Dead for 3 Hours, What I Learned will Change you, Jonathan Ashford

0:00 If you're supposed to hit certain milestones of suffering in your life, bigger milestones, the divorces, the breakups, the car wrecks, the cancer, these things, they're all serving a purpose where you're on schedule to experience them if you're still blind to what existence is. If you're blind to your parts in it. But I was also shown that you wake up at 21 and you understand that this isn't what we think it is and I choose to sit in that place of the entire truth versus my slice of truth.

0:33 You don't need those things to chip away the amnesia. You've done it yourself. That's your free will choice. Life changes when you wake up. So, yeah, suffering tends to dissipate. I've seen it happen over thousands of people now. Those who just choose to wake up, cancer disappears. Life changes. There's healing. There's bliss. So, the free will choice to wake up to what you are can literally change your life.

1:05 This is Beyond with Heather Tesch, where we examine near-death experiences and life itself, hopefully making this life a little better. Hello everybody. Welcome and welcome to my guest Jonathan Ashford. Hello Jonathan. Hello Heather. I'm so happy to talk to you again. You had this incredible awakening when you died of sepsis and during your near-death experience and since then you've really been trusted with so much wisdom and that's really what I would like to focus on today and and just to get to know some of the information that you now have. And for those of you that are listening, um Jonathan was on before and he shared his incredible near-death experience and his transformation. And so at the end of this video you can click on a box to get to that video, or you can find the link in the description. But, you could also stay right here because we're covering lots of new stuff today. Of all the things that you learned during your near-death experience, what would you say is the most life-changing information that you were given?

2:17 Mhm, it's all life-changing, but if I could say there was a piece that you could recognize that would probably break your mold a little bit. And it might be difficult for some to wrap their heads around this, but you could say reality is alive. Reality is something akin to an animal that must be fed. And you either recognize that you feed a version of reality with how you live your life, that it is not outside of you.

2:55 Or you realize that you sit in a space where you have fed no reality. And you get access to all of reality. So, it's our very own definitions, beliefs, and understanding, the things that we attach ourselves to, that dictate what we experience in reality. Because reality is alive, its sole interest is in creating more reality for you to experience. So, if you have a belief and you think you know, something is blue, it will create more blue things for you to experience.

3:32 Now, let's take that to an advanced level. If you view the world in a certain way, it creates the worlds that you experience through the definitions and beliefs you carry. If you walk around in a state where you wish things were fixed, it will give you more things to fix. Reality loves you so much that what you walk around with it looks at and says, "You like that. You're holding on to it. I will give you more.

4:00 Seems like you like that." versus sitting in a place of understanding, transcending duality, transcending material existence, and sitting in a space that says, "There's nothing to do here, change or fix." Because if I tempt any of that, I'm now feeding reality, which reality will continue to create things for me to do, change, and fix. So, I tell everybody the same thing, and everybody thinks I'm crazy when I tell them that this, but there's nothing to do here. There's nothing to change here, and there's nothing to fix here.

4:31 There's only to live consciously and recognize yourself when you do try to do, change, and fix. Because you're the one that's feeding the version of reality that you're existing in. So, it's mindful living. It's consciously living to recognize the part of you that is trying to feed that animal is the part of you that's feeding your own suffering. Nothing exists without your input. Which shows the importance of our thoughts, of our words, of our attitudes, and everything that we do. Yeah, it was shown to me all inputs.

5:09 It's what you hear. If you hear something on the news and give it permission to exist within you, you're feeding it. If you watch certain types of television shows or entertainment, you're giving it permission to exist, you're feeding it. It's your definitely your thoughts. It's the conversations you have. It's the feeling you have when you don't recognize yourself as a loving being. It's all things. You are surrounded by all these inputs, and it's your active conscious decision to say, "I don't need to feed these."

5:45 Or to blindly feed them and recognize you're in an existence that you don't like. I'm jotting something down because two areas I want to take that. One is I guess that really shows the importance of just stepping back from the news as you said or social media things that we often just waste our time doing and we think they're harmless, but they probably have quite a bit of power over us. >> Mhm. You An easy way to put it is you're a super being. You've never been a human and day in your life.

