okay I Am David Paris I am a covid survivor about 2020 when the pandemic really hit New York City I was at the center of it I was hearing around the world people were dying and I wasn't worried I was 45 or 46 I was relatively healthy and I thought things would be fine then one day I got sick and then the sickness lasted a week and then I fell asleep in front of my fridge in the morning and I woke up barely breathing and I thought to myself I might have a problem I actually
was trying to get back to bed but was too weak and uh got phone calls from my family that said you need to go to the hospital I made my way there and the moment I walked in to the hospital I went from barely able to breathing to couldn't breathe at all within seconds they put an oxygen tank on me and I realized oh I actually haven't been breathing in a long time didn't know that until I actually felt what oxygen was put me in a wheelchair and I was like okay maybe maybe this is
pretty bad I spent the next 5 days probably hallucinating pretty that if you've heard the co stories from people in the hospital the hallucinations were out of control I kept having to kick hundreds of people out of my room I found out later nobody was in my room I know it's like it was a wild wild wild time and uh then I remember the moment where they said okay we're going to have to put you under there they were intubating people not knowing at the time 20% of the people survived the last words were my
sister telling me you know only 20% of people come out of this and I'm like ah I'll be fine don't worry about it and I had that kind of attitude cuz I thought at the time you know only the older people die and then that's when things shifted and the next day they went from intubation like a medical coma into an ECMO machine EO machine is what they use when you have heart surgery so uh it does the work of your heart and does the work of your lungs and while you're unconscious usually they do
it for heart surgery you know anywhere from 12 24 hours I was on it for a month and that first few days my heart stopped four times and and I actually remember the moments I was dying some like how can you remember this I remember cuz when I did wake up a month later the clarity of the moment of facing a spirit I was in a theater and in the theater was this mythological figure and they said sorry you're dying and they pointed to the exit sign to me I I thought I was ready to
go I I was married I had a good life a good good career excellent friends amazing experiences some people stay alive to like take care of their kids or you know to stay with their family I wasn't that connected to anyone but when it was time to when you actually face death and you're like oh that's it I just thought the face to face with nothingness is ter just teror panics it in and I was like actually no I take back everything I said I I refuse to let that go and I was like no
I'm not ready to die please and then the figure showed me this curvature of a of a half moon and in that just apologize and saying sorry you're going you're done this is it and that was what activated something inside of me that I'll never ever forget whether it happened in the moment I was dying or whether it happened afterwards I I can't say but I'll will never forget saying no I refuse to die there's just there's no way I'm going to let it go and the spirit told me well okay we're going to let
you try to struggle to live but if you fight to live you have to fight more than you've ever had in your life for longer than ever you had in your life of course you're about to die you'll say yes you'll do whatever and then I spent I can't say it's seem like years months years something like that in an open sea just fighting for watching boats to go by when you're out there and you want to live you just do it you hear those stories about people who like stay out in the ocean for
like a day or two that's what it felt like except it was like a month and I fought to survive and in this world the situation you could see slowly after that first week I got better and better but it wasn't really clear until the third or fourth week um in ination that I would live but when I woke up I remember the clear dreams where I didn't want to come back to this world because when you're in that other world you feel so at peace and so connected to something higher you don't this world
around is like wait what is this and it's strange and it's hard I remember being in a library the spirit said you really want to go back to that world I did and I did and I woke up and when I woke up they said they every day people would come in crying say oh my God I can't believe you lived because so many this was NYU this was New York you know one in every 200 people died and there were they had like big trucks of like refrigerator trucks to dead people and so mine
they consider a semi- miracle it was interesting I I I felt the other side and when I came back it was nice everybody was giving me lots of energy but I also when you taste a bit of the other side it's not easy to come back here and that's I'd say even this is now three over three years three and a half years maybe four now and I can tell you I still struggle with uh living in this world I've always had a panic of dying I remember the first time I saw Star Wars and
that whole planet was obliterated and it occurred to me oh my God that just might be it like this and from that moment forward that thought brought Panic on me and I don't know if Panic is fear I guess it is fear but it's not something that's conscious it's not like oh I'm experiencing fear it's I will do whatever it takes to live I don't fear death anymore I do know that there's a spirit world that exists and it's it's it's a bit strange because I spent my whole life fearing death and when I woke
up I was like no there's there's something else and I so I don't have that doubt I didn't grow up religious but what I did know is when I was in recovery I started associating my fear of death that it wasn't n death that was fear of because you don't know one way or another when you wake up from a coma your whole body atrophies you can't move it's really strange so like you wiggle for the first few weeks and then every month afterwards you slowly get your body back and I remember I remember feeling
