197: What if you died?
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Today's episode kicks off season 11 with the astonishing story of Jose Hernandez. I am so thrilled to be launching the new season today, and deeply honored that Jose chose to share his story with us. We have a lot coming up this season, and you can stay engaged by following us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening, joining the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, supporting the show on Patreon, or shopping at the store and learning more about who we are at ThisIsActuallyHappening.com.

In light of all the challenges and uncertainties of the past year, the work we do on this show, for me, continues to be a source of unending surprise, deep connection, and inspiration. I feel so grateful to be able to share this work with all of you and for your ongoing support. Thank you for listening. You know, I start thinking, if that's me and I'm dead, how could I be seeing? How could I be thinking? How am I doing this? How am I doing this? It's impossible, right? That's me and I'm dead. But if that's me, then who am I?

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 197. What If You Died?

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My grandmother's First Nation. She is from people called the Taino who kind of inhabited the southeast of the continent of the United States, parts of Mexico, Central America and South America. My grandmother was murdered when my father was one. They found her on the road on her way to work one morning. The implication is that my grandfather may have been involved in my father's mother's murder because my father was a bastard child.

My grandmother used to work for my grandfather. They weren't married. She was like the maid in the house and the cook. And he was married to someone else. And she became pregnant before his wife. And so my father came to be and, well, he needed to get rid of her because she was still working in the house. You know, he was pretty well connected. So nothing was done in the town that he lived in. There was not even an investigation of how she died.

Anyway, my father was then raised by his grandfather because my grandfather's wife tried to bury him alive after my grandmother was found dead. My grandfather always denied that my father was his son, denied it to the end. And then when he was leaving Puerto Rico to come to the States to start a new life, he finally signed the birth certificate or did the paperwork. So my father didn't officially become my father's son until he was 38.

My grandmother on my mother's side is French and my grandfather's from Spain. My mom, when her mother passed, she was left in Puerto Rico with some family members. She grew up a person that was, for lack of better words, I'm going to say incarcerated in a room and had to work and clean. And she became like a housemaid as a child, her and her sister, for the family that was theoretically taking care of them.

So growing up, my mom was very private and very quiet. She's always been, but she seemed to be, I think from the trauma that she experienced in her life, she took a lot of stuff that a lot of people I don't think would normally take. So she put up with my dad, who was quite a womanizer. He drank, he was quite abusive often.

So her goal was to preserve us because of her life experience of not having a mother or literally a father while she grew up. So my parents met in Puerto Rico. They met in a farm somewhere in Puerto Rico. It was a tobacco farm that my grandfather used to own.

When we flew to New York City, my mom was eight months pregnant with me. So if you could imagine, they land in New York City, they don't know much about anything. And so three or four weeks after she landed, she was in hospital giving birth to me. I was the first one actually born in the U.S. My father had two jobs. He was a metal grinder and he worked delivering like cakes. So there were 10 of us living in a

two bedroom basement apartment in the South Bronx. We slept six of us in one room. My eldest sister got married and she had moved out. So there were nine of us there. My oldest brother slept on the sofa in the living room. My mom and dad had their room and, uh,

We had two regular sized beds, right? The three boys slept in one, the three girls slept in the other, and we would sleep sideways. The bed would be up against the wall on either side of the room. That's how we sat. My father, I think he wanted to become Americanized right away. So he wanted to learn the language and leave behind his world, the world he knew, and kind of start over completely from scratch.

Me and my younger brother, because we were born here, we kind of thought in English. So he kind of leaned on me and my younger brother to help him to integrate and learn English. Being in the South Bronx, at the time that he moved here, it was like the white flight. So the South Bronx became ultimately a slum. All I remember was him drinking every weekend and leaving the house Friday night and not coming back till Sunday.

So I grew up really looking forward to the weekend because he would be gone and then Sunday would be a very difficult day because he would come drunk out of his mind and being quite abusive. And there was a lot of fear in the home, a lot of screaming and yelling constantly. And then we would get beat. Sometimes we'd be in our room. Sometimes we would be in a closet.

I think a lot of that came from his own upbringing. When I was growing up, I didn't understand none of that. So it created like an anger and a rage in us. It's not something that you think about. It's just something that just builds within you very slowly. Every time you are in a situation where you find yourself laughing or you're being yelled at or you're being punished or whatever's going on, you try to find an outlet for how you feel. You have to vent.

A lot of our friends were like us, struggling in an environment where you had very little. It becomes apparent in the street, you know, where there's also a lot of anger there and you're exposed to a lot of violence.

If you got into a fight with another kid, you would think that two adults will come and separate you. What used to happen was that there was a ring of people all of a sudden around you cheering. It made you more aggressive because all that cheering and it helped to make that anger find a place where it belonged. It made it okay. It's some kind of acceptance, some kind of recognition of your being so you're not invisible all of a sudden.

So you're always in a fight or flight mode in that environment. So the minute you walk out the door, you're in that. But the strange thing is that when you're home, you're also in that. You never escape that fight or flight.

By the time I was a teenager, heroin was the rage and everybody was shooting up and the drug dealers would focus on the young people so they had more clients. So drugs were everywhere. Violence was everywhere. People were killed. So you kind of become numb to it. You don't think that it's having an impact on you, but it really is breaking you down.

