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- [00:00]
Michael Ellick
Foreign.
- [00:12]
Jack Wagner
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features a story that is honestly a bit hard to describe. It comes from a man named Michael, who is currently a minister living in Washington. But when this story takes place, he was a Tibetan Buddhist novice monk living in New York. As you might imagine, being a Buddhist monk involves a great deal of intense meditation. And in meditation, people often have very profound experiences. These are the types of things that Michael had become very familiar with during his meditation practice and life as a monk. But one day during one of his meditations, Michael experienced something far more intense and unexpected than he could have ever imagined. Something that I'm not quite sure how to categorize. This episode is called From now on, and you're listening to Otherworld.
- [01:24]
Michael Ellick
Hello, is this Bobby? Yes. It is, at its core, the science you can't argue with. I'm worried about all of a sudden up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm literally, I'm gonna die. Its limbs were just, like, wrong.
- [01:38]
Commercial Narrator 1
Everybody moves back into the light, even
- [01:40]
Michael Ellick
if it takes them a minute. My name is Michael Ellick. I currently live in Bainbridge Island, Washington. I work in Seattle. I am a minister, but was at the time I served as a Tibetan Buddhist novice monk and attendant to a teacher for years. That sort of led up to this experience, maybe in part. I was raised inside of a, you know, evangelical Christian context. And like a lot of people raised in evangelical Christian context, I totally abandoned it at some point in high school and thought it was all nonsense. And so I decided that I was going to be a poet and an artist and a writer and had nothing to no interest in sort of a Judeo Christian framework. Always felt like a religious person. Deep down. I always felt like a spiritually inclined individual and fascinated by the depths, but not Christian. And at some point, 18, 19, I had what can only be described as religious experiences that changed my worldview and pulled me out of a traditional, you know, western materialist framework. Following 18 in a series of religious experiences, spiritual experiences, I was actively seeking out ways of making sense of those experiences, some of which happened while I was awake and some of which happened in a dream setting, but shook me enough. So I studied comparative religion and philosophy as an undergraduate. I was a double major and then went to an academic seminary in New York City with the intent of being a professor, because I would never have considered back then being a minister. No interest, you know. But at some point while I was in graduate school studying to be a PROFESSOR I think I just became pretty disillusioned with the whole project of academia and seminary education or Ivy League education. There's a lot of politics in that. And I felt like I was being intellectually trained, but without a kind of grounding to actually be a better human and better person. So I started investigating. And I'm from a place on. I grew up on Bainbridge island where I live now. And Buddhism was always sort of the other appealing alternative. There was Buddhists around me, Tibetan and Zen. So I started to really, some point in seminary, really seek out guidance and training in a Buddhist framework. When I entered, I would say that my intent was to train with people who would make me a better person, a better follower of Jesus. I still felt faithful to the Christian story. I just was sort of anti Christian religion. So I trained that way for years and really considered being a full monk and spending my life inside that framework, but for a variety of reasons decided that wasn't the way to go. I went through 9, 11. I was someone who worked in the financial district when the Twin Towers came down, saw it all happen, was present for it, watched Christianity become jingoistic and rhetoric to defend sort of American aggression. So I ended up feeling that I needed to serve inside a Christian, that I needed to leave my own religion better than how I found it. And that as a. As a Western Tibetan Buddhist, I would always be a little bit of a tourist and a foreigner inside it. But if I committed to my practice inside of a Christian framework, maybe I could help serve and more generously interpret what I came to view as the ancient Jesus mysteries. And it was around that time that I shifted from serving primarily in a Tibetan Buddhist context to serving initially in odd jobs and volunteering in a Christian context. It was around that time that this experience emerged. Even after leaving the Tibetan Buddhist world formally have maintained a pretty serious practice. Today I'm as much a meditation teacher as I am a minister. And that has just been a big fundamental anchor of my life. But it substantively changed with this experience. And this experience that I'll share has sort of informed a lot of pieces of that pursuit ever since to go deep in meditation. I think, you know, these days we live in a culture that's pretty distraction oriented. And it's really hard inside a normal American life to practice with any depth without a community around you of other people that help kind of ground your system down into it. But if you do that, if you find your way to that experience, I think the ancient texts and contemporary texts talk about Surreal things that can occur. And. And, you know, the ancient texts talk about a series of powers that might emerge. You know, in Sanskrit and in Pali, they talk about the various things that could happen, including like a certain degree of magnetism or clairvoyance or telepathy. These are things that people talk about in the ancient tradition, right? In my own experience, I think that. And I think the experience of others around me, you. When you