hopeful for, is that it would help her get her life back on track.
Rick: I suppose in the big picture, everything everybody experiences helps them, you know? It’s either the school of hard knocks or maybe it’s a pleasant thing, but I think ultimately there’s an evolutionary agenda to everything that happens.
Nancy: Yeah, I think so. And I hope that she took the opportunity as a result of this to examine where she was in her life and change some stuff. Because I could tell just by talking to her attorney for a little while. And then I talked to the police officers who worked with her a little bit after the accident. And I know she was in a bad space. So, my hope always was that she was able to do something positive with this, with her life and to take an opportunity to sit back and say, “you know what, I think I need to do something different here.” And then make some changes, because I think that was the opportunity presented to her.
Rick: Yeah, I hope so. We received a nice comment from Jeannie Sparks in California. She said, “Just wanted to say thank you and that I needed to hear this.”
Nancy: Oh, you’re welcome, Jeannie. Thanks for listening in today.
Rick: Yeah, and thanks to everybody for listening in. We’ve had a nice crowd on today, 325 people or so at the moment.
Nancy: Awesome.
Rick: Yeah, and thanks so much to you, Nancy. I’ve really enjoyed this. I was feeling a little sleepy this afternoon. I was thinking, oh, I hope I’m up for doing a good job with this interview. But you kind of woke me right up.
Nancy: Well, thank you. It’s been fun. It’s been a great two hours. I can’t believe it’s been two hours already.
Rick: I know.
Nancy: That’s awesome.
Rick: What was it, Groucho Marx said? He said, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” [laughter] I don’t have a very big repertoire of jokes, but that’s one of them.
Irene: That’s for sure.
Rick: Irene says, “That’s for sure.” [laughter] I have about three. Okay. [laughter]
Nancy: Three more than I have. [laughter]
Rick: Anyway, thanks a lot. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. Next week, actually it will be next Tuesday, because her schedule is a little weird, I’ll be interviewing Lynn Twist. Lynn has written a book called The Soul of Money, which is not about what you might think when you first hear the word money. She’s a remarkable person. I saw her speak at the S.A.N.D. conference many years ago. She’s really a force of nature. She’s also involved in something called the Pachamama Alliance, which has to do with indigenous tribes in South America and saving the environment and all that. So that will be next week. So, thanks again, Nancy. It’s been great spending time with you, and we’ll be in touch.
Nancy: Thank you. I really loved every minute of it. Thank you so much.
Rick: Me too. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time.