BACK FROM THE DEAD
I had not a blemish on my face nor a broken bone.
In spite of the doctors predicting it was a 98% chance I’d never wake up and would be severely scarred and misshapen even with extensive plastic surgeries I had the best complexion I’d ever had since I had been born the first time!
My First Life As Scott Spackey
Scott Andrew Spackey was born, the first time, on June 28, 1966. My life was colorful, profound, unusual and worthy of book material.
By 2013, I was well established in my second career. My first one was as a professional, licensed, commercial building contractor in Los Angeles and I was fairly successful for a guy who had spent his youth and early adult life on dope and never went to college. In 2006, I had abandoned my construction career simply because I couldn’t stand the crooked, stressful way the industry functioned. I took a huge leap and studied, trained and became a life-coach, hypnotherapist and certified addiction specialist. I did the unorthodox thing of going straight into private practice. I was successful at this too, earning nearly two hundred thousand a year within three years. I was sought out, respected and regularly invited as a guest on Los Angeles TV, radio and to provide workshops, presentations and keynote speeches at conferences and events.
Within three years, I went from subletting office space from a real estate agent to having a private corner office overlooking the park in a very good neighborhood. I was a single father—close to my son—and a faithful, attentive partner to one woman for over a decade. Life was stressfully successful, materially comfortable and adventurous as I never lost sight of how fortunate I was to have survived such a degrading, self-abusive life with shooting dope and being a lying, philanderer to achieving success and joy in the big areas all hope and wish for: love, spirituality, health, parenting, adventure, travel, comfort…
As my birth month—June—began in 2013, I was preparing for the simultaneous release of my first two books in the coming year. Within the prior year, I had toured India and Nepal as a spiritual pilgrim and trips to Europe as a tourist.
On June 19th, I died.
Nine days before my 48th birthday.
My Second Life As Scott Spackey
I woke from my coma on my birthday near the hour I had been born the first time in 1966. I seem to be having the unique experience of being reincarnated as myself.
Like an infant, I did not have an identity nor did I know how to walk or speak or form deliberate thoughts or feelings. I could not feed myself or go to a toilet. I was an infant in a 48 year old body; a body that had severe injuries and brain trauma.
This second life as myself has been both a fascinating and terrifying experience.
I am going to share with you my insights, perceptions and the important conclusions I have been able to draw from it that has restored me to nearly 90% of my prior capacity. Chief brain neurologists at UCLA concluded and have confessed to having no scientific explanation how I am not in a vegetative state and can function independently.
I am going to share what I figured out, what I did and the deductive reasoning processes that have allowed me to become a medical miracle.
I am going to share what I’ve witnessed and experienced supernaturally as I can now personally report on the experience of death, after-life, and resurrection.
I choose to convert my suffering into something that may bring hope, meaning and invaluable tools to others having experienced life changing tragedy of any sort, especially traumatic brain injury (TBI) and to provide perspective and clarity to those mystified and overwhelmed by near death experience (NDE).
I have been to the other side and I am designed to report on it, both clinically and spiritually.
My reputation as an author, presenter and counselor is one of passion. I express a lot of emotion in my work as my work is a labor of love. I am a practical man and spiritual. My spirituality is not based on theories or abstract, unverified concepts. Like my practical-conventional knowledge, it is based, rooted and expanded from lifelong studies and personal experience. My approach to spirituality is not fanciful, but one of logical, reasoning. I personally do not see the dividing lines between my spiritual perceptions and my material ones. They are not merely two sides of the same coin but are one homogenous substance. God is scientific and science is spiritual.
However, I accept that there are people who are non (or ‘a’ ) spiritual and some who are non scientific and either may be resistant to the field which is less than the other. Mine is not to judge but to present both sides of my experience for you to take and/or leave what you will.
This is what you can expect from me as your narrator and guide through my triumph over tragedy:
This book will be divided: Every other chapter will explore and explain the conventional science of my injury and recovery without the spiritual aspect and every other chapter will present my spiritual and mystical experiences. This way, you can easily benefit from one or the other or both as per your preference. Every other chapter will make it real easy for you to skip past the content you’re not interested in!