You know, when I was, I'm going to say maybe eight or ten, I'm not sure. I was looking out the window. There was a lot of activity, a lot of police. And I remember looking up to the roof. We lived in the second story. My mother had a couple of flower pots. And I looked up and I could see these guys on the roof. And they had this guy. There were four of them. And each guy, two guys had arms, two guys had legs, and they were swinging him.

I just got caught looking up at that. And before I know it, they fling this guy off the roof. And I just follow the trajectory as he came down. I'll never forget this. They flung him far enough that he didn't land on the sidewalk. He actually landed in the street in between the parked cars. And his head exploded like a watermelon. It just exploded. And there was just a big pool of blood and brains, everything, everywhere.

And I looked up and I knew these guys. I didn't know them personally, but I know them from the community they lived there. And one of them was going like this to me. Even though I was that young, I knew, I never saw anything. Then when I got a little older, I was 13. And you're trying to have an identity in this place. You're trying to be someone. So people look at you and they say, oh yeah, that's Jose. He's like a tough guy. He's whatever, right?

I befriended a drug dealer that was 18, and this guy was super cool. He always had like a staff that was like a beautiful metal. It was made out of metal that had these really interesting carvings on it. We became buddies, and we would hang out, and that was a big deal to me because I'm 13, this guy's 18. He seems to exert a lot of power. People are afraid of him. They listen to him, and you want to be that.

And one day we were walking in the alleyways behind, in between the buildings and we were having this conversation and I heard this pop. It sounded like a firecracker. And all of a sudden my friend just falls on the ground and his body's twitching, twitching, twitching, shaking. And I'm wondering what the hell is going on? What's going on here? And all of a sudden I look at his head and it's got a big hole on his right side.

I wasn't even sure what happened so I hadn't in my head it didn't dawn on me that he'd been shot yet. So I went on my knees and I put my fingers on his forehead here on the side the temple area and I'm trying to hold the blood and bone and brain and I held that there for a few minutes and it became uncomfortable it became very sticky. I know when he got hit the blood had splattered over my face so

I'll never forget when I heard that pop, how I felt that spray on me. I finally let go and my fingers were kind of stuck to it. It was gooey. And I started thinking, what am I going to do? The first thought in my head was my dad. And I said to myself, my father finds out about this, he's going to kill me. I wasn't worried about the police. I wasn't worried about the shooter. I was worried about what my father would do if he found out that I had been here or that I was there. And I started running.

It was really hot in the city so a lot of the fire hydrants are open. So I'm running, running, running and I'm a few blocks away and I finally say let me get in front of this pump. And I got in front of it and I told the guy spray me and they sprayed the blood off. And I just kept running and running. I don't know how far I ran and I hid behind these garbage cans and I just suddenly felt so tired. Beyond tired I was absolutely exhausted and I just fell asleep.

Got out of there a couple hours later and I came back and I said, "Oh my gosh, I gotta get home." Anyway, I go home and I'm terrified, thinking if my father finds out about this, I'll be killed. I start looking for it in the newspapers and looking to see if there's any word in the street about what might have happened. And the story did come out, but there was no mention of anybody. And that kind of melded into me. It became part of my skin.

And there was this brutality to life suddenly. I was experiencing it before, but now it was like, what do you do to avoid that? Or how, what can you do to mitigate it in any way? It became expressed more in that anger and rage. Now the blessing was that

I was pretty bright and I did well in school. And a gentleman that worked in the PAL Police Athletic League and got me involved with boxing and became an expression of that anger. It was an outlet for it in a controlled environment. And I started to learn a little about discipline and it gave me some form of purpose.

It made you feel good about something. And so that became part of what helped me craft a better life for myself in a way, but in a survivalistic way, a way that I would survive. Dog eat dog. It becomes almost like a mantra. And that's how you live life. You know, I got to take before they take from me. And when I was in boxing, there was an older man.

And one time I was offered a bunch of bags with heroin in it. I was with a bunch of friends and he happened to be there. And we used to box together and he was like, no, you guys can't take this. He was so adamant. It's like he wasn't talking to me. He was speaking to my soul. I really embraced that. And then he was becoming very important in my life.

In the midst of all that, there are these really special beings that we share our lives with in there. We have these very special people that move through our lives. I got in a college-bound program. They started a pilot program in the Bronx, and I was lucky enough to be selected. There was a lot of culture integrated into it, so we were able to go see plays and performances. If it wasn't for those things, I may not be having this conversation right now. Because the streets are...

Anyway, I grew up, went to college and started living a very competitive type of life. I thought that was what being a man was. I got my girlfriend pregnant young. She was 16. I was 17. So whilst I went to school, my first daughter was born.

I do wind up getting married and we're very young and I have a child and I go to college and trying to work, trying to survive. And there was so much access all of a sudden. You know, when you're in high school, there's a lot of access. There's a lot of girls.

I grew up in an environment where the more girls you had, the more manly you were. Even though I hated that my father was that, I somehow slipped into his role and I became quite a ladies' man myself. And that continued even after I got married. That became my addiction. You know, this is how you prove your manliness. I became very alpha.

I wound up working in a place where there were like 40 little cubicles. That's where I started working. I actually started working at IBM, working as a program analyst. It got me into a different culture. This was a white world, a world that I really didn't like. I didn't really appreciate it. I began to get to a point where I hated what I did. You're struggling in your relationship. Your wife has no clue of what your other life is.