6:16 And you have the ability to create reality, co-create it with something who's just taking inputs from you and saying, "Okay, these are the inputs you're carrying today. I will create the reality that you're experiencing." When you recognize the power that you carry you can understand there's nothing to blame but where you're sitting in your understanding or lack thereof. So, if you're not living consciously you're living in a world that you probably don't like.

6:47 And the waking up process is opening to your eyes to the fact, "Well, if I sit in the space of love, something magically happens. The world changes in a way you won't understand how. You will only get to experience the feeling of that love versus the striving on the other side which allows reality to continue to develop and build itself for infinity till the day you die. Might be multiple lifetimes depending on what you're attached to.

7:17 So, it's more of waking up to the fact that you are actively playing this game. And the way to not experience the downside of the game is to choose not to play. You can't beat the game. You can choose not to play, which is to sit and observe the game. Not feed it. Not give it inputs to create something. Experience the fullness of things, but don't feed it. The other thing I jotted down was self-love, because that's very hard for a lot of people, but it's also very important, as you're saying as well. Yeah, it's a doorway, and I will just say for my American friends, we tend to be the group that has the hardest time with this. I speak to people all over the world, and the Americans are the worst at it.

8:05 We are just conditioned to constantly be reaching outside of ourselves for something. An outcome, uh an achievement, more money, something. We're always reaching for the next thing. We're never We're never at a place of contentment. And contentment is saying, "I'm okay. Everything is fine. I can love myself in this spot." We're always seeking to love ourselves in a different position, rather than just accepting where we are.

8:36 So, self-love is a super tool. It's a super weapon, in a way. It's a superpower that allows you to recognize you're just the thing feeding reality, but you are not reality. What else have you learned that would blow my mind? Perception. Um we carry an identification of what's good and bad. And I will tell you that it is each individual's identification of good and bad that is helping to build that reality.

9:14 On the other side, it's not that there's good or not that there's bad. There's awareness that everything here serves a purpose. Your flat tire today is serving a purpose. You will say, "I don't like flat tires." But it is serving a purpose. We just can't have the understanding of what the purpose is for. We live in a way where we engage our intellect and our intellect never makes it past 3 years old in understanding, so it can't understand what this existence is about.

9:46 But it's understanding that your perception, the things that are fed to you, if you define them in a certain way, not only will you continue to receive them, you will create your own suffering. But if you see everything as coming from the source of love, which holds no definition, then you can sit in the space to receive the fullness of why it's coming rather than what you dictate it to be. You are more powerful than you could ever imagine. Your own perception is creating the world that you're living in.

10:19 It's easier to understand that with a flat tire, but for a lot of people, of course, they're saying, "But it's much more than a flat tire, the suffering that I've I've had to endure." And they really have a hard time seeing any purpose in that. Yeah, there is purpose in the suffering. And I was shown that our scale of suffering is very different. There's no scale on the other side. But it is very different. We're pushed to a 10 on our scale of suffering of 0 to 10.

10:51 And we think we suffer greatly. But it's always in the name of waking you up to something more. There's always something in the suffering. The problem is when we identify that with the human, we've identified with the pain, the discomfort. We haven't identified with the immaterial or the divine nature of all things. We're in denial of it. We just want it to go away. But there isn't any such thing as pointless suffering here. All suffering serves a purpose, and I know that's hard to wrap your mind around when you're in the middle of it, because all you want is for it to end.

11:28 But you can use it as a trigger to love yourself. If you're suffering, love yourself. You're experiencing something that's trying to help you progress. If you witness suffering, love them and yourself. One, you for seeing it, but them for experiencing it because there's something in it. So, you could say you have an internal war within yourself waging every day, which is the intellect versus the heart. The intellect sees something it wants to fix, change, or stop, and the heart just recognize I just need to be loved for all people and all things, all places, no matter what the circumstance.

12:06 So, the pull between those two areas creates our own suffering, creates our own desire for change versus recognize there's a bigger hand at work. It's trying to wake you up to be love, not solve the problems. I'm not sure if I got this off of your website or I heard you in some of the research I was doing, but you said to have spiritual growth, we need to become willing to have our definitions dissolved so that we can experience what's actually true. Yeah.

