Guided by the twelve-step program and angels

Dr. Rajiv Parti was encouraged when he learned the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, had been inspired by a near-death experience in 1934. While being treated at a clinic for his addiction, the clinic’s director asked Wilson “if he would like to dedicate himself to Jesus to see if such an act would rid him of his alcoholism. “Depressed and filled with despair, Wilson began to weep. I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let him show himself! He shouted.

The effect was instant, electric, Wilson says. Suddenly my room blazed with an incredibly white Light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. Then came the blazing thought, ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the Light and the ecstasy subsided. As I became quieter a great peace stole over me, and I became acutely conscious of a presence, which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’

“Wilson never drank again. He told Dr. Bob Smith, an alcoholic in Akron, Ohio, about his experience, and the doctor also quit drinking and began to pursue a ‘spiritual remedy’ for his own alcoholism. The two men, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, became the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Their twelve-step program, Parti notes, was originally based on these affirmations:

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

“When I look at the twelve steps, I can’t help but think that Wilson’s encounter with the Light was similar to my own with the Being of Light. I also couldn’t help but think that he too was asked to devise a means of spiritual healing much like the one I was being asked to devise. Following my surgery, I realized my addiction to painkillers was abating. Soon I took less than what was prescribed and only as needed for my pelvic pain.

“I felt compelled to meditate after returning home from the hospital, and now I was doing it daily, sometime several times a day. One day when I was meditating, a deep sadness came over me, caused by some of the same concerns that had driven me into depression. I began to think about the money I had lost in the stock market in 1999 and wondered why I had put all of my capital at risk just to try to make more when what I had already made was more than I ever expected. I began to wonder why I had gotten prostate cancer. Had God given it to me? Was this karmic payback for something I had done? Would I ever feel good about myself again?

“Then both Michael and Raphael appeared. In their pleasant way, they calmed me down; telling me that ‘going off the track’ during meditation was common. When you meditate, you are supposed to let thoughts arise, but detach from them, let them float downstream in the river of life, said Raphael.

Yes, that’s what’s supposed to happen, agreed Michael. But that doesn’t happen to most people, at least not in the beginning.

Thoughts have thorns, just like cactus, said Raphael. They stick to you and they hurt. Sometimes they don’t detach as quickly as you would like, and they hurt even when they do.

“There were easy ways to conquer these depressing thoughts, said Michael. It was all a matter of changing perspective. To do that, he suggested I develop two opposing personalities, Poor Rajiv and Lucky Rajiv. Poor Rajiv is the man who is stressed out because he lost money in the stock market and can’t accept that the losses were caused by his greed. Then he got cancer, and with it came multiple surgeries with complications. Now he blames God for his problems instead of considering his own karma. Lucky Rajiv is that guy who has a chance to follow his dharma, his purpose, and doesn’t have a huge mortgage. His life is easier, and he can explore a new meaning of life, maybe even change the world.

The angels told me to ponder the question during meditation: Which one do I want to be today? Lucky Rajiv or Poor Rajiv? I realized I could change the story around the circumstances of my life. As Raphael said: You cannot prevent pain, but suffering is an option. All I had to do was change the perspective, and I didn’t have to suffer.

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Dr. Parti's recovery and new healing commitment

“I felt as though I was driving very fast through a dense white fog on a road I could not see. The drive was horrifying and exhilarating at the same time, horrifying because I feared I might slam into something and be killed on the roadside, yet exhilarating because I knew I was not driving at all but accelerating through the universe. In retrospect I realize it made no difference how I felt. I had no control over my voyage, not from the beginning when I left my body in the operating room until now as I zoomed toward the next destination. The universe had taken over and was in complete control of all aspects of my life.

Is that how it’s always been? I wondered as I zoomed through the fog. Has the universe always controlled my life and I just thought I was in charge? As I wondered what was coming next, I noticed that I seemed to decelerate, and as I did, the fog became brighter and my eyes began to hurt. I closed my eyes to shield them from the brightness, and when I opened them, I was in the recovery room. I looked above me and saw the anesthesiologist. He told me about the difficulty they had experienced during my surgery and said that ‘certain events’ had presented challenges for the surgeons and proved ‘at times very alarming.’