start going into longer periods of trance practice, you might start having light telepathy with people and things like knowing things in advance, clairvoyance, not like a turn on switch power, but around the edges, those things can start to emerge. You know, when you really start to practice, it can. It can bring up, especially in the beginning, it can bring up a lot of buried things. If you're someone who has buried trauma or unresolved issues, very often it can suck those things to the foreground. It's very common in meditation that when you really start to find a rhythm, that things that maybe you haven't dealt with properly rise to the surface and it can feel like you're sliding backwards. Like, I thought meditation was supposed to help me. Here I am reliving these things, but it's extracting those things and helping you process through them. So my experience up until 2006 was that those type of things were occurring like, you know, not consistently, not all the time, but. But it was something I would talk about with fellow meditators. You know, you knew that something was gonna happen. You knew that someone was gonna call or what someone was thinking from far away. You have intuitions around someone and then you find out that they were going through exactly what you saw. That kind of stuff isn't consistent enough, at least not in my experience, to count on it and claim, oh, I've got these powers. But. But they are the kind of reality warping that can arise. Your perception of time might even alter. Like, you know, you savor things differently. I was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, at the time. I was at the Dharma Center a lot of the time. But now I was really now living in my own place with my brother, who's eight years younger. And another. We had a string of friends who were at any given time living with us. And in this particular moment, it was a Saturday or a Sunday. It was sometime in the afternoon, sunny day, and I am gonna sit and do my practice. It wasn't my regular practice time. It was like midday. But I had kind of nothing to do. And I was sort of conditioned to. If nothing Else I will sit and practice. So I was sitting on my brother's bed because it was a room where I could shut the door from anyone else who would come into the apartment. And I did this thing where you put these cushions underneath your butt to sit up a certain way straight. And I was in practice and I don't know for how long I was practicing, maybe five to 10 minutes, when in the midst of that practice session I, you know, a memory popped into my head from long ago. And that is not unusual for meditation. All these strange thoughts, you know, are going to come into your head and you sift through them in different ways. But this memory felt different. When I was 15, I was in a really bad car accident. I went through a windshield. I was in the driver's seat and it was pretty serious. And at 15, back in 1990, no hiding how old I am, I was really close to death. But I lived miraculous. Like an inch to the right or the left they said would have killed me. But I was pretty beat up, my face was torn up. And the next day after the hospital, I was in my bedroom again. And I was sort of recouping back in my home, my parents house, in my 15 year old bedroom, well, meditating. In 2006, I had a memory of that morning, that morning after the accident where I was sitting in my bedroom. And it was just some random memory. There was nothing particular about that time that I can identify. But for whatever reason that memory felt different than normal. And I've tried to talk about it in different ways. It felt like it was vibrating or something, like it was a visual image that was distorted like a ringing of a glass or, you know, I don't know, like it was vibrating. It was something about it and I felt compelled, like I could just step into it. It was so crystal clean and perfect, the memory, right? It just felt like I could step right into it. It was perfect. And I don't know how to describe it other than to say that that's exactly what I did. I felt like I stepped into the memory. I did not physically move or leave, you know, the meditation posture, but it's like my body twisted or turned into the memory. I was not sleepy. I do not have the subjective experience of falling asleep, but my body did this little shiver as it transitioned from one place to the other place. And I, I all of a sudden was in my bedroom, my 15 year old high school bedroom back in 1990. I don't know what your 15 year old bedroom was like, but I bet you you don't remember all of it? I think I could have picked out some big, like, I kind of know the layout of the room. But I was back in my bedroom and as soon as I was there, all of it came flooding back, like these weird posters that I used to have. Like, I remember there was this silly poster that I had, you know, that someone had given me probably when I was in middle school, but it just never got taken down. But it was like this cartoony poster my parents had got me. And it was a picture of a really messy room, right? And then the logo of it was my room. Love it or leave it. And I kind of hated that poster, right? It was like, I thought it was stupid and it didn't seem cool. It seemed like a kid thing. And I just never took it down for whatever reason. But I had not thought about that poster, you know, for over a decade or whatever. And seeing that again was like, oh, my God. Plus, a lot of things I remember seeing. Little things. Like, I remember I'd gone to some camp and this is years before 1990. But, like, you know, your room gets filled with the detritus of, like, weird stuff that eventually you get rid of. But, like, there was this, like, name. What do you call it? Like a. It was like a little cross section of a tree of a small tree. And it was this craftsy thing you do at camp where you do name tags, right? And it's your name, but you painted it and now you hang it as a necklace. But I'd done one