I was feeling really really good dancing having fun and we ran out of cocaine so we pulled our money and I asked around and somebody said this guy's selling it and he was really kind of Cy scrawny guy in a beige leisure suit we started snorting it it never occurred to me that wasn't cocaine it just wasn't on my radar that it wasn't cocaine and then bam it was like popey had punched me and I was just shooting us straight up in the air and then I realized I was rocketing out from Manhattan and I
had this huge sense of relief that I was leaving behind not just that nightclub and that kind of whatever bad situation had been happening there but that whole nonsense of being Louisa I was just so done with that effort [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm Louisa peek I grew up in Seattle my dad was a law professor my mom sort of an art historian my dad was really really atheist for him Academia and freedom from the church were the same thing so it was a very academic home and it was a very um performance oriented home we
didn't get love just for being us we had to do well perform make them proud so I was very academic from the get-go did really well in school and I found I liked philosophy classes and that's where I really got into proving there was no God so you know we'd read someone like dayart and he'd do the whole I think therefore I am I have an idea of God therefore and I would just tear that argument that's I just remember getting so into that paper to just like I'm going to prove he's wrong there's no
God that's ridiculous I liked modernism because I felt in modernism people were finally waking up from the dream of this Anglican church and finally like facing the darkness facing this indifferent cold Universe which was really all there was and no point to life I had to change schools many times so by the time I got put in this private high school at 10th grade they all had friends already and I did I just made some what I call camouflage friends friends so that you're not sitting all by yourself finally senior year I discovered beer and
I just started finding out where parties were and going and getting wasted and all of a sudden people liked me and I liked me better when I was drunk so I just kind of play-acted this role as if I knew what I was doing and convinc them that that's who I was but inside I was like a very nervous actress just like what should I do now how am I acting how do I how am I coming off how's my performance and um it was such a weird way to live but it was the only
thing I knew I graduated in 1982 got to New York and there was Studio 54 There Was You know I was just sort of trying to live the dream except for I kept having panic attacks so I would live the dream by staying drunk enough that I wouldn't have panic attacks at a certain point I asked a friend to come down to Manhattan and bring a lot of coke and so he was a dealer uh back in college and he came down brought a lot of coke we did a lot of Coke in the apartment
and then we took a cab and went to The Peppermint Lounge I was feeling really really good dancing having fun and we ran out of cocaine you know my life I was always trying to be cool enough feel cool enough that I would feel okay the next party you're going to finally feel cool no this next drink you're going to finally feel okay no you just need this this is to of pot and that's the moment when everything is going to change for you and I felt I was just right on the cusp of that
I was almost at the point where I would be cool and feel feel okay and now we're out of coke and so we pulled our money and I asked around and somebody said this guy selling it so we bought a gram from him and he's like it's good stuff good stuff and he was really kind of Cy uh scrawny guy in a beige leisure suit we started snorting it and my friend who was a dealer was like this this is doing nothing it's worthless it's it's you know and he kind of just threw down his
bill like we've been had and I thought well it numbed our gums it's it's maybe it's just bad cocaine and if I do the whole pile um I'll get a little bit high so I just snorted and snorted the whole pile and uh then I uh shouted in his ear I'm going to go to the bathroom and even on the way to the bathroom I started seeing this interference of um when you're going to faint there's like these little red Speckles and I was kind of like wao this must be a cocaine side effect um
that's so cool and I went uh waited in the line in the bathroom it got more and more and more by the time I was in the stall I could only see directly in front of me and I realized I couldn't read any of the graffiti any of it and also couldn't get a breath of air it felt like all the air was breathed up in that bathroom so I got out of the bathroom and breathing and I'm not getting anything and I really did not know I was dying I was upset that there was
no air and I was upset about this side effect but it never occurred to me that wasn't cocaine it just wasn't on my radar that it wasn't cocaine um later after I got sober and made friends in Alcoholics Anonymous some of them were drug dealers and several have told me we used to cut cocaine with lidocaine back in the 80s cuz the lidocaine was so much cheaper but sounds like you got sold pure lidocaine and Lidocaine poisoning it's an anesthetic usually used topically but people sometimes commit suicide by just taking a tube of Lidocaine that's