I never became like my dad. I never had issues with drinking and stuff like that, so I was not abusive, but I wouldn't recommend it. The thing about my father was that when I was growing up and I was very young, I became like my mother's protector and I took on that role. So I was always butting heads with him. We were always fighting. We were always struggling. When I became kind of like him, when it came to women, it was almost like a competition. We were actually competing

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. In 1993, my dad is diagnosed with cancer. Of course, I was one of the youngest, the second youngest, but I was always the one that had to do everything in the family. I have a decision to make. The decision is, do I tell him or not?

I opted that maybe it wasn't a good idea to tell him, maybe let him enjoy whatever time he's got left. And I didn't. A couple of months later, he was intubated. It was Christmas Day. And on Christmas Eve, we were all, my entire family was with me. We were all sitting in the emergency, ICU, making the decision. The doctor comes in and he says, you know, he's not going to make it. He's on life support. We recommend that we take him off.

And we all sit there and they say, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let's do it. And then it's like, you, Jose, you do it. You got to do it. And I'm like, oh, how the hell do I wind up now with this? So the next day I came back to the hospital. At the time they told me to be there and I signed all the paperwork. They removed him for life support. And it really was painful. It was painful because...

of the way my relationship with him had been so difficult. And then here I am playing God, deciding when he dies and did I even have the right to do that. I went into the room before they were going to take the machine off and I held his hand. That was a rare thing. We never really touched. We never hugged. It wasn't really allowed. And I took his hand and he just looked at me. And even then, I could not say, you know what, Dad, I love you.

And I came off and I walked around the hospital for a while. You know, the good thing is that my younger brother, he knew that it might be a challenge for me. So he met me there. So I'm walking around the hospital with him and I'm thinking I just killed my dad. But he didn't die instantly. He lived a couple of days after we took him off of life support. So Christmas Day was like horrendous. He passed on the 29th. So he lived four days, three and a half days. And we never said we love each other. We never said a damn thing. He couldn't talk. I was too weak.

And I was a coward. I didn't realize how painful that was going to make my life. I had this insane guilt and grief. I hadn't cried for 40 years, as long as I can remember. I hadn't cried since I was very little. And I wept. And I was ashamed that I was crying. And ashamed that if he saw me, he would be angry at me. And I wept like a baby. And my mother held me.

And I thought, this is the opposite of what it should be. I should be holding her. And so this guilt festered, this shame, this inability to say what I felt. You know, everything I thought was virtuous about me was like suddenly bad. And I was like not a good person. And so I buried it like everything else. The only way I knew.

My life was pretty status quo and I've always been a big dreamer. So somehow or other, I met a gentleman that was a trainer for one of the football players in Miami and we developed a relationship and he got involved in a business with me. So I got involved with a bunch of athletes. I got involved with a company that we did sign memorabilia and I started running with some of them.

I used to hang out with a lot of football players and some basketball players and used to hang out with the Hooters box at the game. And so it just lent itself to the lifestyle I had already. A lot more women now and a lot more exposure. So at this point, I'm living well. I got an opportunity to create this huge business.

With a lot of these athletes and the plan was to create what I was going to call an adult theme park. And what I mean by that, it was going to be eight clubs with a 5,000 seat arena. There was going to be boxing. We had a bunch of sponsors. I used to hang out with the guys that used to be the reps for the beverage companies. So the beer and the booze and all that.

I was able to lock up a piece of land in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale, 20 acres where we were going to do this complex and that's a little city. So all of a sudden I'm looking at all this. I know when I break ground in April, it's October. Imagine October and April, we're going to break ground. I'm going to make $7 million. So Hooters gives you money. The beverage companies give you money so they can be the main guys. And so it's 1999.

I'm ready to kind of like hit the big time. I dreamt about this my entire life. It helped me to mitigate the pain of my father's loss. It gave me something to do, something to look forward to. I was going to go ahead and be able to live the life that I dreamed of, this naughty boy type of hanging out with all the football players. It was going to be called Jams. Had gone and looked at homes. I was looking to buy a home for each one of my kids. So we had each picked one.

My wife at the time went to look at some massively expensive jewelry. She was going to get this rock of diamond that was like 60 grand. This was my ego personified. I felt like I was the king of the world. I felt like whatever life owed me was going to finally be paid.

I had this mindset that the world owed me something, life owed me something. Everything that I had lost out on, everything that I had missed on, I was going to make up for it like 100 times over. Everything had been done. We had contracts, we had contracts on the property, we had a bank that was going to come up with $200 million. Everything was done. We were going to break ground in April, like I said. And then I said, "Well, while that's happening, I'm just going to go run some lines and do some work."

just something to keep my anxiety level down to keep me busy. I like to work with my hands. So I said, let me just go run some electrical lines. And I was working in a company and I was in a bucket truck. The money was good, but it really wasn't a money thing anymore. It was about passing time. And I was just waiting to break ground. We go to work like any other day. It was beautiful Florida day. It was sunny. And I get up on this bucket

And we were running a little late, so we were trying to rush. And we made some errors of judgment, let's call them, to save time. And I wound up getting involved in a small accident. I broke the ribs on my right side. So I wound up in an emergency room getting chest x-rays and finding out I had broken ribs. They taped me up and they sent me home to get me some medication.