that said my name and then a bunch that were like crazy fake names. You know, it's stuff like that. Like weird drawings. I was into things like, you know, role playing games that I would sketch out. I was a sci fi fantasy reading kid and I would draw things or have books. All that stuff was there. And, you know, a couple times I'm like, boy, I wish I still had those books. You know what I mean? Like, who got rid of those? Did I get rid of those? It was like I was back in time. It was perfect. It was not a dream. The experience subjectively was that I was perfectly there and I was in my body at 15. You know, I was conscious of the fact that this is the morning after the accident and I am in total effing shock. I did not try to do this. I didn't solicit this experience. And I don't know what to say about those first few moments other than it was the most surreal experience. Probably one of the most surreal experiences of My life up until that moment, I really felt the ontological shock is the only word. And I'm sitting up and I'm feeling myself and I'm looking at myself and. And I, you know, I can feel the bandages on me, right? I'm looking around, I'm seeing water and medicine and g. You know, this is the room I've been set up to recoup and recover. But I'm in such like, holy shit, excuse my language. I blown away. I'm in 1990, you know, I just. So I got up out of the bed because I'm looking outside now at the driveway, I'm seeing what car, right? Dad used to drive that car. I'm. And you know, I lived with my little brother at the time. And I got all of a sudden like, his name is Sean. I'm like, oh, Shawn's here somewhere. So I get up from my room and I hobble in and immediately my head swoons and I realize, oh, I'm still recovering, I'm a little damaged, I'm sore, there's other damage. So I walk a little more ginger and I walk in and I see my brother in his room. But he is a little kid. He is eight years younger. So you know, when I was 15, he was like whatever, seven, eight. And I was like, well, I can't tell him what's happening, right? He's a little kid. So I go downstairs. We're in the upper part of the house. And you know that house, my parents lived in that house for a long time after, but it got remodeled, it got redecorated. I'm going through like the weirdness of our house back then. And I'm walking down the stairs, and I'm walking down the stairs and then you cross the entry hall of my parents house. And then a little far off, there's a little nook off the kitchenette. It's not the main dining room, it's a little kitchen nook where there's a table and people can eat breakfast or whatever else. And I'm coming down those stairs and my parents are in the kitchen. And my dad's like, you know, watching TV or something. And this little TV attached to that kitchen nook. And I'm watching them and before they notice me, I'm seeing them as I'm coming down the stairs. And it's my parents and they're younger, you know, it's their younger version of themselves. And I'm like, oh my, my God. And I'm still like, what is happening? This is not a dream. I'm pinching myself, you know, I am totally here. I can't believe it. I start coming down the stairs. They both look at me and finally notice that I'm walking down the stairs. And you can tell I'm not supposed to be doing that. They both stand up and like, hey, Michael, what's going on? You know what I mean? Like, are you all right? What are you doing, buddy? And I'm like, mom and dad. And I come down into the room. I don't go back up, I just walk to the kitchen. I'm like. And I'm speechless because they. This, you know, maybe a few minutes has now come by, total, maybe more. But every new encounter just continues to floor me, you know. Meanwhile, my consciousness is that of someone who is, you know, 30 plus whatever I was in 2006, who's a meditator, who is a Buddhist, philosophically trained. And so in my mind I'm like, somehow I've learned how to move through space and time. I'm also a kid of science fiction. I'm like, I've done it. I've hit the jackpot. I know how to time travel. I thought that, right? And so I'm thinking this as my parents are talking to me and they're trying to like, look after. Because whatever I look like to them, in addition to the bandage, whatever my face is doing, it must have looked crazy to them, right? Like I'm in astonishment, but they're seeing me through the lens of someone who might have had a concussion. And they're like, is my son, you know, messed up? Or whatever? So they're like, they're trying to, like, get me to sit down. And I'm like, I am just in shock. So I finally, I say at some point out loud, like, mom, from now on, everything is going to be really different, right? And I mean, in my head, like my whole life has just changed, right? Like the fundamental existential ground of my world has changed. I am no longer stuck in one timeline, right? I thought that. So I'm like, yeah, mom, from now on, everything's gonna be different. And I start trying to take off the bandages. I don't even know why, but she's like, michael, keep on your. You. So that is the initial moment of this experience. But what's even maybe stranger is that I then don't go back. I stay there. I continue living in my 15 year old body in real time for weeks. I don't know how long it was fully, but in my memory it was Like a couple weeks and I convalesced there. I slept, I went to the bathroom, I did laundry, I read get well soon letters from people that were flooding home from school. I eventually go back to school as a 15 year old in high school. My dad was the high school principal. And you know, I didn't remember everything. I didn't remember the context, like the social cues and, or what my classes were. I remember like not being entirely sure, like what classes was I in as a sophomore? You know, I don't know. And fortunately I could kind of use the. You know, everyone knew I had been hit in the head and it was this big accident and my friend, two other friends