I saw you during my surgery, I said.

Really, he said, his smile fading.

Yes. I left my body and watched you from the ceiling.

Of course, he said, breezing through my medical file as though there was some clue in there as to why I left my body.

No really. I watched as you administered the anesthetic and even heard you tell a joke.

“Oh really. And what was the joke? I recalled it, the ribald joke that made the surgeon and operating room staff laugh. The anesthesiologist blushed when I told the joke. I must not have given you enough anesthesia, he said, looking hard at the file to avoid my gaze.

“No, you gave me plenty, I answered, recounting the amount of medication I had seen him administer. I told him about going to India where I saw my mother and sister plan their evening meal and how my late father rescued me on the cusp of hell. I started to tell him more, but he glanced at his watched and flipped the file closed. Very interesting, he said. I’ll come back later to hear about it.

“I never saw him again. The surgeon and a resident also visited, but neither stayed long once I began to talk about my near-death experience. Despite my dissatisfaction with the way my colleagues treated me, I knew I was a victim of karma. You sow what you reap.

“More attuned to this subject were the nurses. They spend quality time with the patients and hear experiences like these in ‘real time,’ as one nurse said. It is not uncommon for patients to awaken from their surgical slumber and tell nurses of encounters with departed loved ones or mysterious Beings of Light. When this happens, said one nurse, a simple check of their medical records usually reveals a cardiac arrest or some other brush with death while on the operating table.

When I saw Arpana I told her as rapidly as I could about my experience. She appeared nervous when I told her of leaving my body and frightened when I described my close encounter with hell. Yet she nearly laughed when she heard of my happiness at seeing my father because our relationships had not been cordial. And the past life experience got but a nod, because past lives are a pillar of the Hindu religion. But when I told her about being greeted by the two Christian saints, Michael and Raphael, she stopped me in my tracks.

Wait a minute, Arpana said. You are Hindu. What happened to the fifty thousand gods and goddesses in our religion? Why weren’t they there? What does all this mean? She said in a loud whisper.

It means big changes for us, I said. Raphael says I must now talk to patients about healing their spirit.

Arpana laughed. You don’t like to talk to patients. That’s why you became an anesthesiologist.

I smiled, knowing she was right. The angels told me that I now need to practice a new form of medicine, something they call consciousness-based healing.

What’s that? Arpana asked patiently. I don’t know, I admitted. I think it’s medicine that heals the spirit, a kinder form of medicine that helps the patient heal without using too many drug. Perhaps it has to do with integrating yoga or meditation or other modalities that elevate consciousness. I have to quit being an anesthesiologist and search for the path. It is out there. I just need to find it.

“Several nights later, before going to bed, I confessed to Arpana that I had entrapped our family in a world of materialism. I am the problem; I know that. I am the one who was told by the Being of Light I must change.

Okay, Arpana said. If they give us good guidance, I will believe that what you experienced was not a dream but a reality.

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Listening to angels and the Being of Light

Dr. Rajiv Parti writes: “The past life dissolved around me, and I was back in the tunnel again. Ahead was a bright Light and next to me, once again, was my father. He led me down the tunnel toward the Light, and we looked at it together, its intensity oddly soothing. My father let go of my hand, and I kept moving forward. As I did so, two angelic forms emerged into the tunnel. They exuded a powerful vigor—a charisma and energy that made them seem magnetic. I approached them with awe and they hovered above me and smiled with joy and confidence. Telepathically they introduced themselves as Michael and Raphael, archangels of the Bible.

“Because I had studied the Bible, I was not afraid of these angels. What I could tell from this encounter, however, was that they were powerful spiritual beings and unmistakably angels. It was only with later research I learned that Saint Michael is the protector of people and the angel who opens doors and Saint Raphael is the angel of healers.

“The Light was still far away, and as we approached it, we went higher and then into a meadow that was green like emerald stones and peppered with rosebushes, the blooms as red as wine. The sweet smell of grass and roses made me almost delirious with pleasure. A crystal-clear stream of water cut through the meadow, and the air off the distant mountains was blowing gently. Around me in the sky was the deep and gentle sound of ‘om,’ as though it were being chanted by nature itself.