I start taking that and I'm okay the first week. Then the second week I go back and they say, "Well, you're not really getting much better. We're going to change the pain med and we're going to give you something that has an anti-inflammatory component." It contained Advil. That was the game changer. I take the first pill. Everybody takes Motrin and Advil. I didn't know it had that in it. I knew I was allergic to Aspen.

I take the first pill. About an hour later, it's really hard to breathe. So I called up the ER and I spoke with the doctor and he says to me, you know, you can't take a deep breath anyway, so it's okay. And it was a free fall. I slowly started to get worse and worse and worse and time was moving on. Got to a point where I couldn't lay down. I had to sleep sitting and Christmas was coming. Real hard time for me.

It made me grieve, my dad, of course, but I was having so much difficulty breathing and they couldn't find out why. New Year's come and this was Y2K 2000 and they were worried about all these computer things going wrong. So we were waiting for some crazy event to happen on Y2K and nothing happened. A couple of days later, January 5th, I wound up in the hospital and sitting in this room and remember the nurse saying, you know,

we're waiting for the guy to come in and see you but if you need help just push this button i had already had an iv put on and stuff so they were trying to give me stuff to help me breathe i guess i wasn't responding and uh i remember looking at that button for a long time and contemplating whether i should push it thought of course was i can't push that button i'm a guy i'm tough i chose not to until the last minute and when i finally pushed the button

It took about a minute for the nurse to get there, but that was the longest moment, one of the longest moments of my life. And she opened the door. She looked at me. Didn't say a word. She just hit that whole blue button. When I hit the button, I'm almost at the point where I actually can't breathe at all. And all you hear is this. As I'm really struggling to get any air in, but also getting the air out. So I was trying to get air out so you make space for air to come in.

In the beginning, I'm not thinking I'm dying. I'm thinking I'm going to be okay. I'm always okay. I always come out of these things all right. So anyway, when they come in the room and they start stripping me down, I felt this sense of shame because I couldn't hang on to the sheet. I was so weak. Then they're sticking a board under me. They're laying you down. And I started thinking about my kids and my family. And I felt this tremendous knot in my chest of emotion. And I felt like I was falling into a free fall. I was just crashing.

Everything that I loved, I thought I would never see it again. And then I started thinking about dying and what was dying going to be like? You know, I thought of it electrically, if you could imagine that, like you're going to shut me off like a light bulb, boom. And that's it. I'll be over. I won't exist anymore. I'm nothing. That was making me feel very small, very little. I started grieving my family, what would happen to them, you know, what it was like when my father died for me, the pain that I had. I didn't want them to have that pain.

And I started thinking about God. I didn't believe in God. I thought church was more of a business, you know, and it was fear-based. I had issues growing up. My father, First Nation, his teachings were God is everywhere. Look out the window. Everything is God. My mother, no, go to church. God is in church. I chose none. I became an atheist. So here I am struggling with an issue of God, being an atheist and saying, well, what if God is real?

Let me call out. And I started, I prayed. I said, God, if you're real, if you intervene, I will stop being who I was. I will be a better person. I was trying to negotiate. The response was very clear. My heart became incredibly irregular. I couldn't breathe anymore. They were trying to intubate me. And I got angry. And my thought was, I knew you weren't real anyway, so what the hell? Freak you.

I became very scared because I thought I was just going to disappear and I wanted a nurse to hold my hand so bad. And I couldn't speak. I couldn't say, hey, hold my hand. I thought about my father and I said, he will turn in his grave if I show fear. And I didn't. I stiffened. I never forget it. My body actually stiffened and my heart stopped at that point. I could feel it like horses galloping in my chest and then all of a sudden, poof.

I could hear the IV drip. By that time, I had three or four IVs. They sounded like water splashing, raindrops hitting a tin roof, like splash, splash, splash. When I looked at the wall, I could see the grain in the wallpaper. And I was like absolutely absorbed and fascinated by it, like, wow, what's going on? And I remember looking at the door, and I could see the door frame. Clearly, it was right in front of me with a clock right over it. And it was so bright.

And I thought I could see a shadow. I started thinking to myself, you know, you've had a really hard life and really difficult. I'm not quitting and I'm not giving up. No shame in dying. There's no shame in this. With that thought, I finally came to the point where I said, you know, Jose, it's okay to die. The instant that thought went through my mind, a shadow that was by the door moved and started to move around the people in the room and just reached out and touched me.

And when she touched me, the calm and peace and the sense of love that came with it overwhelmed my inability to breathe and the fact that I was dying. My heartbeat didn't matter anymore, even though I could hear that it stopped. So you hear that beep. It's a strange feeling to hear your heartbeat going crazy. Then all of a sudden, beep. And you're like, there's an awareness in you that says, I'm dead. I just died physically. And when that shadow touched me, my fear evaporated.

It felt like I could breathe. I felt this incredible sense of love and peace and calm and serenity. It was just overwhelming. And I felt this beautiful warm breeze just kind of flow over me. And I got long hair. So I imagined my hair was blowing in the wind and I'm like feeling so free. And I felt like this wind was lifting me and lifting me. And the next thing I know, I wind up in the corner of the room and I'm observing what's going on.

And I see myself there and said to myself, that's me and I'm dead. And I start thinking, if that's me and I'm dead, how could I be seeing? How could I be thinking? How am I doing this? How am I doing this? It's impossible, right? That's me and I'm dead. But if that's me, then who am I?