5% lidocaine and swallowing it right mine was puree and uh so my heart was starting to slow down and getting down to like I don't know 30 beats a minute something like that so no matter how much I breathed my brain was not getting oxygen I found my date and I told him there's no air in here there's no air and he's he's like it's fine and I was angry like why aren't you noticing that there's no air he took me to the bar and the bartender gave me a glass of water and I really
did not want a glass of water I wanted air but I just took a sip and then bam I thought that I had collapsed and hit my chin on the bar cuz I SW I felt this blow but no it was like popey had punched me and I was just shooting us straight up in the air and there was so much relief to because I was no longer oxygen star D I don't remember breathing or anything but I had a sense of like now there's all the air I could want and then I realized I
was rocketing out from Manhattan and I had this huge sense of relief that I was leaving behind not just that nightclub and that kind of whatever bad situation had been happening there but that whole nonsense of being Louisa I was just so done with that effort it was a perfect Clear Blue Sky and I sensed that the ocean was under me perfect blue going all the way to the Horizon I made a decision that I was going to Arch back and do a a back bend dive and then I could see the ocean blow me
and uh I was diving toward it and I thought isn't it like con cuz I'm like 300 ft up isn't that like concrete when you hit it you know but I didn't have any fear I was just like we'll see and so then I dove straight down and then I could see it was way up to the surface but the surface was gorgeous from down there and the bubbles were going up by me and it was all so gorgeous and I said man I hope I wonder if I can make it to the surface okay
and then there I'm there then I looked and I saw a Mesa that came up and on top of it was this old weather worn house and I thought that house has to do with me and I got to get there next thing I know I've reached the house but I'm at the door sill and I'm I'm like this high above it I was just a subjective point of awareness and I didn't have a body and I crossed the threshold once I was over the threshold then I knew this is the house of my ancestors
and they have all come this way through this house and I could begin to feel my ancestors around me grandparents and I had a sense of a generation beyond that and the strongest presence was my grandfather who had died before I was born they were all really excited to meet me really happy that I was crossing over ready to greet me but I couldn't see them I could just feel them I didn't even hardly know who any of my ancestors were in my regular life and you know people who are interested in genealogy orever I
was like who cares about that but here I was just honored to be following in their footsteps and with this feeling that we go through this house and I had a sense of we and it was all of the people who are connected to me I knew there was supposed to be an armchair in this room that faced a big picture window that looked out at the ocean and it wasn't there and I just had a sense of like that that's no fair where where is the chair and I thought how am I going to
see The View it's beautiful I want to see it as soon as I thought I want to see it something grabbed me by the sternum sternum that I didn't have but a sense of you know where your heart is whether you have a body or not it grabbed me by there he pulled me across the floor and and we went up to the window sill and over the window sill when we went over the window S I just felt like wo what is happening but I was very delighted by it right and then next thing
I know the ocean's in front of me the sun is directly in front of me it's setting and it's making a path that comes toward me and I zoom over that path and I'm flying and I'm feeling all this Forward Motion forward motion and it feels delicious but then I had a skeptical thought and it was like wait a second perfect ideal surroundings unbelievable Beauty fabulous sensation Am I Dreaming people dream they're flying is is this real and then a voice answered me and it was very kind of deep and clear and powerful and it
said more real than anything back there and I Knew by back there it meant in the Louisa business and I also had not expected anyone to answer me you wonder something you certainly don't expect an answer but I also had to kind of think in answer to that voice that's true this is more real than anything back there so Sun started getting bigger and bigger as I got closer and I began to even be able to see some of the patterns on the sun and I thought uh am I going to vaporize you know I'm
I'm getting so close but again with no fear and then in instead of vaporizing I of hid it pass through this filament and I was in the light and it was everywhere and I felt that it was so brilliant that all you could see was light but I could also feel that it was in me somehow it was light from the inside as well as from the outside warmth from the inside and and then I began to understand that it was love I felt this sense of finally finally because all my life had been jump
for the cookie try try try and maybe you'll get a little Crum of love you know and here I was just completely engulfed by love completely saturated with love and then I began to become aware that I was being cradled like an infant by some being and in my mind's eye the being was sitting on the ground sort of in the way that Buddha figures sit but holding me and just pouring you are so loved you are so loved and the thing that was most is that it was you are so loved not like here's