“I closed my eyes and went with my senses, now fully engaged. I was in a state of Shanti, pure peace, bliss, and love. The angels laughed at me. Some people who come here are so thrilled they would leave their body if they weren’t out of it already, communicated Michael. They feel something they have never felt before and find something inside they didn’t know exists, communicated Raphael. It takes them to a new place in themselves.

“I must have appeared nervous at being in this formless, nameless environment because Michael put his hand on my shoulder as a means of comfort and communicated. The higher you go up in the spiritual realms, the more formless it becomes.

Raphael touched my other shoulder, communicating further information. That’s right. You become surrounded by a powerful entity of energy, of pure love and intelligence, and this pure love is the base reality, the underlying fabric, of everything in the universe. It is the source of all creation, the creative force of the universe.

Yes, communicated Michael, this pure love is the source of all that makes the universe. It is contained in everything imaginable yet somehow ignored by so many. Enlightenment comes when a person realizes that love is everywhere and is the only thing that matters.

“Ahead was a silver-blue form that showed no sign of being male or female. This form was large and exuded a familiarity; perhaps it was a member of my family whom I deeply loved. I knew the Being of Light very well, yet at the same time it was new to me. Still, when it took me into its space and engulfed me with its blue Light, I was wrapped in its total knowledge.

“There was a lot to absorb, a lot to think about. But the Being of Light left me no time to do either. It began gently whispering in my ear. And as the words started, pure love—I don’t know what else to call it—pervaded everything, as if my five earthly senses were soaked in omniscient, all-powerful love. The more I became wrapped up with the Being of Light, the more distinct became the chant of ‘om.’ I was at once communicating with and in the Being of Light. I am one with the universe, I thought.

Everything will be all right for you, said the Being of Light, telling me that soon I would return to my earthly life. But there would be a change, said the Being. Now you will become a healer of the soul.

First came the cancer, said the Being, and along with that came increasing depression, often caused by an overwhelming fear of disability and death. Chronic pain followed the cancer surgery, and with it the disability and exhaustion that come from jolts of pain when one moves in the wrong way or from the nagging aches that keep one from ever being totally comfortable or sleeping soundly.

You have experienced these, said the Being. These are diseases that tax the soul. Since you know them well, you will show other people how to fight these diseases spiritually.

“In order to do this, the Being of Light revealed my new path. I would no longer be an anesthesiologist. Instead I would become a practitioner of spiritual medicine, a practitioner of consciousness-based healing. Instead of putting people to sleep, I would now focus on waking them up.

“Suddenly, I was in a clinic, one with no walls and bright natural light streaming through the windows. On the floor in various poses were patients performing yoga, and in another part of the clinic were a few rows of people sitting in cross-legged meditation poses, each looking blissful as he or she concentrated on gaining spiritual information from the universe.

This is consciousness-based healing, said the Being of Light. This is what you must learn and teach. This is your new life. You have been humbled by pain, so you have the knowledge. Finding the knowledge inside you is the best way to learn.

“I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude for this love that surrounded me. In retrospect, I think the Being of Light might have been Jesus, but I have no way of truly knowing. I do know that it was a cosmic consciousness of some kind, one that grants us understanding and institutes positive human change. I felt revived, reborn, a man with new plan, a man with a mission! I was going to change the world and my relationship to everything in it!

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Dr. Parti's NDE reviews his life and past lives

Rajiv Parti writes: “From the corner of my eye I could see my second chance coming. It came from the last person I ever expected to see. It was my father! I recognized him immediately although he looked at least thirty years younger than when he died. His hair was jet black and he looked sleek and handsome in his official uniform as a Director of Civil Aviation.

“Putting his arm around me, he tried to comfort me. That act of empathy was frightening. I realized that I couldn’t remember one occasion when my father had ever comforted me as a child. Like many Indian fathers of that generation and the generation before, the only time he or my grandfather touched me was to commit an act of punishment.

“Standing with my father in the afterlife, I had a flashback of that event in which I relived not only how I felt being beaten but how my father felt as well. I could intuit his anger and disappointment like it was my own. It was a confusing and painful perspective, because I could see everything that happened to me on that long ago day yet, at the same time, experience all that he felt and saw in those superheated moments.