I am not here to persuade the non-spiritualist nor the unscientific person to a particular point of view. As I’ve done in all my work, I am going to share and detail my experience in my own brand of expression. My award winning book, Project Addiction, never judges drug use and nearly tempts you to try them as my descriptions are so visceral and alluring, yet the truths of the downsides of drug abuse are there too. I do not preach, nor advocate; I just give the straight dope!
My expression as a writer is evocative[1]. I do not hold back my feelings and opinions and my audience trusts me to be thorough and unpersuasive. This form of writing is my personal style and I love it and cannot effectively communicate any other way. I gotta be me!
But since I am not trying to convert non-spiritualists into spiritualists nor spiritualists to scientific thinkers, I will share my thoughts, emotions and experience from my passionate center. I am an expressive person and an addictive personality. Expressive means when I talk about going to the store it is a story with emotion or I don’t bother telling it all. Addictive Personality means I am either passionate or indifferent to all things—it’s either all or nothing. I’m either the pit-bull in the china shop or indifferent—I don’t have middle grounds. While many people are justifiably annoyed and turned off by this character, many others are drawn to an ability to express things in ways most cannot.
On the practical (material) side of my character, I will share my struggles, my pain, my hopelessness and often preferring death to enduring any more of my tragedy. I will share in a sensible, yet, at times, emotionally charged, manner along with the intelligent, counterintuitive, scientific methods I used to get beyond my TBI/DAI and NDE[2].
And from my spiritual side I will share and expound on the supernatural events that I have experienced through being resurrected and reincarnated as myself and what I was exposed to in between life and death and afterwards.
This will be the only chapter that synthesizes both aspects of my experience. Going forward will be every other one so those only interested in one or the other can easily benefit from what they prefer and skip past the one they don’t. I want to help anyone and everyone I can, in any way I can so I chose not to make my text exclusively supernatural nor exclusively conventional science.
The Material
My collision resulted in a TBI, a Traumatic Brain Injury. The brand of TBI was a DAI, Diffuse Axonal Injury. TBI has been headline news for several years now, so most laypersons know the basics: that severe impacts or repeated impacts to the skull and brain result in TBI which cause impaired motor skills, reasonability, intellect and emotional stability. The plethora of data on TBI cannot possibly elucidate on the massive quantity of how these symptoms manifest: anger, depression, delusion, impaired walking, coordination and many, many others and/or a combination of several. No two TBI sufferers are having even similar experiences.
My TBI, true to my pain-in-the-ass, extremist character, had to go big and be a DAI version. Diffuse Axonal Injury is when the white and grey matter layers of the brain separate. This means they shift and when they do, the billions of brain neurons that bridge the gap and connect between the two are severed. Each and every brain neuron you have, of the over one billion of them, has a responsibility. Each one of them contributes collectivity to a particular function such as moving your finger or sniffling. When these neurons disconnect, the function they contribute to is severed, like having a wire short out in your house: one tiny section of a random wire in your wall prevents you from nuking your burrito in the microwave. Your microwave has three wires to it; the ground, the positive and the negative, but when any single one of these three has a separation the unit does not work at all, or worse, can cause a fire!
Miles of wires and hundreds of connections powering your home are just fine, yet some random, rogue wire nowhere even near your micro isn’t connecting and your burrito lunch is served cold.
This is what happens in a DAI injury. It is simply not possible to reconnect the severed neurons: they are too small and there’s too damn many of them. It would be like a supernova in a galaxy millions of light years away and now you gotta re-establish the billions of stars to their original locations! Not gonna happen!
Once these neurons are severed they cannot do their job since they relied on other ends of their connections to perform tasks.
For this reason I could not walk, talk or function. It wasn’t as simple as my brain forgetting how to do tasks. The info on millions of tasks (like walking and talking) was deleted: As if I’d never known it in the first place.