were in the car with me. They were also severely injured. But we sort of had the excuse of this to justify that. I wasn't entirely clear about everything. I remember the first day I went back to school, for instance, and my dad drove me and you know, and I figured by that time I'd figured out what my classes were. I don't remember the exact moment where he laid out my classes, but I remember thinking like, I don't know what they are. And at some point, you know, it gets figured out and I can basically be slow because everyone knows I've been hurt. But then I have to pick up everything through context clues. Like it's a mixture of memory, you know, think back to when you were 15, like you don't remember everything. Even now I don't remember everything. So it's a mixture of like reducing my memory and like reading social cues off everyone. Right. This is not a memory. I am living it physically. I am not tranced back. There is no part of me that is like remembering or that is like, oh, I know that somewhere. I'm back on a meditation cushion back in Queens. None of that. No, I was 100%. My subjective experience was that I teleported back into my 15 year old body and I was there physically in every possible real way. I could smell the world, I could taste. It was 1000% real. I don't know how else to put it. Like it was 100% real. It was my life in my body. I got to watch. You know, this is in a time where there's like four channels, there's four broadcast channels and like in our, you know, I lived in Bainbridge, is a suburb of Seattle. There was like, I think three abc, NBC, CBS and Fox. Right? Maybe pbs, you could kind of get in. So there was that. People were sending me things like sympathy cards so my dad would Come home. Maybe he was that first day, but I think it was the second day of being in bed that he brought home all these sympathy cards. And there was one I remember from this girl who I won't name, but years later I learned that she'd had a big crush on me. You know, but reading the sympathy card and kind of reading between the lines, I remember thinking like, oh, she has a crush on me even now when we're 15. You know what I mean? At 15, I didn't know that. But reading the card with the knowledge of what would come later, you know, I was putting pieces together, right? And, and I was freaking out, right? Like, I was just like, oh my God. I mean, again, my subjective experience sitting in that bed is, is I've, I've been trained as a Buddhist. I've been trained in philosophy and religion. I'm like, I don't know how to say this. I'm a really open minded person. I'm open to the possibility that my brain somehow produced this experience. But if it did, that experience is so intense, so detailed, so nuanced and for so long with none of the dream skipping, it might as well have been real. That is equally as miraculous that our brain, my brain could, could produce this experience. So I basically just jumped past this. You know, is this a dream? In my mind, I knew it wasn't, you know, I was living it. There was no doubt because it wasn't like I had one shot. I could, you know, after an hour come back and pinch myself again, right? Like I could drink coffee, I could, you know, all that stuff. Like I'm living in the minutiae. And so I remember thinking a lot about like, okay, so now I know for sure time travel's possible. Now I know for sure that our consciousness can decouple from our body and move around in time and space. What does that mean? And so I'm now revisiting everything I've learned through the lens of it not just being vaguely metaphorical. I wasn't sleeping. I was there in 1990. And that was just another scale of surreality. So those days went on and again, I don't remember everything. I remember thinking, like, do you dream and go to the bathroom like this? Do you dream and have to do your laundry like this? Am I dreaming? Dream gauze as I'm changing my bandages. Like, I can't eat because of my mouth. My face was really cut up and in fact my lip was split and it had to be stitched back together. And so eating was really Difficult and painful. So I'm drinking things, but I'm like. As I'm going through these physical sensations, I can feel the. What do you call it? The thread of the stitches on my inside of my lip and on the outside. It's really gnarly. It's disgusting. But it's painful and weird. And I'm sitting there experiencing it. I don't remember every single minute of that. I remember my little brother coming in and feeling bad for me. And he was scared a little bit to look at me. And I tried to assure him, but that was a big one. Because, you know, my little brother grows up, and he's like my closest companion. You know, like, we live together in the future. And I can't tell him, you know, at some point, the two other guys who were in the wreck with me, one of them was in the front seat, and his chest hit the steer. He was the driver. We were driving in the car, and we basically were driving too fast. It slipped in the rain, and we hit like a telephone pole. And so I went hard on the windshield, and my shoulder got messed up on the dash. His chest hit this, and his head hit the glass. So he was caught up. The guy in the back seat was not cut up and was wearing a seatbelt, but the seatbelt hit his abdomen with such force. They were more worried about him for a little while for various reasons. Well, he was okay, and he came to see me at some point. At that moment, I did not choose to tell him what was happening to me. I was asking him about the accident. You know what I mean? We were reliving the accident. That's what he came to do, and that's what we did. Later on in the weeks that I was there, I would confess to him what had happened, or I would sort of. Sort of. I would. I would sort of frame it for him. But at that time, we're just visiting, right? And we're talking about. And I'm faking it. Cause I don't know what else to do. I don't know what else to do. Time just doesn't stop. It continues.