In his near-death experience, Parti was surprised to see hope in the eyes of his father. “He looked like a person who was enlightened by love. A person who had gazed into the eyes of God. Universal knowledge granted us in the afterlife allowed me to see and feel him in this new way.

“I could see his father with him, younger and stronger than I remembered as a child. He too had the look of God in his eyes. He did not frown at my father’s revelation about the family tradition of anger. He confirmed it with a nod, and for a moment I could feel the pain in his life too. I knew that behind him was a chain of ancestors, each of who had been filled with anger by their fathers. I also felt their presence somewhere around me, exuding understanding and empathy for the generation behind them who had given them the disease of anger.

“But now I felt empathy from my father. Don’t pass the anger to your sons, he communicated. Without moving his lips, he spoke a truth I will never forget, words clearly from the divine realm: My son, if you are truthful to your own self, the God, the Divine, the Universe, will take care of you. Around me was a gauntlet of ancestors welcoming me to walk among them to a different realm. I was pulled into the tunnel, moved forward by their welcoming hands.

“My life review then took a pleasant turn. Childhood events that were steeped in kindness, innocence, and fun appeared. The simple moments are most important, came a telepathic message from God. The simple moments are the most important because there are no simple moments. All moments are memory and lessons. All moments build the person you are.

“I could see the Light at the end of the tunnel. It was bright and powerful like a thousand suns, yet as pleasant and welcoming as a beacon guiding me to nirvana. But my forward motion slowed, then stopped, and then suddenly I realized I was no longer moving forward but backward, backward to another place and time, one where past life events would explain some of my own life’s dilemmas.

“The darkness engulfed me, and out of it came visions of a life I didn’t at first recognize but that turned out to be one of my past lives. In the first vision, I was sitting in a royal courtyard in medieval India. Feeling the power of my position as a prince of the region. The scene before me was vivid. The grass was bright green, well kept and lined with tall statues of Indian gods and goddesses. In front of those statues were farmers, the farmers who tilled my land and raised crops that made me wealthy.

“I was angry, but I don’t know why. From my princely perspective, I rose up from my throne and walked toward the farmers, swinging a whip as I moved through the cool grass. I had no fear of retribution or self-defense from the farmers because on either side of me were several loyal soldiers who advanced with me and also swung whips.

“I could not remember why I was torturing those who worked so hard for me. I do know that I took great joy in slashing the backs of the farmers after they had fallen to the ground. And I do know that my wrist began to hurt terribly after I administered these beatings, so much so that I couldn’t use that hand again without experiencing extreme pain.

“As I watched my shameful performance, I flashed forward to my current life where I had experienced a torn ligament in my right wrist. The pain had become so severe that I had taken pain pills to cope with daily life. Why had I recalled the pain in my wrist now? Was it because I had been so mean to these people, workers who had looked to me for guidance and wisdom yet received the business end of a switch?

“I was horrible to you, I said as I watched the beating play out before me. Forgive me for what I was doing. One by one the farmers came to me and accepted my apology, some even touching me to convey human kinship, something they never would have done had they thought I wasn’t sincere. When they put their hands on me, I felt a jolt like electricity that rattled me to my very bones. I am sure it was this steady stream of loving jolts that healed the ligament tear in my right wrist that had caused me pain for years.

“As I faded from the life of the medieval prince, many more of my lives flashed before me the way pictures in a picture book would if one were to flip through it very quickly.

“Suddenly the rapid review of lives stopped, and another specific life review began. I found myself sitting at the doorway of a large mud building, gazing out at a green field of plants. I was in a mountain town in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, and before me was a field of poppies, their green pods sitting atop the stems like Popsicles on a stick. I had inherited this field of poppies from my late father and was now one of the top opium producers in the region. I was making a tremendous amount of money from the sale of these poppies, but my financial status was no longer the focus of my life. Rather, I had fallen in love with my own product. I was an opium addict.

“In the beginning, it was heavenly to inhale the opium. It put my brain into a state of pleasure that made me feel as though I was floating in warm ocean water, detached from my surroundings. Infused with this evil bliss, I watched the poppy field change color with the sunset and the day pass into night. But the joy of using opium turned to hell when I decided I wanted more. I found myself ‘testing’ the crop all day, every day, telling my employees that I had to test the drug for purity before it went to market.