In this sense, I was like an infant: an infant has not yet learned to walk or talk. Infants haven’t forgotten. This is what my DAI had done to me: it deleted all my info and knowledge on being human. It was ALL brand new to me. I was an infant in a 48 year old man’s body.
Your identity is made up of the sum total of each and every experience that has led you to THIS VERY MOMENT.
With no past, you have no identity. My memory was erased. Deleted. I did not “forget” who I was or my son or how to walk or talk. It was entirely deleted. When you lose your keys there is a quantitative awareness that you “forgot” where they are; you have a subtle awareness that you once did indeed know where your keys were.
This is different than not knowing how to speak Chinese. You know that you once knew where your keys were the same way you know that you didn’t forget how to speak Chinese; you never knew it.
My identity was an unknown thing to me. Not something I forgot, but something I never knew. It was gone. Deleted. Erased. When my past was deleted, my identity was gone as your identity relies on who you were last year, yesterday and a moment ago to identify.
I no longer existed.
Brain Specialists
A brief fast forward (we’ll detail the recovery in the hospital in upcoming chapters—I won’t leave anything useful out, I promise): The chief of brain neurology at UCLA medical center heard about my case and phoned me about three months after my accident, inviting me to see him, no charge. I jumped at the chance and, since my son had recently taught me how to drive, I drove to UCLA hospital (not by myself!) where the chief of brain neurology interviewed me. During our talk (which I struggled to do), he kept pausing and asking, “When was you accident?”
Until I finally asked him, “Why do you keep asking me that?”
He said, “I’m looking at your fMRI from your accident and there must be a mistake. I am not seeing how you’re not a vegetable.” (an fMRI is a magnetic brain scan image)
He asked if I would allow him and some students to study me and try to learn how I was virtually a scientific anomaly so they might be able to use the findings to help others with similar injuries.
I agreed.
They put me through two days of studies where I performed tasks ranging from household actions like getting water from a tap, making a bed and remembering which rooms in the faux house were what—bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, etc. I performed word puzzles similar to grade school tests and minor organization skills such as putting things away to where I had found them. These puzzles and tasks were insultingly simple for a man of my intellect and capacity, yet I could barely do them and was unable to perform many of them.
Weeks later, I followed up and inquired what they had discovered and I was told, “We have no scientific explanation how and why you’re not nearly a vegetable. The best conclusion I can draw is that your state of health prior to the accident must have been superior to have such alarming progress in such short time.”
I can assure you that while my wellness was well above average, it was not superhuman. Yes, I worked out with weights 5-6 days per week, walked twice per week and played aggressive tennis weekly. But I was not a chiseled man with no body fat. While I was very health conscious with a strictly vegetarian diet for over ten years I also had to be careful of what I ate and drank to keep my middle age weight down. In addition, I had lived as an excessive hedonist through my twenties and into my early thirties with copious abuse of narcotics, alcohol, food and sex. Over all, at the time of my tragedy, I was an average weight and had an above average fitness level (5’10”/177 cm, 210 lbs/100kg). Not extraordinary, just above average.
I have since learned that a DAI injury of my magnitude takes nearly a decade to return to self-reliance, causing severe
Impairment for life.
Over ninety-percent of DAI sufferers never wake from their coma. The majority of the ten percent who do survive become institutionalized, homeless or commit suicide within four years[3].
I became self-reliant within months and was mentally and emotionally stable and significantly restored within 48 months.
My recovery has been a hybridized system: I combined the therapies and procedures performed and advised by the medical doctors with methods and practices I learned with my own research and blended these with my Eastern, holistic self-training. Where Western medicine and procedures fell short, Eastern medicines and traditions filled the gaps and where Eastern practices were insufficient I compensated with Western.
I will be sharing my process: not only what I did to speak and walk and function again but the learning process and deductive researching that established a customized recovery system for my particular defects, strengths, weaknesses and needs.
