Jeremy Kagan
Jeremy Kagan is an American film and television director, screenwriter, and television producer. In June of 2013, Kagan published a book about his near-death experience which took place during a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. After leaving his body, Kagan reports entering a personal hell, escaping, and then exploring various spiritual realities. Among other things, Kagan reports becoming aware of everything he had ever perceived, actual or imagined. His personal story, or life review, eventually morphed into the story of humankind , which he felt he had created: “Everything I had seen and heard — all the events I have known about, all the media I had watched, every movie, TV show, book, image, human I had met or seen or heard about — all of them — I had made them all up! Everything known on my path as this particular human being had been of my making. My imagining. And all the creations made by others — even the very existence of others — all of this had originated in my mind.”
Websites & Background Information
• The Near Death and Life of Jeremy Kagan
• ‘My Death: A Personal Guide Book’ on Facebook
• Jeremy Kagan on Twitter
• Jeremy Kagan on NDE Space Network
• Wikipedia on Jeremy Kagan
• IMDb on Jeremy Kagan
• Jeremy Kagan on YouTube
• SCA Family Stories: Jeremy Kagan (09/12/13)
Book
My Death: A Personal Guidebook
Amazon Description:
“This is a powerful memoir of a near-death experience. After a Native American sweat lodge, the author loses control of his body and then his life. He begins a passage that leads to a personal hell. He discovers a way to escape and emerges into an amazing exploration of the soul’s journey. In this intense adventure, there are insights into stages of consciousness and encounters of blissful perfection. This spiritual, inspirational book is meant to be an aid to removing the universal fear of the final journey we are all taking.”
Notable Quotes
“Your hell, whatever vision you may now have of it, simply evaporates. It is all a fiction, invented. Its strength and even existence just depends on how long you want to believe in it. But it has a false power. It vanishes once you realize it is merely a thought. It is like a cloud in the sky. It will inevitably dissolve back into the endless sky.”
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXKEj2of7Zw[/youtube]
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRBezxNZXNk[/youtube]
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My Death: A Personal Guidebook
By Jeremy Kagan
EXCERPT:
“My vision turned to the sides of the channel. I sensed/saw forms passing by. These seemed like misty grey vertical cylinders, like the elliptical megaliths and menhirs in the Celtic countries.
“Or were they people? Or former people? Or were they human forms in cocoons?
“Were they pointing? They didn’t seem to move at all. They appeared stationary and distant, like the way you see passing trees from the windows of a train.
“Did I know these beings? If they were beings, were they my family? My dead relatives? Ancient ancestors? Or were they from my more recent past? My dead father?
“Did I just sense my present lover out there? Were these the souls of the living and the dead? Or were these angels? Or aliens? They didn’t speak. But there definitely was something or someone out there. Unrecognizable shadowy presences off in the cloudy distance. Now I am very visually oriented, but others who have had near death experiences also have seen similar things, even though they were out of their bodies.
“AND THEN
“Something happened that certainly was unanticipated.
“Well, all this was unexpected!
“But this new experience was a jolt.
“It was an explosion.
“An explosion of perception.
“An explosion of everything.
“From inside and out in every direction.
“And it was instantaneous and infinite.
“It was an intense rapidly expanding display of time and memory.
“An explosion filled with images.
“It contained everything I had ever perceived, actual or imagined. Every encounter and recollection stored in my memory simultaneously exploded before my consciousness.
“Whatever I had seen, heard, done, read, was in this blastula. It included what is sometimes called a ‘life review,’ defined by that often repeated statement: My whole life passed before me. And it did. But it wasn’t passing as one event after another. It was all happening at the same time. It was spreading out in all directions as fast as the speed of light. Or maybe faster! All the stages and events of my life in immediate infinite detail.
“But there was more. Much more.
“This explosion of events also included everything I had ever known beyond my personal life story. It was the world’s life story, as I knew it. The history of the planet flashed from the Big Bang till now. It was mostly concentrated on human events. All the proceedings of history that I was aware of when I was alive. What appeared was all the heroes, the leaders, the avatars, the battles, the soldiers, the victims, the slaves, the martyrs, the artists, and the lovers. And some seemed to have more prominence. They stood out like the larger figures in a pre renaissance painting or a Buddhist thangka where the more contributive beings appear larger than the ones who have given less to the whole. I saw Gandhi as one of these bigger beings, but there were others: the spiritual guru Ramana Maharshi, Buddha, Moses, Christ, Tolstoy, Beethoven, Picasso, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Kennedy, Churchill, Leonard Bernstein, Chagall, Mahler, Monet, Mozart (and a smaller image of the actor playing him from the film Amadeus, for there was this mix of the real and the artistic), Ivan the Terrible (from the Eisenstein’s film I had so admired), Piatagorsky, Rasputin, and on and on. And there were all the images that others had made — all the movies I had watched playing simultaneously. And all this was so speeded up that each entire film took less than a nanosecond to play and they were all playing at the same time, thousands and thousands of them. And there were all the paintings I had ever seen, and the sounds, and all the music. All of it happening as a coterminous instantaneous rush of an expanding sphere of known creation, at least as it was known to me. Everything that had happened in time was happening immediately. Time was squished into an infinite now.
“But what was far more shocking, and yet completely clear, was that everything I had seen and heard — all the events I have known about, all the media I had watched, every movie, TV show, book, image, human I had met or seen or heard about — all of them — I had made them all up! Everything known on my path as this particular human being had been of my making. My imagining. And all the creations made by others — even the very existence of others — all of this had originated in my mind. Yet there was no ego here. For that individual was quite dead. That ego with all of its selfishness and neurotic qualities was gone. Dissolved. So whose mind was this that had made up everything? Who was this ‘I’ that had made up all of history, the triumphs and the horrors, and all the arts, the movies, the Van Gogh paintings? If everything that was my experience and everything outside my experience had been invented or imagined by this ‘I,’ who was it? The ‘I’ that was me, my name, he was dead. Yet there was someone perceiving this. A witness which seemed to be in and have a distance from this visual aural historical explosion. Some being who was aware and awake, creating and witnessing all this, without any affect or judgment. Who was this being?
“If there is a God who creates everything, was this then the Creative Force witnessing itself through the lens of my incarnation?
“My mind was beyond answering or analyzing. Only experiencing.
“I was just that — awareness itself. The creator and the witness.
“The awareness of everything that was and is.
“Being itself.”
To order a Kindle version of Jeremy Kagan’s new book, click here.
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