“I knew they knew the truth and also knew that they would eventually move me to a hut and supply product to me that would keep me high all day while stealing the farm’s proceeds. I knew all this, but I didn’t care.

“I have been given this addiction again, I thought, as I watched my nineteenth-century self smoke the highly addictive opiates. My addiction to modern narcotics was no different from that of the addiction I experienced more than a century earlier. What was different was that I was experiencing it in a past life. What does that mean? I asked myself. It means you now know that your challenges from the past are presented to you again, said the universal voice that was with me telepathically. You have another life and another chance to cure your addictions.

“I realized that in my current life, I was echoing behavior from my previous lives, behaving with a lack of love to those less fortunate, misusing my material wealth and social status, and numbing myself to real life with painkillers and antidepressants. As this insight pulsed through me, another wave of awareness washed over me: if I were still alive after this surgery, I would have to break these patterns and live differently. Perhaps I would be given another chance to conquer my failings.”

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

Dr. Rajiv Parti’s experience “on the rim of hell”

“I had come to Bakersfield from Louisiana to work as a temporary doctor. My assignment was to work one month as an anesthesiologist in the San Joaquin Community Hospital. After years on the East Coast, it was a pleasure to be in the warmth of the San Joaquin Valley.

“My wife, Arpana, opened a dental office of her own, and I soon changed hospitals to take a position as an anesthesiologist at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, an institution dedicated to delicate heart surgeries. Within a few years, I was named head of anesthesiology. After that I joined several of my anesthesiology colleagues in starting a pain clinic where those with chronic pain could receive treatment in an outpatient setting. Soon we were on a road to prosperity that we could hardly believe. We traded our small house for a larger one and then an extremely large house as we built a family of two boys, Raghav and Argun, and a girl, Ambika.

My goal was bigger everything—house, cars, art collection, bank accounts. At one point in my twenty-five years at the heart hospital, I took a nine-month sabbatical in order to trade stock. I made millions of dollars, sometimes a million dollars in one day, but I lost it as fast as I made it because I thought I could read the direction of the stock market with greater accuracy than the pros. That didn’t happen, and I finally gave up this folly and returned to the hospital.

“Feeling like a master of the universe is easy in the world of modern medicine. In my specialty alone, heart surgery anesthesia, the medical world had made so many advances in technology and techniques that we could literally bring patients back from the dead by doing everything from unclogging an artery with a balloon to replacing it or even dropping in a transplanted heart.

“Reality popped that myth for me. In 2008 a routine physical revealed a significant increase in my PSA count, an indication that I had prostate cancer. A biopsy of the prostate gland told me how bad it was. I have good news and bad news for you, said my urologist and good friend who called one evening while my wife and I sat drinking tea in the backyard by the golf course our house overlooked. You have prostate cancer. But it’s in its early stages, and you can have it taken out and you’ll be cured.

Surgery, however, left Parti incontinent and impotent. Scar tissue kept forming, requiring four more operations and resulted in the need for Parti to wear an adult diaper. An artificial sphincter was implanted to solve this problem, but it became infected. Arpana drove Parti to the hospital for emergency surgery.

“As we sped toward Los Angeles, all I could think about were the negatives in my life, a long list that could be organized as: Unlucky, Cancer Patient, Infection Prone, Addict, Depressive, Materialistic, Demanding, Unloving, Egotist, Angry.

“Denial of my own illness made me angry with myself. My anger spread to other events in my life. First, I became angry with God for giving me prostate cancer. What possible good is it to give me such a horrible disease? Why did I deserve something like this?

“And then there were the pain pills. As my wife drove me to the hospital that night, I finally admitted to myself that I had crossed the threshold of addiction. And there was more. The combination of the cancer and my pill addiction had depressed me. To cope with that condition, I had started taking antidepressants. Soon I felt as if they were as necessary to my well being as the pain pills. Why had I lost control of my life?

At the hospital Parti dozed until, prepped for surgery, he got the bad news from his surgeon. Your ultrasound shows us that you’re full of infection. You have a severe infection we can’t touch with antibiotics when you are full of pus. We need to clean it out.