When I said that to myself, I heard a voice to my left and she said to me, visualize your body as if it were a car and this car has five million miles on it and broken down to the point where we can't fix it anymore. So you got to let it go. That meant I had to say goodbye to my body. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, I just say goodbye to my life. And here I am not dead somehow. Right.

That was painful and hard enough. Now I got to say goodbye to my body. But it was a very curious moment because when I looked at myself, you know, and I realized how special that body, that vessel, it was a vessel in my mind at that point, had been to me. It allowed me to live that life in there and how beautiful that life had been. Before, that life had been miserable, always a challenge, always hard. Now all of a sudden, that life was so beautiful.

And I started to get these little memories of what I call benign things. And they were like holding my little brother's hand, hearing a bird, watching the sunrise, you know, taking a breath. And all of a sudden, all those little moments, all those things that I did every second of my life became so important. And I never thought about, you know, a smile, a hug, how important all those things were, you know, just amazing.

seeing the blue sky, the stars at night, how rich I was and had been. And I never took a moment to say, man, you had it all. You know, instead of thinking, I got nothing, I got to take it, I got to make it. Now I'm thinking, man, you had it all and you need to be grateful. And I became so grateful and so humble that I looked at my body. And for the first time, I looked at myself with love and I was so grateful for the opportunity and I honored my body.

I heard the voice say, okay, now we got to kind of move on. I was always complaining about how short I was, how I never thought I was attractive. I never thought anything good. And here I am looking at myself with so much love and caring and just overwhelmed me. So I looked at my body and I said goodbye to it. And it was so painful because of so much beauty and grace that it had allowed me to experience in this life.

She led me. It looked like a corridor or a path. And I went down that path and I saw in front of me like what I can only describe as a black hole. And then I just fell in it. I felt this ripping. It was painful. And I land on the bottom and the voice says, keep going. You got to keep going. There's another one. And I go through it. And the same thing I feel is ripping, ripping, ripping.

and when I emerge at the bottom, I'm suspended in this ball of color. So if you imagine being inside a ball, imagine a basketball, you're right in the center of it and all around this color and it's moving, it's alive. And the voice is telling me the pain was you were letting go of all those things that hurt you in life. They can't come with you. You have to be pure to move on. And I understood that explanation, if that makes any sense.

And I kept going and then the color was just calling out to me. And I could see it moving and it was getting closer and almost like an event horizon. So I could see this line in front of me or around me. It's beautiful colors everywhere moving and they were all talking to me. It's like a million voices and all I hear is chatter. But ultimately, I become immersed in the color and I became color. Ultimately, as I moved through this color and I experienced one of the most profound experiences of my life.

Because the color accepted me. You know, we're so used to being like rejected and things like that. This color was so accepting. Whatever I was, it was okay. And it made me feel so tiny. Not in a bad way, humble, but so grateful. While I was experiencing this living color, experiencing it, I was also being programmed. This is how you're going to paint when you come back. This is how you're going to do. You have to do this, and then you need to do this, and then you need to do that.

And I ultimately emerge on the other side of the color and I come out in like a forest. And the trees and the wildlife is everywhere and there's mountains in the background and I could see the dark clouds, the clouds making these dark shadows on the mountain. And I'm like awed by it, saying, oh my gosh, what an amazing place. I start to move and then I get a thought and the thought is, what's going to happen to my kids? And I hear the voice and it says, don't worry, you can see them from here.

And I'm thinking, wow, that's awesome. That made me feel so peaceful and calm. And I'm already immersed in this incredibly peaceful loving. All I feel is love. Overwhelmed by love. It's overwhelming. And peace and serenity. And I'm moving through this. And as I get near the tree, I become the bark. Then I become the inside, the pulp. And I can feel its heart. And I can feel water coming up. It's food. And I can feel it feeding itself. Then I can feel the leaves. And I become the leaves. I can feel the breeze. I can feel...

It's amazing. Then I see a bird and I become that bird. I see a stone, I become the stone. So everything that I'm seeing, I'm experiencing, I'm becoming. And there's a sense in my head telling me everything's one here. You're beginning to experience a sense of oneness. And ultimately, you'll be integrated into everything at the same time, not individually.

I start going up the mountainside and I can see the snow on the top. It's beautiful. And I get up to the top and I see the white below me and then I get over it. And as I look over into the horizon, I see the sun on my right and there's a beautiful beach and a pool on my left. When I look at the sun, it's like looking through a telescope. So you see the flares coming off of it. This thought goes in my head and says, this is where the warmth is coming. And this warmth is what's giving me this buoyancy. So it's allowing me to fly.

Anyway, I look back to my left and I see in the water there's a man knee deep and he's holding kids in a chain. They're each holding arms on his right side and one on his left. For some reason I said, "Let me go and find out who that is." So I kind of hover down and the man turns. So he let go of the kids and he turns, but the man is my father.

And I looked at my dad and the joy that I felt, I can't even begin to express. I can't put it in words. It was just like, this is my chance to tell my father everything that I never said in life. Oh, wow, this is it. This is the moment. I looked at my dad and he looked at me and I didn't talk. I could hear him in my head. I imagine he could hear me because we were communicating.

And we had this moment where we expressed how we felt for each other. For the first time in my life, my father's telling me he loves me and I'm telling him that I love him, that I remember. And then we did what we never did in life. And we approached each other and I actually hugged my dad and he hugged me. When my father held me, I became him. The same way I had become the trees and everything else. I could feel everything he felt.