- [30:46]
Jack Wagner
All right, we'll be right back after this quick break.
- [31:05]
Michael Ellick
So good, so good, so good.
- [31:08]
Commercial Narrator 2
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- [31:17]
Michael Ellick
How did I not know Rack has Adidas?
- [31:19]
Jack Wagner
Cause there's always something new.
- [31:21]
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- [32:04]
Commercial Narrator 4
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- [32:09]
Michael Ellick
We're the greatest partners of all time. New friends Gary the snake and your last name the snake dream team. Pick new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [32:19]
Commercial Narrator 4
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just 4.99amonth for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months, Plan Auto renews at 1299amonth. Terms apply.
- [32:52]
Michael Ellick
So my father's the high school principal, Bainbridge Island High School. At some point he brought home like stuff for me to, you know, I don't remember how many days I was out, but he brought home stuff for me eventually. Like, you know, paperwork and notes and like I said, sympathy cards. But there was homework. He basically was okay because of my mom, like with me not doing, you know, I improved quickly. I seemed to them to improve faster than maybe I should have because I'm filled with all this energy of like being in 1990. But my body was pretty messed up and they. I wanted to go back and be involved before they wanted me to be back and involved. So there was a little bit of a reversal in negotiation. I remember that like, when do you go back? I was ready to go downstairs that first morning and they were like, no way. You know, so every step of the way there was like, are you sure you should be out doing this? And you know, that kind of stuff. And like I wanted to go see my friends really bad and they would not let me do that. They would start eventually to let friends come visit me. But it was sort of supervised by them. So I wouldn't overdo it eventually, you know, there's homework at home. But my dad basically feels bad because he thinks I'm moving too fast. Doesn't insist that I do anything. I think under different circumstances he would have. So eventually I'm allowed to go back. And I think that my friends were going back. But that first day back, part of the craziness is that I'm walking down a high school hallway and I haven't thought of this place. And like, oh, yeah, during music time, we don't actually go to the music room. My friends and I sit in this little office and we play games on this computer, right? Like, I'd forgotten that. I'd forgotten that we had these little. You know, there's all this nuance, there's all this remembering. But again, as I said, like, you know, I just remember feeling really free and like, wow, I'm gonna waltz through everything in life. And what's odd to me now is that I don't think until later did I have the thought, am I here permanently or not? Right? Like, it feels like it should have happened sooner than I'm like, am I here forever or am I going to go back and forth? Because initially when it happened, I was like, wow, I just meditated my way to 1990 and you know, can I go anywhere? Can I go to. Can I go anywhere? In my timeline, you know, I remember thinking about that stuff, but mainly I was just savoring the feeling of like being, you know, I remember thinking unhooked in time. I was there, I was fully there. It wasn't like I was aware that I was remembering nothing. Like that I was 100% there, but I was not attached. I wasn't compelled by any of the narratives. You know, someone can be a jerk to you and you're like, what do I care? You know what I mean? Like, I don't care what you think about me. You know what I mean? You're a little kid. And I remember feeling like the power of more confidence, right? The, like, I remember feeling like, wow, you know, girls are into me, the guys are into me. You know, everyone sort of wants to be around me. A, because of the sympathy, but B, just because, like, I'm free. And that really made me wonder, am I free because I'm in high school and don't care about high school as a 30 year old, or am I free because this isn't my timeline and like some part of me is just not wired in. So, you know, there's a lot of little instances that come out in my memory. You know, band class, lunch with friends, realizing all the insane things we did. Like for a while we were doing this role playing game in the library during lunch and you know, I had to Pass. Cause I didn't remember what my character was. I didn't remember. You know, there's a lot of little moments, um, when I've told this story. What I kind of flash forward to is. Is starting to think about, like, okay, how do I leave a trace for this? So the friend of mine named Gordon, the guy who was in the backseat of the car who got hit with a seatbelt, he was still my friend. Like, we. We're lifelong friends, and he was my friend. Then we were in the accident, and to this day, we're really close. He's like a. And during the time in 2006 where this happened, he was either living. He was certainly living in New York at the time, and there was off and again on again that he was living with us, but he was around, and I knew that. And so at some point, I couldn't contain myself. I was like, I wanted to share this with somebody so bad, but I couldn't share it with my little brother because he was a little kid. And I couldn't share with my parents because they would think I was damaged. So I had a couple really close friends, but the obvious one was this guy Gordon, because, I don't know, he was with me in the future. So at some point during. In between class time or we're just hanging out, I say to him, you know, I don't tell him the exact truth. I basically lie and say, gordon, I had this crazy dream. And I say to him, I had this dream, and in the dream, it's the far future, and you and I live together, and we live in New York, and all these things have happened. And