“Is the surgery over? I was zooming straight up as if in an elevator, I was sure of it. It was that feeling in the pit of the stomach when you are rocketing to the fiftieth floor in a skyscraper, and the mild G-forces tug steadily at your insides. Or is that really what I felt? My consciousness began to lift, and instead of seeing the doctor standing over me, I could see the ceiling approaching, its glossy surface getting slowly closer.

“There was a horrible smell in the room, and when I rolled over and looked down, I could see that it was emanating from my abdomen, where one of the surgeons had made several incisions and was now sucking out the infection with a bulb syringe. The odor of the pus was overwhelming and repellent. As the surgeon and a nurse diligently sucked tubes of pus into the bulb syringe and squirted them into a stainless-steel bowl, another nurse applied eucalyptus oil over their masks to take the edge off the odor.

“They seemed to have forgotten to dab the scented oil on the anesthesiologist’s mask because he appeared to be having a problem with the powerful stench. Apparently, the odoriferous conditions reminded him of an off-color joke, which he told as he struggled with the odor. I won’t repeat the joke, but everyone in the operating theater laughed, including me.

“From my position above, I could see the hard work presented by my case and knew as an anesthesiologist that one of the roles of my specialty was to provide humor during difficult surgery. I made it a point to remember the joke for use in my own repertoire, which came in handy later in proving the case for my out-of-body presence in the operating room.

“It had been several minutes since I had separated from my body, and in retrospect I can say that I was enjoying the new perspective. Below, I could see my face in a state of total repose as though nothing was going on with the body it represented. Is that really me, or is this really me? I wondered. I felt a pressure in my chest and became alarmed. It felt as though my heart was skipping beats. I wanted to tell them how I would handle this emergency, but I was not able to communicate with them.

Seeing is believing, and you can’t see the spiritual, one of my professors had said. Clearly there was now an ironic truth in what the professor said. Seeing is believing, and I was now in my spirit body seeing my physical body. I had ignored patients who told me they had left their body during surgery. Would the members of my own profession now ignore me? Or, worse, would they mock me behind my back?

“Suddenly something happened. All I knew was that an extraordinary shift had taken place in my perspective. It was as though my field of vision became much wider and my consciousness expanded well beyond whatever it had been before, as though all of my senses had the ability to see, and what they saw could easily be different scenes.

“It was frightening to have so much input, and some of the visions appearing on the edge of my sight—I call it mind sight—were unpleasant.

“My mind sight gravitated to the most pleasant of the images, a vivid and simple vision of my mother and sister sitting on a sofa in Delhi. They were relaxed and talking, with that unspoken love between mother and daughter so clear. The scene was vivid and detailed. My sister was wearing blue jeans and a red sweater and my mother a green sari and sweater.

“My spirit body moved into the lounge with them, and my spirit ears listened to what they had to say. Mom, I said. She did not hear me. Mom! I said, reaching for her and then through her. Mom, I’m here! My hands passed through her as if she was made of clouds. Or am I the one made of clouds? I wondered.

“I was mesmerized by what I saw and heard, and so focused on my mother and sister that the sudden sound of instruments clanking in the operating room frightened me. I turned my head to the left, the direction from which the sounds were coming, and I could see into the operating theater. To the right were my mother and sister in New Delhi and to the left, my body on a surgical table in Los Angeles.

“Seven thousand miles separated the two scenes, yet both were there in front of me. I was a mechanistic medical doctor, and this event represented new physical laws that I didn’t understand.

How can I be hovering? Where is my brain, and what am I seeing with? Am I breathing? Why can I hear? Will ever get back into my body, or am I destined to roam through eternity, a spirit without a body? Will I see others out there like me?

“My world turned dark, and for a moment I was relieved. I’m returning to my body, I thought. But that relief was replaced by fear as I saw a distant lightning storm off to my right, one that seemed to draw me in very quickly and soon became loud with the sound of thunder and . . . screams and moans of pain and anguish as wildfire moved over burned souls that withered from the intense heat. I was made to lie on a bed of nails, where their needle sharpness tortured my flesh.

“I was drawn in as if on a moving sidewalk that took me to the edge of this flaming canyon. Smoke filled my nostrils and with it the sickening odor of burning flesh. I was on the rim of hell. I tried to turn away and couldn’t. I tried to move back but couldn’t. Every time I took a step back, an unseen force moved me forward, leaving me with a horrific view of the most agonizing place one could ever imagine.