12:37 Explain that a bit more. Yeah, you could say when the first thing I was shown there was the the nature of truth. It was shown to me as a circle. Truth is all possibilities, all things, all things we would say good and bad. Has no rating. It's just all all possibility. What we do is we take that circle and we cut it into pizza pies. We cut it into slices and we say, "Well, that's my truth. I'm the 11:00 slice."

13:08 And somebody else's truth is the 6:00 slice. But, they're partial truths. And those partial truths that we take as the truth, we develop our realities on. So, we look for the inputs that support our partial truths, but they are not the truth. So, we're living for the most part most of our lives in the name of the definitions that we carry which support the partial truth that we think is guiding us to something greater.

13:39 When you recognize the definition as only partial truth, you can release them all and experience the whole circle. You're not bound by the slice that you've defined. So we're just trying to get to the spot where we recognize our own language is one of the things that keeps us from greater understanding. It's using words. It's using intellect versus using the feeling of something occurring. We feel it and then we spend our lives defining it, trying to figure it out.

14:10 Just feel. That's a good explanation. Thank you. I'm not sure what kinds of things that you've been able to learn both during your near-death experience and and also from this wisdom that comes to you. Have you learned anything that would rewrite human history or concepts of how things work here on Earth? Yeah. You could say when when you wake up to what you are, what you really are and you transcend your ego, you understand that it's the very thing standing between you and truth.

14:50 You understand that everything here is connected on a scale that is beyond measure but very much visible. You see the dominoes, a trillion dominoes lined up to fall down and create this beautiful portrait of you. So you no longer see singular circumstance. You no longer see a war. You no longer see a person suffering. You see how everything connects on the scale of the planet.

15:22 So, again, there's nothing random here. There's never been anything random. We're experiencing exactly what we need to experience, moved by a bigger hand for purpose that the intellect will never understand. You can see glimpses of it. You can understand glimpses of it. But, to experience the greater part of it is to sit in the place where I hold no definition of this. Any definition that I hold is simply for my intellect, and I have now cut a piece out of truth and called it the truth.

15:58 So, it's just sitting in the place to know you're loved, you have nothing to worry about. You go on forever. This has not been your first existence, and most likely will not be your last. And it's just to sit in the place to go, "Wait a second, there's a hand in the room that's always propping me up, always helping me. Why haven't I known this?" Because you haven't felt it yet. The intellect and the ego have been in the way of the feeling. You're trying to define it and figure it out. When you release those things, you understand the world is not what we think it is.

16:31 Reality is not what we think it is. You get to see behind the curtain. And that's why you're here. So, what are a few things behind the curtain that would be interesting for us to know? Well, imagine this. You've reincarnated a number of times, and each time you try to wake up to more understanding, but you've lived plenty of incarnations where you've just forgot. The amnesia was too strong. So, call that my progression was on pause.

17:02 So, you can look at the people of the world, you can look at presidents and politicians and all these people, and I always make the joke, imagine being that deep into your spiritual progression where the only place you could wrap up your lessons was to become a politician or a president. How difficult would that be? So, it's understanding that nobody is who they think they are here. Nobody is a definition. We're just looking at the costumes that we're all wearing, and we're saying, "Well, that guy looks like a cowboy and does cowboy things."

17:38 And I would say, "Well, of course, he's wearing a cowboy costume, but that isn't who he is. That's who he is in this incarnation. That's who he is in his journey. That's who he needed to be to experience what he needed to experience. Do we know if he's waking up in this experience? No, you're not going to know. It's not your job to know. It's your job to look in the mirror and say, "Well, I recognize the costume that I'm wearing.

18:05 I can sit in this place and understand history isn't history. The past isn't the past, and the future will never be the future. It's all an experience that is being served up to us for our own progression, our own remembering. So, to judge anything is to judge it from that single pizza slice of truth, my truth, which we think is the truth, which makes the judgment null and void.

18:36 So, the challenge will always be to sit without definition, to sit without love, to sit beyond the ego, to recognize that you've never been the ego. It's simply been your costume. To strive, to thrive, to gain, to manage, to move or manipulate are all things that you're not here to do. Can you describe who we are to the best of your ability when we're not wearing our costume? You're infinite. You are all possibilities of you. You're all aspects of you now without realizing it. You think you're just you.