I hope to teach you how to design your own recovery system that is unique for your circumstances. What worked for me may not work for you and vice versa. I used counterintuitive reasoning and tenacity to perform the exercises that have restored me back to 90% of what I was. What the hospital and doctors provided to me yielded small results and is a mere fraction of what I have done to become the medical miracle that I represent.
I am not fearless or brave. I was terrified of remaining how I was which is what motivated me to keep trying and to improve my methods and my efforts. Fear and terror brought me back from the dead and restored me to functioning; not bravery.
I am not a miracle.
I worked my ass off and God graced me with results.
The Spiritual
Your soul is your essence. Your true identity is not your physical form, your name or personality. It is your soul. Your soul is eternal and transmogrifies: changing its appearance like putting on a different costume, to adapt to each incarnation it is destined for. My pure identity is not my personality or body as all these superficial attributes are transient and temporary and, like a costume, are removed and a new one reapplied, when there’s a new act—life—to live.
My soul was dispatched from my body and spent nine days in a dormant, pending state until it was time to reincarnate as myself.
What did I experience during this nine day dormant state?
Not much. Hence the term, dormant.
“I” was barely present: a crude awareness—not quite a consciousness, only a simple awareness. I was aware that I was, i.e. I existed, but could not connect to my identity. I was an observer without the ability to perform or function or interact with the circumstances. What is known as an a-priori: an existence with no prior points of reference; not a here or there, not a before or after, no concept of you, or me or we. I just was. Merely aware of existing without any ability to interact with reality nor even a desire to. Interact would be incorrect wording as I was entirely separate with nothing to interact with. I was an observer at most. Descartes coined the term, “I think, therefore, I am.” I was able think and subtly wonder and be curious of my state and circumstances, but that was it; nothing more. I was aware.
I existed as a soul within a portal: an ethereal chamber of sorts that had no time, space, or dimension or location. What I learned within the portal is what I can share. Volumes of information were uploaded to my mind.
Seek and Ye Shall Find…
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manual for dying. Tibetan Buddhists believe the human soul reincarnates forty nine days after it leaves the body due to death[4]. The Book of the Dead instructs a person how to prepare for those forty nine days since what they do during them and how they interact with what they experience in that time determines what circumstances they will be reborn—reincarnated—into.
This is how they find the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader. When a current Lama dies, the Buddhist monks know he will reincarnate forty nine days later. They have powerful insight as to where, what family and circumstances he will be born into, largely because of the manual for living and dying, The Book of the Dead. When they locate him, they ask permission of the family to adopt him and he is taken to the temple palace and raised and groomed to prepare to return to his role as the Dalai Lama. By their understanding, there is never a “new” Dalai Lama; there has just been one, born-died and reincarnated to continue. This is known as a bodhisattva; a soul who rejects full enlightenment which would lead to liberation of his soul from the material phenomena. The bodhisattva chooses to reincarnate and return to the material world to assist others in their journey to perfection. It is the ultimate, Christ-like, selfless sacrifice: to remain in the imperfect material world for the benefit of humanity.
The Book of the Dead (there was an Egyptian Book of the Dead in ancient times too, that served the same purpose, by the way.) teaches what to expect during your transitional state from when your soul departs your body and how to handle it to reincarnate safely, in favorable conditions to continue your progress towards total enlightenment. The goal here is that once enlightened, a soul no longer is required to reincarnate in the material world. They’re done! Go to heaven! Enlightenment grants eternal salvation and reprieve from the dense and dross material world.
For nine days (not forty nine) I was in a transitional state, what is known as the transmigration of the soul. During these nine days I was exposed to Absolute truths and knowledge. I was not taught or shown these truths of existence or reality: I had access to them. As we all do during transmigration.
I am going to share with you what I witnessed and retained after being in the Portal during my dormant, transmigration of the soul. And also what I have experienced since then as a man who has the surreal experience of reincarnating as himself!