“Naraka, I thought, the Hindu word for hell. Although I hadn’t lived in India for decades, it was the Hindi word that imprinted itself in my mind as I tried to move away from the conflagration before me. Another name came to mind, Yama, the Hindu god of death. He will be arriving soon, I thought. And then my soul will be burned with those other burning souls.

“What is my karma? In my religion, karma means that your future life will be determined by your behavior in this life and previous lives. You have clearly not been making love. I heard this message as though it were spoken in my ear. I looked around and could see no one at my sides. The message came to me telepathically, but it was so powerful God may well have spoken it.

“You have led a materialistic and selfish life. I knew what I heard was true, and I felt ashamed. Over the years, I had lost empathy for my patients. I did my work like a machine, not a human being. I saw my patients as profit centers, people who could give me the wealth and prestige I wanted in exchange for my services as an anesthesiologist.

“My thought turned to my family and how I was sometimes verbally abusive. This was particularly true of the way I treated our son Raghav. Of our three children, Raghav was the one for whom I had the greatest expectations. As the eldest, he was expected to achieve the most in life. You are not working hard enough, I shouted angrily when his grades reflected a lack of understanding of the subject I loved. On these occasions, I was ashamed, but pretended my ire was righteous.

“Now, on the rim of hell, I felt my chance to heal the past was gone. My God, give me another chance, I prayed. Please give me another chance.”

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).

The "frozen man" remembers his surgery!

Anesthesiologist Rajiv Parti writes: “By all indications, the patient on the operating table was dead. His heart was stopped, and his body drained of blood. There was no respirator turned on to keep him breathing and no oxygen being fed to his lungs. The EKG machine that would ordinarily beep in time with his heartbeat was silent because there was nothing to beat in time with. All of his organs had stopped functioning, and his brain revealed no waves on the EEG machine.

“In fact, the patient wasn’t dead, not really. He was in suspended animation through a surgical procedure known as hypothermic cardio-pulmonary bypass and circulatory arrest, a procedure that replaces the patient’s blood with a cool fluid that lowers body temperature to approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit and stops all bodily functions. Just like death, but not quite.

“The purpose of the surgery in his case was to repair a tear in the aorta, the main artery leading from his heart. This is a dangerous surgery, but there was little choice. Without it, his weakened aorta would eventually burst and kill him instantly. If the surgery didn’t kill him, he would have a normal life span. He was almost damned if he did, but definitely damned if he didn’t.

“I was the anesthesiologist on the case. It was my job to administer anesthesia to the patient while the surgeons opened his chest to expose the heart. Then, after the surgery, when warm blood was returned to his body, my role was to keep the patient safely and deeply anesthetized as we brought him back to life. In between, when the cooling solution filled the circulatory system and the patient’s vital signs appeared as flat lines on the monitors, I had little to do but observe the deft hands of the surgeons as they performed their delicate and complex patchwork on this king of all arteries. They had only sixty minutes to work their magic.

“When we brought this patient to the operating room, he was already heavily sedated. I spoke to him momentarily when we transferred him to the operating table, but he didn’t have much interest in conversation. The sedation and the realization of what was about to happen had sunk in and he remained silent, wondering, I am sure, if I was the last person he would ever see. I didn’t give him much time to think about it. I injected propofol and other anesthetic drugs into the saline tube placed in an arm vein and watched him drop off to sleep. After placing an endotracheal tube into his windpipe, I watched carefully as the patient’s chest was opened and his heart prepped for the surgery. Then a surgical specialist administered the cold perfusion fluid, and another carefully drained his blood into an oxygenator that would keep it primed with oxygen and clot free. Before long the patient was in suspended animation, and the surgery had begun.

“Over the years I have worked on several of these operations, and they always amaze me. The genius of the research that led to this surgery, the deep concentration of the skilled surgeons—to me this procedure took medicine to a new frontier.

“From my place at the head of the table, I looked down at the patient. He seemed as dead as any dead patient I have ever seen; yet he would make it back to life and be among the living for many years.