the Panic of falling and my therapist was telling me that that Terror you feel about death is actually Panic just your life going when I realized that the feelings I was having was really not about death it was it was just about the natural part of the body reacting off of losing itself as opposed to some closure that I was worried about once I was able to distinguish those two things yeah my fear went away I don't didn't have fear anymore in the last three years I do go back and forth I studied all the
different religions and death and what they thought of it and came to the conclusion there you don't you're not going to know one way or another before my near-death experience I wasn't able to see it that way it just all I experienced was panic and Terror but when I was actually it was actually when I was falling and experiencing the same panic and I realized oh it's my physical body or the memories that I'm fearing of losing and it's not so clear that's going to happen so it it just became an unnecessary experience one of
my biggest triggers is in life is like I'm always thinking what should happen and the moment I think of my shoulds in the world I could tell my brain starts getting rattled in anxiety and I Lose Myself And when I breathe and let the sh go and articulate the things I do love that was the gift and for me having a near to death experience was Incredible Gift spent my 20s and 30s seeking to be an acrobatic All-Star in my coma one of my biggest memories changed everything was once I was getting better I was
dancing in all of the biggest conventions in the world I was an Allstar and I remember being offered something finally to to satisfy this desire to be an Allstar remember the spirit told me you just need to drive to the bottom of the world take this diamond to take it to the top and you'll finally achieve everything you wanted but you'll have to run some people over on the way and I was like no problem and I immediately got into the car and I drove to B World took the diamond I took it to the
top of the world and I remember it was like one last chance are you sure you want to do this and there wasn't anything that hesitated because my whole life all I wanted was Glory all I wanted was that that that admiration of people looking over me fawning over me and in that moment a spirit took a sword and sliced me in half and at the same time in the other hand showed me an infinite amount of Worlds and and realities to the left and I remember being humbled by the wackiness of oh my god
I've been leading my last 25 30 years maybe longer trying to achieve this level of Happiness whereas when you see the depth of what the spirit showed me it's absurd it's like why would you do that I remember waking up with Clarity from this to say I will never seek that level of experience of life again the what I want from life is people for the last 25 years I pushed everybody away only if they helped me achieve my dreams to be an acrobatic old star which I somewhat achieved but I still wanted more it's
funny I got a parade when I came home people were so happy that uh I came back and you know hundreds of Maybe not maybe 100 people or something like that outside my house were so excited to see me and I got like this different type of love I didn't have to to perform to be loved it was love for me and I was able to distinguish finally that my worth as a person and who I am is what I want to live and be cherished by not by my accomplishments the last three years have
been completely different and I could never live the life I live LED before and so for me near death was a a it was a connection to Spirit but it was also the best thing that ever happened to me because it it it shed the do drums and my life became very different I wrote 18 books the last three years this is a CO story this one I wrote in bed because people didn't know what it was like in 2020 and I said I have to get something out immediately I never left bed I wrote
it from my from my cell phone and it was an oral history from everybody involved and shared all the dreams I shared with them I got it illustrated by this was the spirit that that told me yeah you're going to die and I think it's pretty good most of curriculum books and they're self-published so it's easy to write but it's because I'm a I was a social emotional teacher at the largest Middle School in Brooklyn and I thought to myself I have all this knowledge I'm going to write it and I did that I wrote
everything I wanted to do and when you have Near Death I think everybody will say you don't go back to the life you lived you you push yourself to create the connection between people do the art that you've always wanted to do for me was contribution contribution was the most essential thing to do now I do want to do America's Got Talent one more time but I do it in a different mode I'm not tied into the happiness but I am tied into what moves what what makes me happy what makes the people around me
happy life is meant to be connecting and and and spread um spread love and experience love and that's not the way I lived it's the way I mostly live now as much as I can and uh but it's not the way I lived and so during the coma was really reconciling the disharmony inside of my soul that needed to be balanced when I woke up I cried probably a hundred times more I ever had in my life and people the nurses kept telling me to stop crying and I had to like hide and cry while
not looking at them I'd cry for hours every single day for months and I don't have that anymore but I remember the grief is still there it's still there now part of the grief I sometimes think is returning to the world and then sometimes I think the grief is the actual experience of near death to this day I struggle when things are stressful or not not working or hopeless because I've been in a hopeful world I've been in place of connection and then when you live in disconnection and disharmony it's it's very difficult it's like
why it's like this seems not real whereas like that other thing was way better and there's grief behind that I can feel things way different now than I did when you first experienced this you don't want to live it's odd like you're like why why live in this world of Frau and and it doesn't make sense to be honest to live here when you have EXP experience the other the other side and it's not easy to keep going I constantly get people telling me thank you for living thank you for staying but it's not easy
because this is a tough world and when you know the other side you're like this this this is crazy what we're doing staring lost at the Skylight we all falling when thees in our staring lost up at the Skylight We All Fall in when the love in our right staring