19:14 You're many. It's understanding that your natural state is as love and compassion. You're just in the state of love and compassion. There's nothing to define about it. It's more of a feeling. It's recognizing that everything you work through here is trying to get you to remember that. It's to become formless here within form so that you can remain formless on the other side and not have to come back here.

19:44 So, what are you? You're an aspect of God. You are love itself. You are an energy. You are a frequency. You are all things as well. And the divine joke is you forget and now you think you're Heather. So, who are you? You're infinite. You're beyond a description. You're beyond an identity. Can you recognize aspects of yourself while you're here? And the easiest one is love. We talked a little bit about our thoughts and our actions and even what we take in.

20:20 How important is gratitude? Gratitude is a superpower for sure. The issue is most people reach gratitude through the intellect or the ego. Um we look at the things that we define as a representation of me thriving. Right? Might be it the the car you love. It might be the trip you just took. And I'm grateful. I'm eternally grateful for these things that show me I'm gaining in life.

20:55 But true gratitude is being grateful for a fork. True gratitude is knowing you were a child once. You received your first pair of shoes. You've had shoes probably every day since and the only time you think of shoes is when to change them or buy a new pair. It's like when's the last time you thank your shoes for not having to walk across a parking lot barefoot? Or walk on dirt or stone. Gratitude is saying, "I just took a breath.

21:27 You're giving me another? Thank you. Oh, another? How many you're going to give me? I can tell you if you miss one, you're gone. Um so gratitude is being thankful for the things that we look past all day, every day. The kitchen table, the faucet, the water, the gas When's the last time you thank gas for being in your tank? Or the steering wheel? We have an infinite number of possibilities that ground us in gratitude to know, "Wait a second.

21:57 God isn't sitting on a throne somewhere. I'm surrounded by it. It's in everything and I'm grateful for everything. Not grateful for certain things. I'm grateful for everything." I love that. That's a great practice. Thank you. In life, we often get little nudges and we ignore them and then we maybe get kind of a shove and and and so forth until we get a lesson. Do you think if we could learn to learn sooner, would we have to still endure some of the trials that come our way or do you think they would wrap up if we figured out things a little bit quicker?

22:37 If you're supposed to hit certain milestones of suffering in your life, bigger milestones, the divorces, the breakups, the car wrecks, the cancer, these things, they're all serving a purpose where you're on schedule to experience them if you're still blind to what existence is. If you're blind to your parts in it. But I was also shown that you wake up at 21 and you understand that this isn't what we think it is and I choose to sit in that place of the entire truth versus my slice of truth.

23:11 You don't need those things to chip away the amnesia. You've done it yourself. That's your free will choice. Life changes when you wake up because then you don't need the sandpaper to scrape away the parts of you that you're holding on to. You You surrender to the fact I don't need them. So, yeah, suffering tends to dissipate. I've seen it happen over thousands of people now. Those who just choose to wake up, cancer disappears. Life changes. There's healing.

23:43 There's bliss. There's the heart opening and feeling almost in some instances what I felt in that embrace of God. You are that powerful being. You aren't the costume you're wearing. So, the free will choice to wake up to what you are can literally change your life. You said that you learned things about time and existence. >> Mhm. What did you learn? Time's an illusion.

24:13 We really are only Pretend God We're watching a slow motion version of something, but pretend God is a is a guy with a long beard and a tunic and he has a tennis ball in his hand. And he's standing up and he just drops the ball from his hand and when it hits the floor, that's the end of your life and you bounce back into that hand and he drops it again. So, you're just repeating as the tennis ball dropping and hitting the floor, but you're viewing the tennis ball dropping.

24:44 You're witnessing it dropping, but now you're witnessing it in a way that is slow motion. It takes a hundred years for the ball to hit the floor. The ball was always traveling in the same direction. It was always going to hit the same pieces of dust as it fell. There was no left turn, right turn. There was no change in the speed. You're just witnessing your existence in a slow-motion view that gives you the opportunity to wake up. Gives you the opportunity to reflect. Gives you the opportunity to remember to shake off the amnesia.

