Jacob Cooper: We're all bio neurochemical.
And when I was disembodied on the other side, there
was no beginning, middle, or end with how good I felt.
There was no time.
It's like taking air and trying to chop air up.
You couldn't even if you tried.
It would be so ridiculous.
And so the way I could describe it was euphoric,
unconditional love, in dwelling in that place
where there was no end to this endless euphoric
sensation that I was having, there was no cap on it.
Rod Bland: My guest today is Jacob Cooper who had a
near death experience at the tender age of three
and he's here to talk about that experience today.
Jacob, welcome and thank you so much for
coming on the show.
Jacob Cooper: Oh, my pleasure, Rod.
Thank you for having me on your channel.
A big honor, and I've been a follower of your work, and I
thank you for the good work that you're doing today.
Rod Bland: I imagine that your NDE is one of your first
childhood memories, so how about we just start there?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah, this is actually my...
30th anniversary this month of September of my
near death experience.
It happened in September of 1993.
At the time I, obviously didn't know it I was just an
infant, but I was diagnosed with whooping cough,
otherwise known as pertussis.
And, I suffocated as a result of whooping cough.
There wasn't a capacity to breathe.
I went to a playground just as an innocent child,
climbed a ladder onto a slide, completely suffocated
due to whooping cough.
I wasn't able to hold on to everything, my brain, my
body, everything shut down.
And once I surrendered, I was able to really go on a journey
to the other side where I completely crossed over.
My soul completely crossed over and it was
that experience where I encountered, my own guardian
angels and spirit guides.
I was aware of God, all that there ever
is, ever was, will be.
I became aware of my own soul family members.
I was aware of past lives.
I was aware of angels that were surrounding my body,
which was on the ground and people were calling to me.
So this was a profound, fascinating experience,
but most importantly, was the decision factor.
I know plenty of near death experiencers will speak on
how they were told, hey, it's not your time, you have more
work to do, stuff like that.
But for myself, there was all autonomy as to
what I would be doing.
And I just asked, if I were to stay on the other side
what would my life look like?
Why should I stay?
And I was given imagery of premonitions of what I
would be doing in this life.
And I saw myself helping a lot of different people.
And it was from, that reason of helping others is why
I decided, to really stay.
In that point from the decision of agreeing to
helping people after that, everything dissipated.
And I was, I woke up on a hospital bed, but without the
complexity of this near death experience at such young age
with memories that last with me, I know to this day and
with within my whole lifetime.
So it's it's fascinating.
I'm sure there's a lot to unpack, unfold.
Within my NDE, but I'm forever grateful for it.
I'll never forget, my crossing over experience.
And more importantly that, you could take and
bury the body, but you can never bury the soul.
The soul goes on, beyond the body.
And I, and thousands of others throughout
the world are living testaments of that reality.
Rod Bland: I'll just take you back so we can flesh
out the details of your NDE.
So you're at the playground and I guess you began to
notice that your breathing was labored and I know you're
recalling things that were when you were three years
old, so it's probably some of the details may not be there.
But at what point did you realize that your existing
reality was changing or had disappeared and a
new reality had appeared?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah I want to preface that, the details
are just as clear as any other near death experience,
and that will blow the viewer's mind but, why I think
that is, is the component of trauma that happened within
my near death experience, and when you're having something
traumatic, you either have disassociative components to
it where you push it away to protect yourself from that
trauma, or there's clarity beyond any experience you
compare it to your lifetime.
So this isn't an ordinary memory.
And I was not an ordinary three year
old when I had this.
I was none of us are, we are experiencing ourselves
in chronological age throughout this lifetime.
But beyond that, we're all infinite souls that
are timeless and ageless.
And so this was a full experience of my soul.
Beyond, the developmental trajectory of myself, as
a young three year old.
But the details were fully there and, I do credit
trauma, but yes, suffocation was what led to it.
What allowed me to cross over was the capacity to
let go of my suffering.
You see why I mentioned trauma as I was suffocating,
and that was the scariest moment of my life to this day.