I lived his life in an instant and I knew he was so proud of me and I knew how much he loved me. And I know he regretted that he had never said it either. And I just felt so how wrong I had been. I had thought all these things and I thought I knew everything and here I was thinking this is how he feels and never really knowing how he ever felt. And now here we are and we merged into one being.

And the love and grace that I felt is, I can't, it's hard to talk about. It makes me still very emotional. I think this happened 20 years ago. And then we let go. And he looked at me and he said, Jose, you have to go back. I looked at my father and said, hell no. I'm not going back. I'm staying right here. I like it here. And we got into a debate. Anyway, ultimately, he looked at me and he said, I'm going to do a deal. My father used to play a lot of poker and stuff, so he's always doing deals.

And I said, okay, what's the deal? And he said, look, I promise that when your time comes, I will be the one to go get you. And I looked at him. And for some reason, that felt like it was the best deal ever. And I said, you know, dad, that sounds like a good deal. And then I just felt a pulling here in my chest, but from my back. And I felt something just pull me out, suck me out.

And all of a sudden, I'm in my body and I open my eyes and I see the doctor. And she's still doing CPR. And when I opened my eyes, she kind of moved her head back. And she got surprised. And I felt horrendous, sick, sick. And I'm like, what did I just do? And then this crazy thought went in my head. And the thought was, was I such a shitty person in life that even heaven just kicked me out?

and I'm laying there shocked from the experience because then I start thinking was that real? That really happened? Did I go anywhere? Did I meet my father? What's happening here? And then they finally stabilized me and I'm in the room thinking, maybe my head broke, my mind broke. I said to the cardiologist, you know what, I think I went somewhere. And he looked at me like, no, no, no, no, you didn't go anywhere.

You know, your brain is still alive for two minutes after your heart stops. And you had all these medications we were giving you. And then you released DMT. And I'm like, oh, boy. So I thought I was crazy. I thought the experience wasn't real. So I thought my mind was broken. And then I started to say that that wasn't real. And I started to become very fearful. You know, when you come back into your body, it's kind of interesting because it's almost an alien experience.

From the time I was born to the time I had that near death, my only experience of myself was in this body. I left it for five minutes that I was dead. I came back. But when I came back into this body, I was having an alien experience. The physicality was like a burden. The pain. My body was really struggling. I could feel that. And it felt very awkward, very uncomfortable and strange.

It stayed with me that thought because I felt so natural whilst on the other side. And then when I come back into my body where I think I would feel the most natural, it felt so awkward and strange, you know, to the point where I felt like I was being punished. And that's why I was being sent back. I was kicked out of heaven. And so that to me now is a punishment. Being back in my physical body is a punishment. And it took four years to embrace being back in body.

the heart monitor, the alarm goes off when you reach like 140 or 146 beats per minute. The alarm went off and someone came in the room. This woman appears by the door and I'm beginning to panic saying I'm crazy in my mind that never happened. It wasn't real. She asked me if I wanted to take communion. In my head I'm going what the hell? I haven't been to church in over 30 years. My mind is saying no but my head is saying yes.

She had oil on her palm and she just rubbed it and she touched my forehead. When she touched my forehead with her two fingers, I just went back like if I was dead again. I felt that peace and calm, the fear went away and everything stabilized. I heard her say something, I don't know what she said. She left something on the night desk and she disappeared. She stabilized me instantly and I wound up three months in hospital and got a prognosis that I would never leave there alive.

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My prognosis was I won't live alive. Strange thing is every time they hit a cold blue, I would migrate into that ball of color and just immerse myself in those colors. And it gave me peace and it began to give me some kind of resiliency. And I started to get better. I started to get better. Then when I was leaving hospital after three months, the prognosis is, look, you could live a year and a half. But if we do surgery and remove half of each lung, because it's progressive, they believed you could live for three years.

And I'm thinking, forget that. You know, I only had a 50-50 chance of surviving the surgery to begin with. I'm thinking all that pain and anguish for another year and a half is not really worth it.

So I left the hospital and recovering was very difficult. It's almost like being in the hospital at home. So you got oxygen, you got all these things, you're on a regimen. You're completely isolated from your family. I came home and I'm this oddball that doesn't know anything anymore. He could be mentally ill and your wife is looking at you and even my grown up kids like something's wrong with you and who are you and why are you talking about spirit? You never spoke about that before. You're a math guy, you're a science guy.

So there's nobody to speak to, you're completely isolated. So I would sit in the kitchen with them and have dinner. And I felt like they were in a bubble. And I was outside of this bubble. And it was clear, I could see and I could interact, but I wasn't really a part of anything that was going on. I felt completely disconnected from life. So if I'm crazy, then this isn't real. And not only the experience,

am i what i'm experiencing right now at this moment real is this isolation usual am i hearing a sound that maybe they're not hearing you know what's going on not getting better quickly drains you you know having someone help you get out of bed and help you up and

Helping you get dressed is an unusual life experience, right? Because you used to do that since we're little. We learn how to dress and how to go to the bathroom and do all these real simple, simple things. When it becomes a struggle to sit there and try to eat, it changes everything. And then just thinking, I'm not here, I'm numb. And the addiction struggles, I came out addicted to multiple medications.

struggling with anxiety. And then I needed the Xanax every three hours and then every two hours. And until I realized that it was the actual medication that was causing that and the psychologists were able to explain to me what was happening. And then the thought of where I was had more appeal than being here. And I was suicidal at that time, quite suicidal.