25:20 As time was shown to me there, it's instant. Our lives are instant. It's we have one breath here. It happens in a second, you could say. But we have the illusion of 100 years as the gift that allows us to wake up to love, to wake up to loving others, loving ourselves, loving our selves for taking a ride on this crazy roller coaster in this really funky costume that we're wearing. And gratitude is built off of that understanding. But time is not what we think it is.

25:55 If we're remembering, if we're waking up to love, we already had that. So, what's the point of coming here? You could say, I'll use the sun example. We walk away from the sun, right? We're embraced by the sun. It's warm and it's wonderful. It's a great place to be. And then we forget about it. We're given this amnesia and we walk away from it, wondering if there's a sun, not realizing it's behind us. And it's only when you walk out far enough that you turn around and recognize, "Oh, there's the sun."

26:28 And you experience love and gratitude again. So, you could say that the sun is experiencing love for itself through us. It's like if you were to draw a heart, everyone starts from the top, start from the bottom, start from the point at the bottom. No matter how far to the right or left you go, you always come back to center. You're always leaving it to go back to it. That's the remembering. It's the waking up and saying, "Oh, wait, there's a loving sun behind me. I forgot all about this. Why do I keep walking away?"

27:00 It's in that moment of recognition that you both get to experience the shared bliss of what you are. Spring always feels beautiful when it comes around after winter. Yes, it does. I'm curious if you've seen any glimpses of the future. Mhm. Yes. Um we're heading for some turbulent times. I call it everybody's personal apocalypse. It's where you will feel probably the most turbulence you've ever felt in your existence.

27:33 And sometimes I call it the Super Bowl for the souls. You picked a time to be in the final game. And your choice is to wake up to something or to deny that there's something more. It's a single choice. There's nowhere to run from it. You can't hide from it. Things will happen in the world that will shake your understanding. Can you just get to the place and experience love before that happens? We can't change the things that are going to happen. We can't fix the things that are going to happen.

28:07 But we can recognize our true selves and sit in that place which benefits both us and everyone who's around us. So, it's more of a free will choice to you could say be active in a waking up role rather than sitting back and waiting. Well, let's see how this turns out. All right, I think most people are sitting on the sidelines wondering how it all pans out. Which would be denial that you're part of something bigger.

28:37 Your existence was never your own. It was ours. It was everybody's existence. You waking up changes things for everybody. So, it's a time where everybody's pointed back to that sun. Somebody will wake up and say, "Oh, yeah, I recognize the sun." And other people will choose to put sunglasses on. So, it's it's your own personal apocalypse in a way where you recognize I have to choose something.

29:08 I have to choose to remember what I am or endure something I don't want to endure. Endure turbulence to that might last years. So, it's it's a free will choice. What is the catalyst? And what kinds of events are you talking about? And And then also, how far out are you talking? We're in the midst of it. I would say it started a couple years ago.

29:39 You can see the world is changing. Societies are changing, institutions are changing, money is changing, uh border lines are changing. Who's aggressive and who isn't? It's all changing. Everything is changing. You're in the midst of the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. When that super being, when God, the universe, the all decides to change things, how does it do it? Well, it uses us. We're the fingers and the hands of that being.

30:08 So, you're seeing those fingers and hands remove everything from the table to reset it. If you are sitting in the place to see that and you understand your connection with it, congratulations. You're sitting in the space of love. If you're in denial of it, you will probably suffer through it in a way because you'll always be wanting an outcome that's based on your view of reality, which is just the ego wanting more, wanting change, wanting something to be fixed, wanting, wanting, wanting.

30:44 Versus knowing you already have everything you could possibly need within you right now. So, how will it come? I imagine we'll see it continue to happen in material existence as we're seeing it now, more turbulence, more politics, more money, more more of the things that shake our lives. Does it have an end? Yes. Is there something else on the other side? Yes. Do we have to endure this turbulence during this time? Yes, there's no way around it.

31:16 But the thing that helps you situate yourself for it is to recognize what you really are and recognize what everybody else is as well. Is it the division that we're seeing amongst people that is causing this versus outward circumstances? Yeah, the division is a part of it. We're at a time You know, I get asked this question, "Why do you not charge? Why do you only accept donations?" Because everything has been monetized to a point where we've chosen the money versus the human being, the person.