“For the next hour, I watched the chief surgeon work with speed and urgency, racing against the clock to repair the damaged artery. The room was filled with controlled tension and fear, and not just because of the delicate nature of the operation. A good percentage of patients undergoing this surgery do not survive—not because of the surgery, which is almost always successful, but because the human body is not always capable of returning from the dead. The surgery was successful but the patient died is not considered the punch line of a joke with this operation; rather, it is a reality that we in the operating room are all too aware of.

“When the surgery was completed, we moved with great efficiency to bring the patient back to life. As the blood was transfused back into his body, I administered more anesthesia so he wouldn’t awaken too quickly. Then the ice was unpacked from around his head so his brain could warm up. As the cold blood was slowly warmed, platelets were added to enhance clotting, and then cardioversion paddles were activated on either side of his heart in hopes of jolting it to a start.

“This was the point at which we all held our breath. If the cardioversion jolts did not restore the heartbeat, the patient would die. On the third try, this patient’s heart began to thump regularly. After several minutes observing the heartbeat, a closure surgeon stepped forward and sewed his chest together. Then this resurrected patient was taken to the intensive care unit (ICU) for recovery.

“I was one of the first to greet him when he awoke. He was groggy, but he knew where he was and he was glad to be there. I think he didn’t expect to be alive. When he saw me, he cracked a smile.

I was watching you guys in the operating room, he said.

“What he said clearly didn’t register, and I must have look puzzled.

I said, I was watching you guys in the operating room, he repeated. I was out of my body, floating around by the ceiling.

How can that be true? I asked myself. He was frozen!

Yeah, he said. I saw you just standing at the head of the table, I saw the surgeon sewing the patch on my artery. And then he went on to describe the number of surgeons in the operating theater, where they were positioned, the actions of the nurses, and other events that made it clear he had been observing events from somewhere above us.

“I could hardly believe what he was saying. Over the course of my twenty-five-year career, I had attended to hundreds of patients, many of whose hearts were barely beating when they arrived in the operating room. There had been patients who claimed to see deceased friends during their cardiac arrest, or who saw lights at the end of tunnels, or who claimed to see people made of light, but I chalked that off to some kind of fantasy and referred them to the psychiatrist. As one of my medical schoolteachers had said: If you can’t touch it, hear it, or see it on a monitor, send it to psych.

“But what had happened to this man was different. He had accurately described the operating room I was working in with great clarity. He not only showed signs of being alive when his heart and brain were inert but also of being awake.

Your heart was stopped, I said to him. Your brain didn’t have any activity. You couldn’t have seen anything. Your head was packed in ice.

“The frozen man challenged me again by describing details in the operating room he hadn’t mentioned earlier—information about surgical tools and comments about things that took place well into the surgery.

“He was interested in talking more, but I stopped him and ordered a shot of Haldol, a strong antipsychotic drug. The stock market had just closed, and I wanted to see how my investments had done that day. I didn’t tell him that, of course. I told him a sort of truth, that I had other patients to see, and promised I would come back later to talk about his experience.

“The day after Christmas 2010, the curious memory of the frozen man came rushing back. At the age of fifty-three, I found myself lying in the recovery room of the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center talking to an anesthesiologist about my own near-death experience (NDE) that had just taken place during surgery.

“The problem was he didn’t believe me, or else he didn’t care. Like the frozen man whose NDE I had ignored myself, I now had ventured into a spiritual world and felt more alive than ever before. Not only had I completely left my body and brain behind and gone into another realm of consciousness, I had returned with an astonishing amount of wisdom that was readily available to me. I knew the other place I visited was completely real, and later it would prove itself again.

“Yet as I tried to share all of this information with my colleague, I could tell he wasn’t the least bit interested. In fact, when he promised to return later so I could tell him the entire story, I knew that karma, the idea that you reap what you sow, had now taken place. Just as I had promised to return to the bedside of the frozen man and listen to his story, so too was my colleague making the same promise. And like me, he never returned.

“It has now become my life’s mission, my dharma, to bring the message of consciousness-based healing to the world, to heal diseases of the soul. I deliver that message to you now in this book. A dream of spiritual peace is a common one. I want to show you how to attain it."

Rajiv Parti, Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back (Atria Books, 2016).