the love show we do for everybody when they come into the light more like I know you better than you even know yourself and I adore you and that feeling I just I had everything I could possibly want and I just wanted to stay there forever I can't say how much time passed whether it was a minute or what but then the parent just said you can't stay you're not done and went to Blackness I was baffled I was absolutely baffled what do you mean I can't stay what do you mean I'm not done so
I screamed no with like everything in me no and I had to thought like if you remember being a little kid and thinking like I'm going to just throw the biggest tantrum and I'm going to just like show them that they can't do this that's how I felt I wanted to kick I remember thinking I wish I could kick them in The Shins but then it just went to BL instantly so I had no recourse in the Blackness I also had a sense of dropping and when I felt the dropping that's the first time I
felt scared I it to drop felt frightening and I didn't know how far I would was going to drop or what was going to happen I began to see these little stick figures and they were like chalk drawings on the background one of the stick figures started getting closer and somehow his circular head filled in like a dinner plate and he's going how many fingers what is your name then I gradually realized he's talking to me and then I remembered the world when I came back to reality all the sick figures turned into all the
people in the crowd around us right and he was the bartender of course and I had just come alive again it was the hugest bummer I remembered I am back in the meat puppet everything is manual now everything is back to this stupid memory I have of how things worked it was more like you got to be kidding I'm not going back to this song and dance no way so I was lying on the ground and there were people all around as many as I could see uh wall of people and I I I didn't
quite understand why and I it was a whole lot of water around me I thought that they had like in the movies or whatever thrown water on me to revive me but was actually sweat had just poured out of me when I came animate again the bartender had been doing CPR on me the whole time it was about 3 minutes I had from the time I took the Sip flipped backward but into a grandma seizure and I had banged all around having a grandma seizure and then cardiac arrest and so the bartender started the CPR
he kept up with the CPR not CPR is not working CPR is not working and I turned gray and my date says that it was so long to him that it wasn't working and I turned so gray and looked like a corpse and nothing like myself that he had actually just told the bartender you know she's gone just just cover her up give it up she's gone but he didn't and oh it's so hard to say I never thanked him so we all went up the stairs together and I'm like why are we going up
the stairs okay let's go up the stairs and we sat outside and it was in grwi village and we were sitting on this bench with our backs to the wall and bartender came over to talk to first to my buddy or my date and and then he turned to me and he said you know you were gone a long time we kind of thought you weren't coming back and in my 22-year-old mind I put together that he'd been doing CPR with his mouth on my mouth and this is what I thought ew he's like got
to be 30 that's so gross I'm so embarrassed so I'm just going to go like yeah hey yeah that's great that's what I did and I was smoking my cigarettes and it's just horrifying to me many years later I I just realized he had given me everything that I have all the experience I've had my son the I was only 22 I mean I hadn't done anything and he gave me my life back and I was too busy being cool to acknowledge what had happened all of a sudden I put together that the ambulance was
for me and that it meant I was going to go to the hospital and that meant my parents were going to find out that I had done cocaine and had a cardiac arrest and that was not something my parents would approve of so I just said to my date please please don't make me go to the hospital please please so he just grabbed my hand and we just ran to the nearest taxi right there and we jumped in and I remember him saying drive just drive in the morning I remember having bruises all over back
of my head was all lumpy but most of all my sternum from the CPR and I talked to my roommate about what had happened and she said so do you think that the parent thing that you said was holding you was that like God and I knew it was but I just couldn't go there I thought if this is true and if I went somewhere and that was pretty close to God filling me with love and I remember people people saying God is love and stuff like that that means the church people are right and
that means I'll have to go to church and I just kind of had this image of of me going to church holding the Bible talking with other kind of dowy goody goody girls when like Studio 54 and Columbus AV and all these things are right there and I've got my high heels and my minis skirts no I'm going this way I'm not going to turn into some good goody goody Christian girl and that was kind of the decision I was making because I could not undo who I was it really had more to do with
this is me this is what I believe and if I acknowledge this is real I have to start over from scratch and I'm just not going to do that so I told some people about the story as if it were a very cool hallucination and then I just kind of put it away and tried not to think about it but none of the memories were fading if I thought about it I could go back to flying over the ocean and him saying more real than anything back there and I could feel it again but I