31:53 And you can see that happening now. Everything is monetized and everything is about the profit, and it will continue that way until it can't go any further, and we're close. And it's kind of just understanding that we're witnessing those who understand and those who don't. They're separating in a way. They will continue to separate in a way. But that pulling apart between these two sides does create turbulence.

32:23 It is two opposing forces trying to It's like tearing cloth, separate. So, all you can do is witness what's going on and sit in that space where where recognize who and what you are. You recognize the love that you carry for others, even the ones who don't understand. And the love that you have for yourself, and the love that you have for that being that is always in the room with you. And you could say that's the safety.

32:53 That is the acknowledgement. That is the portal, the door to greater understanding and enduring the experience better than always wanting something else. Is the key to getting through it or getting to the other side when we can start to see and love people for their differences? It's recognizing that you're two halves of a perfect sphere. The infinite half, which is you in the state of love that goes on forever.

33:26 And then the human half of you, which is all want, desire, measurement, definition, feeling of lack. One side of you is the adult, and one side of you is the 3-year-old. When people sit in the human side and they identify themselves with the human side and their wants and desires and their preferred outcomes, they are not outcome independent. You could say it's the 3-year-old that's constantly reaching for the cookie. If you're sitting on the other side of that and you have the understanding of what you are in the space of love within you, how does that adult judge a 3-year-old who just wants a cookie?

34:06 You were 3 years old yesterday. You're awake today, right? So, it's sitting in the space of going, "There are no differences. There's only those who understand what they are and those who don't." But you don't scream at a 3-year-old because it prefers something. You love them where they are until they grow out of the 3-year-olds, right? So, we're just trying to get to the a where we we recognize people are going to people. People have been peopling since the beginning of creation.

34:39 And all we can do is sit in that space and love them or sit in the space and create our own suffering by trying to change them. So, differences, you could remove differences and say love everybody regardless of differences. If you're in the adult space, you know, okay, well, there's there's someone acting like a 3-year-old and there's someone who isn't. I love them both the same. It's reaching the level where you love the Pope, the president, and you pet all the same.

35:06 Equally. No no favoritism. No favoritism because that's conditional. And to have conditions means you're manufacturing love through the ego. You're not being love. So, it's a challenging time. It is a challenging time, but I'm so grateful for people like Jonathan that are putting out such positive things in the world and reminding all of us who we really are. So, thank you so much, Jonathan, for being here today. For those of you that want to find out more information about Jonathan, of course, I'll have information in the description, including a link to his website, but that is jonathanashford.com.

35:49 Just a great guest, so much wisdom, so much information. I would love to hear your thoughts on everything that he shared, but why don't you just stick with the one thing that really stood out to you or the one thing that just blew your mind? I mean, there really was so much that he did share. Also, for those of you that started with this video, make sure to go back and watch the first video, which was his near-death experience. I'll have a link to that in the description as well. You can also find in the description a link to all of my past episodes. So, while you're waiting for the next one, please go ahead and check that out. But, share your thoughts on the things that you learned here today, give it a like and share it with a friend if you know someone who may like it. I know not all of you like to write a lot in the comments. You can always just say I made it to the end or you can make leave a comment about Bobby.

36:38 Anything like that is fantastic as well. Thank you to all of you that support me by coming back here week after week. I'm so grateful for all of you. As I always say, come looking for me. Don't count on YouTube to send me out. They may, they may not. So, I'm always here every Thursday. I've got a new episode. And of course I've got all my amazing guests from the past and a special thank you to all of you who are supporters and super supporters. I appreciate all of you that have joined becoming a members just to help support my channel and help cover some of the costs. Thank you so much everybody for being here today. I'm so grateful for all of you. Have a wonderful week and make sure to tune in next week when I have another incredible guest.

37:21 Thanks for joining me on Beyond with Heather Tash. Please add comments and questions you'd like future guests to answer. Also, if you liked what you heard, please hit the thumbs up button and subscribe. That'll help keep this podcast going. You can also go to Beyond with Heather Tash to look for more episodes.