I tell him all the things that are, in my experience, true about the future. Right? We live in New York. I tell him about 911 that you're working this. I was studying with a Tibetan Buddha, you know, everything that I could think to share. And I just sort of like, I just somehow wanted him to know, right? I did not fully say. Maybe I did. You know, I might have said something like, yeah. And then I had this weird. You know, in my dream, I woke up and I was back here in the accident. I might have said something like that. But I remember that whatever I did, I didn't fully tell him that I'd traveled back in time from that moment. Right. I don't know why, but maybe it was just too weird. But I remember wanting to leave some kind of trace, you know what I mean? And I probably should have done something better, like carved my name onto a tree or invested In Apple, right? But I started, like, at some point, I started thinking, like, well, can I go back again? Am I, you know, living? There was such a trip. It was such a trip to be with my family, and I love my family. And it was just so weird that at some point I went back to where I started, which was like, can I leave? You know, and if I do leave, you know, can I come back to this? Felt like I probably could. So I started with just telling Gordon, my buddy. And then at some point after that, I don't remember why exactly, but I remember having, like, a panic moment where, like, I've been here for weeks. Like, am I stuck here? You know what I mean? Like, am I gonna just live my life like Merlin? You know what I mean? Reversed in time, living backward, you know, Like, I'll live forever now like this. You know, maybe that would be okay. But I was still attached to my old life, you know, in 2006. So at some point, and I don't remember all of this, but I remember having a panic moment. Like, can I just go back and forth, or am I stuck? And in that moment of panic, I thought about it, and I tried to visualize my, like, where I was when I left. And I tried to picture myself, you know, sitting on that cushion on my brother's bed in the apartment back in Queens in 2006. And I did that. I did that. I was at school at the time, and I visualized it. And sure enough, that, you know, vision or whatever had this weird quality. Like, it was ringing. It had that same quality. Like, that Departure place was similarly altered or just bizarre. So I, in an impulse, stepped into it, and my body kind of does this weird lurch again, and I'm like, shudder. And I am back in 2006 in my brother's bedroom. Initially, I'm relieved because, like I said, I entered this period of, like, panic, and I don't even know why, but I am back in. And I am like, oh, my God. And I'm, like, touching the bed, touching the wall. Is this a dream? You know, like, whatever. What is this? So, initially, huge relief. I did not look at the clock before I sat down. As a result, I didn't look at the clock when I got back up again from that bed. But my sense perception is that no time. I mean, I. You know, if time passed, it wasn't very long. It was still in the afternoon of the same day. It was still sunny out. I can't tell you how much time actually passed when I've Told the story to people. I've said no time past, but I'm not positive that there was no. I don't know, I don't know. But it wasn't a substantial period of time. I was seemingly back, and it may have been an instant, and I was hugely relieved. And I got up and I walked around the apartment and I was just like, you know, swearing, probably. You know, it's like whatever, you know, that. You know, it's like getting the wind knocked out of you. Nothing like that had happened to me. I'd had, you know, surreal experiences, I'll say spiritual experiences, but nothing so reality moving where, you know, you're doing something like this. I could not seem to go back at the time. I don't know if it was until that day or later on. But at some point I tried to go back and couldn't. I tried to picture certain times and just do it, and it wouldn't work. I tried to picture that initial memory again and see if it would ring or hum or whatever like it did. And it didn't. And, you know, I'll say I became pretty obsessed eventually around like that. I. I started, you know, later, you know, probably right away. But up until the present day, I think a lot about time and theories of time. And so I became obsessed with these things. Like I said, I'm a regular practitioner. I practice every day. And part of me. As you settled into other states, you start thinking, is this how I did it? Is that how I did it? For a long time, there was nothing substantial that would show me that meditation is what did this, other than as a fluke years later. Within the recent years, I've had dreams that seemingly talk about this and tell me things about this that I've had to ponder and wonder. But that's more recently. At the time, in 2006, I was just in shock. And like I said, I basically was with my friend Gordon all the time and my brother Sean. And so eventually I told them. I think I told my brother first because I couldn't contain it. You know, I just needed to tell somebody who could hold it. And, you know, he asked me some obvious things, and one of them was like, michael, why didn't you leave more evidence? I was like, I. Because I panicked. You know what I mean? I didn't think about it. But when I went to Gordon, I remember saying to him, before I told him the full story, I was like, do you remember any times after the accident where I came up to you and told you about this dream? I had, and I basically told him, asked him if he remembered me telling him what I remember telling him in that experience. Right. Do you remember a time when I was talking about the future and you and I lived forward in Queens? We were living in Queens, so it would be a weird thing to say. And so I said that. And he basically was like, boy, I don't know. But, you know, he used to say a lot of weird stuff, Michael. You know, we were weird kids, so maybe we said all sorts of crazy things, but