So I started going to a psychologist after a year and a half. And when I went to the psychiatrist, I wasn't going to the psychiatrist so they could help me understand what happened and accept it. I went to the psychiatrist thinking I'm crazy. Maybe they can medicate me. So I'm looking for a magic pill. I went to several psychiatrists. It was a very difficult process.

First one, after three or four months, he tells you that you hate your mother. You know, you hate women. And I'm looking at her like, okay. I remember just saying, you know, this is so Freudian. They put me with someone else and I had another very unusual experience. And then she left me for financial reasons. She didn't leave me hanging. She put me with somebody else. And this person really helped me. So this is two and a half years into the process. And she sat with me on the sofa and she did what I needed to get done in the hospital. She took my hand and I cried.

And I finally said, this is why I'm here. I had this experience. I saw my dad. Am I crazy? And that's when the work actually started, two and a half years later. When the psychologist sat by me on the sofa and actually held my hand, it just broke a wall that had been in front of my life forever. And that was a wall that said that I couldn't be

human, that I couldn't feel, that if I felt something, I had to shut it down. I had to hide it, disguise it. And all of a sudden, it brought me back to that moment in the hospital when I was dying. And I wanted someone to hold my hand so desperately. Desperate doesn't begin to explain what that feeling was like. And then somehow, I had found the strength to suppress that

Because my dad would turn in his grave. And it just took that facade away from me of what being a man was. It tore that completely apart. The same way that my dying tore apart all my belief structure about math and science and there being no afterlife or no God. That moment galvanized that. This is okay. This is being human. This is what we're supposed to be like. And I wept.

And that became the catalyst for me being able to say after two and a half years of seeing psychologists, this is why I'm here. This happened to me. Was this real? So she changed my life. She'll probably never know in a way that allowed me to be a human being. Her holding my hand made me kind of say, OK, it's OK to be human. I could cry. And yes, it's OK to share the story. And if you're crazy, you're crazy. Doesn't matter.

I was able to make peace with the experience and accept it as real, that I understood how valuable life was. You know, I came back with this desire to paint. And it wasn't a desire, it was more like a compulsion. I needed to paint. I had to paint. And I would go back because I didn't think I was sane and think, well, you're kind of crazy anyway, so you really don't need to paint. That experience wasn't real. You didn't learn how to paint.

But when I had the experience with the psychologist, I held my hand and I was able to speak. The desire to paint became overwhelming. I started thinking, how would I even start what I'd never done this before? And all I had to do is close my eyes and I was there. It was telling me, this is what you need to do. I could hear the colors talking to me.

And so I took a black canvas, I painted it black. And I knew from instinct that in that blackness was everything that made anything we know. In this world that we live in, started in an empty void, we think was empty, but in that emptiness, in that blackness, was everything that made everything that we see now. That's why I start with a black canvas. It represents that aspect of creation where everything exists. All the ingredients are there to make everything that we know.

When I kind of meld into the color, what's interesting about it is that the color is alive. So they're talking to me. So I see these colors moving. So blue becomes purple, becomes red. They're laughing. There's so much joy and so much love coming from it. And I become red. I become blue. I become all these colors. So when I look at color today, it's not color. It's a living entity.

So I'm surrounded by a panorama of life and that color taught me how to paint. How to paint in layers. So I had to paint on top, finish and then paint over it and paint over it and paint over it. When I looked at it, you're looking at a two-dimensional plane but it has depth. And as I look into that depth, I'm looking into my beginnings.

So in there is embedded my entire ancestral tree, but so is everybody else's. And it gets convoluted to the point where it becomes one, where everything that I know, everything that I see, everyone, everything becomes an aspect of it and is embedded in there in that oneness. And I'm looking at it from out here where everything seems to be distinct in itself. So a rock is a rock, a bird is a bird. People, us, we're, I'm Jose. That becomes irrelevant.

and we become source. And it tells me how we go back, what brings me home. And I realized that when I painted, I would not be here. I was somewhere else and I could be there for days and days lost in this blissful place.

I started working with some rehab centers and some drug addiction centers. And I started doing something that I call an inner immersion. You know, how do I find myself? You know, we think about going inside. Oh, we'll go inside. We'll find stuff. And I look at it from a different perspective. And for me to find myself, I have to be able to reach the depth of forever. While that exists in here, it also exists out here. And so the inner immersion was amazing.

How do I look at myself, not from a physical, from a more inward perspective, but look out? And I started using the art. That's how I wound up speaking to hospitals and things like that. And it looks like we may start a couple of incubators. We're doing a pilot program right now called The People's Light. And the idea is to create a structure, a sculpture outside that is interactive, communicates with people. Same way the art communicated with me, except we're using technology.

So it just changed my life. My life changed completely. So when I was falling down, it was very painful, but it was essential for cleansing. You got to take your ego apart like a puzzle. Just completely take it apart and start from the beginning because ego doesn't exist. So a lot of what I knew fell apart. My relationship fell apart.