just wanted it to be a hallucination so bad that I thought okay so for some reason I overdosed on coke and I had a cardiac arrest so maybe as my brain got starved for oxygen it kind of went down to one little signal at the very end and that little spark of a signal seemed really big it was just love is what's the last spark to go out in the brain and I must have experienced that so it was just a brain phenomenon and I can put this aside and go on living the way I've
been living years passed with nothing weird happening and the story was just kind of a story my alcoholism has gotten worse and worse and worse I left a teaching job because it got in the way of my writing but it actually got in the way of my drinking and I bought a log cabin way out in unincorporated thirston County and I got a job as a barista and I would party with all the iies to kids though I was 34 and they were in their 20s but I had not grown up I had no new
uh game plan for my life so I went to a party I got so drunk they took my keys away and put me in a stranger's house but I found my keys I found my car and I drove home completely shitfaced I came to a place where the road narrowed to go over a railroad tracks for me it was just like kind of a sea of I don't know how many reflective signs I just thought you know I don't care what happens 80 M an hour and I just shoot for the middle and I made
it through and I got to my log house I got out of the car and I remember uh kind of holding myself up with the door and it was a starry night and I just thought man and I am such a badass when I drive drunk and right after I had that thought something seemed to shoot from the stars and through me and out my feet like lightning and it was an knowing and it said this is the last time I can help you and you do know right from wrong so back words drunk messed
up me goes what was that and I felt a scent of guilt cuz I did know what I had done was wrong at some level and I did know I knew better and I tried to shake it off but I it had it had had this intoning of Truth somewhere in my core and that resonance just wouldn't stop so I still went drinking I still went and I just kept hearing you do know right from wrong and that's the last time I would help you someone's been helping me all this time which I didn't know
but I sort of knew so it took me another month uh before I went to my first AA meeting but I did go and that was uh January 29th 1995 and I have not had a drink since I am a completely different person now than I was at the time when I had the nde which is 40 years ago so part of it is aging but I actually think if I had aged with no Direction I'd be a bar Haag somewhere and then a lot of it is AA because I learned a lot from listening
to the old-timers and so on and just being in meetings but there's also this component of knowing knowing not thinking that God is real [Music] I think it's important not to segregate God as separate from anything else God is a Nexus of intelligence and love which are actually the same thing but it's in everything so in the trees that made this chair was God God is the energy that is everywhere it is not useful to personify God as some dude in the sky and it is not useful to say well God's the boss and then
these angels are at a low they're all the same but I feel like my angel is a conduit for God and then I can also be a conduit for God and that I can always come back to as a touchstone that my job my job is to leave each person I encounter a little happier than they were and I take this in everything I do I work one-on-one with people in my work but I always take the time to talk to them and ask and get somehow a laughter a human moment in our work and
people that I pass on the street sometimes I'm in the airport and I'll get overwhelmed and I'll just say to him I can't smile at everybody but I feel like each person that I exchange that little spark with if it's positive if there's a moment of seeing we're both human and I'm saying good wishes toward you I'm doing my job it's hard being human it's hard being incarnated in the meat puppet and burping stuff back and forth to each other and signals it's it's just difficult I also feel there are dark energies in the world
and that hate ferments more hate and Free Will is a big deal we can destroy the world by choosing hate we do know right from wrong and we I could have smashed my brains open on a PL tree or a telephone pole that's what they was saying you're free to do that to destroy yourself if you want but you do know right from wrong and you you can move forward same thing as a whole human race we have these horrible hate makes hate conflicts going on in the world but we deeper down know that love
is what we're going for so God wants us to find the path to [Music] love I think that Martin Luther King nailed it when he said hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that and our survival-based lyic system tells us no hit them harder than they hit you you know but Jesus was trying to say you know give them your coat too it's trying to say turn it around and find a way to love and that's what Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all these people who've changed the world did it
by seeing no you don't hit back you love back so that the other person sees they were wrong to hit you [Music] [Music]