he couldn't distinguish it. And there was no confirmation there. There was no sense that he could point to. And I was disappointed, but because he's my good friend, I told him the whole story. So nothing at that time gave me any confirmation. I was frustrated, and it sort of just became, for a while, this weird story in a closet. And if I met interesting people, I might share it under the right circumstances, but I didn't share it with everybody. And again, there was sort of this dissatisfaction because I could not, you know, I can't prove to anybody that that happened and that it was, you know, people, oh, it's just a dream. Oh, you just had a weird waking vision. The brain is crazy. And, you know, and maybe all that's true, but my subjective experience is what it is. And no one can convince. I don't. On some level, I didn't need anybody to confuse, but I wanted someone to share how crazy this was. And I just never had it for a long time. The thing that comes closest to a confirmation came a couple Years later, probably 2009. So years later, the person who would become my wife, my then girlfriend, I am taking her home to visit my parents for the very first time. And, you know, this is an important meeting. I know that we're serious, et cetera, et cetera. And we're in the house, and it's like the second or third day that she is just staying. And, you know, I lived in New York at the time. I think she lived in Chicago at the time, my girlfriend. And we were back on Bainbridge island visiting my parents for a couple for like a weekend. So we're there, and at some point I am back in my bedroom that was now like a guest room or like my mom's office or something. This totally different place. But I'm listening downstairs, I can hear my mom talking to my girlfriend. And I'm just. I'm not really paying full attention to it, but I hear her wheeling out this story that my mom loves to tell. My mom has this Story that she's told forever. Since before the accident, I think the original accident. And it basically is like that mom has this thing where she's like, oh, when Michael was young, he was a really sweet little boy. He was a little angel. And then at some point after the accident, Michael became a jerk. And my mom could not say this strongly enough. She's like. It's like he was brain damaged, right? He just became a different person. Now. That's not my experience, and that's not the experience of my brothers or others around me. My. There. I think a more. What feels more true to me is that I got older, that I became an adolescent, and I became more difficult. And my mom didn't like me arguing with her. You know what I mean? And she sort of blamed the accident. She sort of used that as a moment to justify that I wasn't her little boy anymore. You know what I mean? Something like that. And I'd heard this for years before. I'd heard mom around the edges say, well, you know, after the accident, Michael just kind of became a jerk, and he wasn't that sweet little boy anymore. Something like this. And so I hear her starting to tell this story, and I'm kind of rolling my eyes a little bit, like, oh, mom, here's Mom. She's gotta get this story out. This narrative is important to her. But this time when she's telling it. When I overhear her telling it to my wife, she's telling it a little bit different. She's not just saying generically, michael, change. After the accident, she's getting specific. And I hear her starting to tell the story of the day, of the morning after the accident. And she basically says to my girlfriend, oh, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the next morning, and Michael came down from his bedroom, he ripped his bandages off. And in a mean voice, he said, mom, from now on, everything's gonna be a lot different. And she used that as proof that I had changed, that all of a sudden I was a different person. But when she said those words, it sent a chill, because I remember saying that. I remember saying that from the perspective of my travel through time. And so that I froze in my tracks because I had never heard her repeat that ever before. And now she's telling the story of something that happened that I have a memory for. Not from the original time, but from going back in time through this projected experience. So that was really chilling to me. But it's the. It's the only thing I can point to for some Mild anecdotal confirmation. It's not scientific. It's not going to hold up in a laboratory. But for me, it was like, wow. Wow. Since then, I've explored a lot of crazy avenues and I've tried to find people's accounts of. You know, there are other accounts of people who seemingly go back, but nothing as intense or as long. And frankly, even, you know, if a doctor says, oh, someone went back and relived a traumatic memory, I mean, maybe that's what was happening. But. But usually I think they mean, like, metaphor. I mean, this was just. Nothing leaves me satisfied. I would be content that I dreamt this, right? But it just doesn't add up for me. It doesn't seem like, you know, I've had crazy dream. You know, I'm a lucid dreamer. In the meditation where you train to lucid dream, I'm definitely in that category, but. But this was not that. This was something else. Now, very recently, I was in the grocery store and I was singing this song to my. I was singing this old Elvis Costello song. And I don't know, you know, I was singing it under my breath. My wife and kids were in the car. This is like a week or two ago. And I'm in this grocery store, you know, Now I live back on Bainbridge island, which is where I lived in high school. When I first had the dream in 2006, I lived in New York. Now I work in Seattle. I moved back to where I grew up, basically. And so I'm in this grocery store on the island. I'm picking up something for a party we're going to, and I'm singing this song. And as I sing this Elvis Costello song that I knew from way back when, I start having this memory of that same grocery store before it was gentrified back in, like, the olden days. I don't