My relationship with my children is good, but it's nowhere near what it used to be. You know, I almost see in the back of their mind somewhere, where's the old Joe? So we don't think that we're always renewing. But one of the things I learned in this experience or in my experience is that I'm constantly renewing. Every minute of every day, every second, there's a renewal happening. While it translates into a slower time frame in life. So my divorce took

seven years to actually manifest. It was part of that renewal. The reason the divorce happened was because I was renewing. She was renewing. We were, everybody's, everything's renewing, you know, constantly. And for me to get to the other space, I needed to be free. So I started to understand what we in the First Nation culture call the Red Road.

It's not my job to reconstruct what's in front of my life right at this moment. It's important that that be in my life because that is the way. And so today it's okay to die because that's the path. There is no punishment. There is nothing that I'm paying for. There is nothing that I've done. I hated my life. I hated who I was. I hated everything in my world.

Until I didn't. Until I realized that everything in my world was special, everything in my world was important, everything was essential. Then you find in real life it's happening all the time.

So we're kind of renewing. I started painting something I never did before. I met Anastasia, my new wife, and we had a miracle happen. We have a little one, Gabrielle, she's nine, and totally unexpected. But it just shows you how little we know and how we assume we know so much. I know I'm going to go to work tomorrow. I know in two hours I'm going to do this. I'm going to eat dinner at 7:00.

Suddenly something happens and what we know turns out to be like we really don't know. Even as we're in this physical body, we're experiencing a spiritual cleansing and I call it the shedding. We shed these things that are not essential. They're not really relevant and important in life. We think they are. So me having a brand new car, maybe it's not that important. Me telling someone I love them is.

And we all have different things that matter to us. So the idea is to focus on what matters to you and speak to it, express it, talk about it, share. One of the teachings that I got from my experience, and again, this is my experience, is how I perceive love. Dying taught me about life. It taught me what was important in life and why love is a cornerstone and the only thing that matters.

So love becomes the cornerstone of the experience. We think of love here and we experience love here, but I'm talking about primordial sense of love, something that is so it, the core. So the first thing that came into my head when I started thinking about love was a tree, a fruit tree. And I'm thinking this tree loves me.

so much that it puts all this fruit out in the hope that one will fall and become another tree, but always in the hope of creating more, a substance to sustain something else. You know, when I'm thirsty, does the water quench my thirst? Yes. That's love the water gives me. And I just look at everything like that. Everything's just giving. Everything in this universe is giving, and it gives in the only way it knows how.

And I look at a tree now with so much love and kindness and gratitude because I understand that that tree is doing so much. It gives me air, it gives me shade, it gives me so much it could become firewood. It sacrifices itself in so many ways for me, you know, and it feeds me, nurtures me. Never thought of it before. You know, the sun, same way. So now everything has a different value to me. Love to me is not an emotion.

It's a physical living presence. If one electron doesn't call for another electron to change the value of this atom to make something, it won't happen. So we look at it as attraction. We could call it magnetic. You could call it electrical. You could call it whatever you want. I just look at it from that. It's just love. And to sacrifice yourself to become that.

Love is so much more. There's no words for it. You know, without love, there's nothing. So when I left the hospital, they gave me a prognosis, which obviously wasn't good. I had one and a half to three years. That was 20 years ago. My health has been pretty fragile since I left the hospital. So I've been in the hospital at least 10 or 12 times, pretty near death again.

I mean, I want to live as long as I can like everybody else, but I'm not worried about when it comes anymore. So my thought is when I'm in the ICU, I've been quite a few times in it again. My thought is my dad will come. Don't be afraid. And that makes it okay. It made me create peace with my dad. You know, the teaching wasn't that he forgave me and I forgave him. And we were like, yeah, this is going to be great from now on. The teaching was Jose forgave Jose.

and the guilt just melted away you know and and i learned to love who i was and it just made me love life

When I say life, I mean everything. I'm not saying like us in a physical body. I mean everything. A rock, a bird, a drop of rain, everything is imbued with life to me. We all think we're moving a separate path. We all think we're doing everything different, but it appears that way. But everything moves in one direction only. And everything is one. It moves together. It doesn't move separate.

And all that movement is essential because it creates the one thing that is what we know, the moment. And we're always in that moment. We're never there alone. Everything's in that moment with us. A lot of things that we take for granted, we don't understand how important they are until something happens that makes them very relevant and all of a sudden they're important. I saw a show the other day that said if we didn't have earthworms, we'd be dead in 10 years, right?

you know so they could think about that think about that that's happening on the ground we don't even see it but so important life exists everywhere at the same time even other spaces so where i went when i died i didn't experience death i actually experienced a life that was significantly more vibrant and alive today's episode featured jose hernandez

You can find out more about Jose and the work he's doing at innerimmersion.org, where you can sign up to join the community and participate in the free monthly conversations, Evening Joe. To learn more about Jose's art, check out his gallery at josehernandezfineart.com. You can also see Jose featured in the Netflix docuseries, Surviving Death. If you're interested in learning more about near-death experiences, Jose will be a featured speaker at the IANS conference this year. IANS stands for the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

He'll be presenting Embracing the Masculine, Helping Men Make the Shift into the New Paradigm with Randy Kolibaba, a highly decorated Canadian RCMP officer. IANDS have arranged to offer Jose and Randy's talk free to veterans. So if there is a veteran in your life you think could benefit from hearing this talk, please direct them to IANDS and ask for Diane Cochran at IANDS.org. That's I-A-N-D-S dot org. ♪

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook or at Actually Happening on Instagram.

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Thank you for listening.

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