I am not going to take the long route of qualifying my statements with “I believe…” or “I think…” or “what I saw…” or “what I was told or shown…” I am going to proceed with statements of certainty the same as I say, “My name is Scott and I have brown eyes.” I don’t say, “I believe my name is Scott and I think I have brown eyes.” Nope. My name is Scott and I have brown eyes and that’s an objective fact, not a subjective belief. I am not trying to convince you of what I learned and was exposed to. I am going to report it as it was, and is, and you can do what you want with it so please do not mistake my certainty for a cultish attempt at persuading you. To be quite honest, I am indifferent as to whether people believe me entirely, partially or not at all! My name is Scott and I have brown eyes, and that doesn’t change because someone doesn’t believe it!
I do not think I am special or chosen. Every soul experiences the Portal between lives and many retain much of it. And many go crazy from NDE (Near Death Experience) and many cannot make sense of it. I have a gift of communicating well and perceiving things on a wider spectrum than most folks. This is not why I was chosen, because I wasn’t chosen. I died and came back and have the need and skill to elaborate on it. I’m not a saint or a messiah. I do have a unique set of qualifications that have a LOT to do with how and why I was able to retain much of what I experienced and I have the ability to share it.
I’m getting my qualifying out of the way NOW to speak freely as the text goes on without interruptions of dozens of qualifying footnotes at the bottom of every page! There are nearly countless spiritual texts, books, scriptures that lend support to what I’ll be sharing and I may allude to them from time to time, and sometimes not. It is up to you to take it as I present it or to do more research to qualify what I am sharing.
The Transimgration of the Soul
Most Eastern spiritual philosophies (Hindu, Buddhist, I-Ching, Zen, etc) have consistent themes which I will share with you now. The Eastern view is that you reincarnate life after life for eternity until you become “Realized”, “Enlightened”, “Liberated”. These are the terms for perfect understanding of Absolute Truth (with a capital ‘A’ and ‘T’). Once a soul reaches this state, they are released from the material phenomena, i.e. no longer required to reincarnate. This means they either: a) become “divinized” (one with God but not becoming God—heaven in Western spirituality), OR… b) become liberated; their soul merges with infinite reality like a drop of water to an ocean never to experience suffering again, but neither do they experience joy or bliss—they go into a neutral state of being forever, kind of like being peacefully asleep for eternity.
They mostly agree that during the transitional, transmigration of the soul, that for a brief period, they witness the Absolute Truth. Whether it is forty nine days as the Tibetan Buddhists hold as true (and Hindus) or nine days as it was for yours truly, or plus or minus time as needed, they all agree on the fundamentals: that during this transitional state you gain access to, and witness, the truth of your existence and reality, whatever that may be!
You see your whole life pass before your eyes so you can witness what it is you did wrong and what it is you did right and how you could’ve done more to become perfected, i.e. enlightened/liberated and avoid the crushing inevitability of being reincarnated. Reincarnation is not generally viewed as a great thing. Spiritualists and mystics perceive the material world phenomena as deeply flawed and undesirable. Life in the material world ain’t heaven! It is crude and dirty and while it has great qualities, the favorable qualities are grossly disproportionate to the quantity and quality of sufferings. It’s a decent place to visit, but you don’t wanna live here!
The goal of existence is to transcend the material experience and exist eternally in heaven, become enlightened, liberated or spiritually realized—choose your preferred term. I can honestly say, that after being a citizen of the material world for an eternity, I am bored to sh#*t!
All the good stuff makes you either fat, stupid or addicted if you do it a lot and it takes a life of focus and discipline to live in moderation. I’ve done more than most and it’s a blessing to have such extraordinary life experiences. But it’s also a curse as it becomes very hard to remain satisfied with anything less than extraordinary. This blessing and curse makes me perpetually restless.