know. When I'm singing this song and I start seeing this memory of being in that store and singing that song again. It's like a chant, right? But it's this Elvis Costello song. It's one of my favorite songs. And. And the memory sort of shimmers. The memory sort of vibrates. And that sense of a memory that's sort of like crystal clear but vibrating or something. I don't know how to describe that, but I have not had that experience. So clearly since that experience, right? And I'm in the grocery store and I have it, and, you know, some part of me immediately is like, I should go through. I should do it, right? And once Upon a time I might have. But, you know, I'm not thinking about this every day these days. I have two kids I'm raising, and part of me was, like, a little scared and think, like, you know, if I do this, like, what happens? Will I jump back to that memory? And then will I be able to jump just like the last time, back to this exact moment? Or will my body collapse on the floor? You know what I mean? Like, will I pass out? Is this astral projection where my body will just crumple, and then what happens to my kids and my wife in the car? You know what I mean? Like, I sort of. I don't feel clarity about doing it, so I don't do it. But it shakes me and I go back, you know, I pay for whatever the thing is, and I go back in the car and I tell my wife immediately, like, you're not going to believe what happened. Because to me, that was a really distinct thing. It doesn't sound like a very good story, but that memory pattern felt so distinct that I was. I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. So, you know, I am a professional meditation teacher and minister, and I know there's a line that people, you know, there's certain things that are too much to be believed, right? Like, they just can't take it in. It's changed me. It's changed what I think is possible. It opened up my worldview. One of the things that really sticks with me is, is that sense of social and emotional freedom I had. You know, there's a religion. There's a sociologist of religion named Mircea Eliade, and he was Romanian, and he basically argued that the Western materialist concept of time is something that is essentially psychologically inherited from the Hebrew tradition, right? In the Hebrew tradition, the past is a time of paradise where we were connected to God in the garden, right? Mythologically, the future is going to be a time when the Messiah returns, and great, we'll be with God again. But the present is a time of exile, where we are stranded, waiting in between one thing and the next. And so Ricci Elioti argued that that sort of sense of being stranded in time and time as being exile speaks to me. And I think part of what that experience did was sort of unhook me emotionally, and, you know, I could just waltz through. I wasn't invested, you know what I mean? And I think on some level, that has carried with me even, like, I don't feel like I'm entirely in this timeline anymore, you know what I mean? Like it's sort of, I don't know, I think in a weird way it detached me from something. And I think I don't, I don't know if I would have named that moment. But part of me still doesn't get caught up in the way I used to around social, you know, like, I don't really care. I don't know. It's weird, but I feel like something about my psychological perception of time has shifted. And that's left me to think that what Jung and a lot of the quantum physicists say is true. That time, the way we conceive it, is a psychological projection. And if that's true, then a lot of other things are psychological projections. And that if that projection is withdrawn, reality becomes a really different place. And I think that's what we are. The fullness of that is what we're experiencing when we practice meditation, when we, when we distill our thoughts and develop compassion for others, you know, so, yeah, I mean, I think it's folded into my wider journey as a spiritual person and it's empowered it in some way and it's continues to impact it, I think probably forever.
- [59:37]
Jack Wagner
Okay, thank you to Michael for sharing his experience. I think no matter how you look at this one, it's such a completely mind boggling story. When I first spoke to Michael, I was struck by the amount of time he spent in the past. Whether you believe he actually time traveled or was having some kind of intense memory recall or something else entirely, he was experiencing all of it in real time. And so much of that was just the monotony of day to day life. During the interview we talked in a lot more detail about the time he spent being a teenager again. And it turns out a lot of it was just experiencing hours of sitting in bed, going to class, listening to the teacher. Just the unremarkable things that consume our lives that we don't normally associate with time travel and also the type of thing most of us don't even remember. In fact, when Michael talked about trying to leave proof with his friend, it hit me that I barely remember anything at all from that time in my life. If one of my friends came to me right now with a similar question, I would be confident completely useless. I thought this story was so interesting. Thank you once again to Michael and also please reach out if this ever happens again to you. This episode was called from now on and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Schaeffer Theo Krantz, Haley Pearson and Nikki Cate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five star review and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you can become a patron@patreon.com Otherworld Our social media isotherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odysee. Leah Rhys Dennis, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor and Hilary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odysee app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained, you can send us your stories@storiesotherworldpod.com.
- [62:28]
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