The Spiritual Government
You DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE to reincarnate! In this transmigration phase, you see what you did and didn’t do in your life which is determining your upcoming reincarnation circumstances (your life passing before your eyes). You get a good view and strong glance at the details of your upcoming life’s conditions and circumstances: rich or poor, healthy or diseased, smart or dumb, attractive or disfigured… and you see WHY. You witness what it is you did in THIS life to create the karmic circumstances and conditions for the one you’re getting a preview of. If you lived well and smart and kindly, you’re probably pleased with the upcoming life of peace and luxury, but if you lived selfishly and were sinister, you see the life of hard karma you’re about to face. None of us are exclusively virtuous or sinister so our next lives are a proper blend of the two.
The reason the so-called Spiritual Government[5] gives you a preview of what’s coming and what you did (or didn’t do) to create your circumstances is to help you commit to doing better in the life that’s coming and prevent it from happening again. You even see your next DEATH! When, where, how… the details! This is meant to alert you to make better choices and live spiritually. It is NOT meant to punish you, but to remind you that you have a choice to live righteously regardless of your circumstances. God is merciful, not passive-aggressive!
The divine Spiritual Government is not showing you what you did wrong and what bad stuff is coming as a result to punish you! NO!
God IS love! God is your Divine parent, God is trying to get your attention to make better choices to protect you from yourself as all good, loving parents do!
The Portal
What I am referring to as The Portal is my own clever term for the space (or non space) my soul remained in during its nine day dormant state. I am also a life-long student of spiritual philosophies, a master theologian, spiritual adept of kundalini yoga, kriya yoga and bhakti yoga, a third degree ceremonial magician of a mystical order, a certified master alchemist and proficient in astrology, the I-Ching, Zen, numerology, Kabbalah and sacred geometry. I don’t just talk my talk, but walk the walk and have the experience and so-called qualifications to back it all up. I’ve spent my entire life as a student of religion, spiritual philosophies and mysticism. It has always been my fascination and I was born (both times!) with an insatiable appetite to know the mysteries of existence.
At the beginning and end of the day, I am a true spiritualist; a servant of God who respects and admires each and every soul who also loves and serves God. Several of my spirit altering events were in the company of Muslims, Christians, Mormons, Hindus, agnostics, Jews and Catholics.
I don’t care what name you use or which building you use to connect with the Divine. God is God.
Spiritual Science
I am God’s child and servant and unworthy of God’s grace or love. I am not big on rituals or ceremony anymore and so my spiritual practice, my sadhana[6], is simply to meditate on God’s loving virtues and grace and wish and hope to be nearer to God in every moment. The purpose of my life is a spiritual one and none other makes any sense to me. I work and live in the world but try not to be of the world.
I am in awe of technology, science and reason. A physics hobbyist who’s been to CERN, a professional counselor educated in all forms of psychology, and a servant of deductive reason and I respect nothing less than researched and tested conclusions. My spirituality is logical, reasonable and makes sense. Theirs is nothing impractical about spirit!
Material and Spiritual
Please accept my apologies if you feel your particular interests are not elaborated on as much as others. I will try to be well rounded, but it simply takes more space and description to explain the mystical, spiritual, supernatural aspects as they do not adhere to conventional language and ideas as conventional concepts do (hence the term conventional/unconventional). I am a big fan of metaphor and example to explain things. Feel free to skip over sentences you feel are merely redundant because you understand something others may not. What is easy for you to follow may be hard for another, but be humble! What may be hard for you may be easy for them! I’m communicating to a wide range of intellects here, so be patient!
Let’s start at the end:
On June 19, 2013, I was killed…
[1] A Stone’s Throw, my first memoir, has won four awards for “creative-narrative” non-fiction.
[2] TBI: Traumatic Brain Injury. DAI: Diffuse Axonal Injury, NDE: Near Death Experience.
[3] Wikipedia & National Center for Biotechnology
[4] It is believed the soul enters its new body on the 49th day though the top of the skull. On the 49th day after conception, a fetus’ fontanel closes. Look it up!
[5] I will be using this term to refer to the “law and order” qualities of the spiritual dimensions.
[6] Sadhana: (saw-duh-nuh): sanskrit for spiritual disciplines.