But once I was able to let go of this period of suffocating
that felt like an eternity and just surrender to a
breath beyond this body, which, in my language, I
grew up Jewish, the breath for spirit is called Ruach,
which translates as the wind or the breath of God.
And I let go of the suffocation and lack of
breath in my own body and surrendered to the eternal
breath of source that we all are connected to.
It's through surrender that really was a saving grace of
my life and my experience.
Rod Bland: So when you can't breathe, there's panic, right?
There's all this Oh, I can't breathe, I
can't draw a breath.
This is the one thing that you need.
Yeah.
So was there some thought process where you go,
this is not working?
Were you able to think rationally or was it
just the letting go just sort of overcome you?
Jacob Cooper: The letting go.
There, I tried as much as I could to be in denial
of it or tried to breathe,
but there was nothing, you ever imagine like drowning
and trying to like grasp onto something to hold onto,
but you're drowning and you just have to like, just
surrender to the process.
And that's just what I did.
I surrendered it and I just felt myself shifting
and elevating beyond My body, it's try to go into
a car and rev your engine.
The car's not working.
What the heck is the point of staying in the car?
You're not going to stay in the driver's seat.
You're going to go into the hood, check the engine,
see what's going on.
And for myself, that's what happened is I just let go of
something that wasn't working.
There's no point in being there.
It's not operating, but really, fully was my brain
that I felt that snapped in half due to the deprivation
of oxygen, and once really my brain, feeling my brain
snapped in half was when I fully really let go and
surrender to the other side.
And so there's a saying that, my brain cracked open and
that's when God came in and for myself, that literally
happened to me, where I felt an incredibly large, loud
crack within my own brain.
And that's when God in the spirit realm came in full
force and full throttle.
So I know, hopefully we could talk a little bit about the
brain and mind dichotomy because I could talk ad
nauseum about that too.
Rod Bland: And what did you witness?
So once you'd let go of the panic, associated with
not being able to breathe and what did you witness
after that period of time?
Jacob Cooper: I felt myself going into a familiar tunnel,
which when we cross over,
we all go into a tunnel and we go into a journey
within, a journey to the other side, but I really
felt my soul ascending.
Once I entered this light at the tunnel,
I felt my soul elevating and ascending to this
sensation of euphoria where, in our world, we're
used to like a limitation with how good we can feel.
We're all bio neurochemical.
And when I was disembodied on the other side, there
was no beginning, middle, or end with how good I felt.
There was no time.
It's like taking air and trying to chop air up.
You couldn't even if you tried.
It would be so ridiculous.
And so the way I could describe it was euphoric,
unconditional love, in dwelling in that place
where there was no end to this endless euphoric
sensation that I was having, there was no cap on it.
And, this endless cap of love, this endless source
of euphoric love, was my understanding of God.
God is in euphoric, unconditional love.
Where there is no beginning, there's no
middle, there's no end.
And all of life itself flows through that source, that
we are all divine sparks of this euphoric, endless love.
And that's the source of all of creation itself.
And, you could imagine when I was looking at and
feeling this euphoric love, there was no like end to
it, it was just, eternal.
And that's not something that we're used to.
In our minds, we're used to operating on a linear level.
There's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday, and that's it, and there's the month
and there's structure.
On the other side there's no box.
There's no structure.
It's a totally different dichotomy than this reality.
It's just so different, in, in every possible way.
Rod Bland: And how did your experience, so you're a
three year old, and a three year old's experience of
oneself is fairly limited, fairly small, right?
How did your experience of yourself and who you
were alter as you went down that tunnel once you
got to the other side?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah, it's just experiencing myself and I
wasn't limited by the body.
I wasn't limited with how people perceived or saw me.
I wasn't limited by a particular age.
I was, my soul.
And, for all of us, we sometimes associate
this current lifetime with our soul,
and it's really just an experience of our
soul, but not the full totality of who we are.
It's like picking up a
book and identifying one page of that book.
As the entire book itself, and that's an aspect of it,
but it's not the entirety.
And so we identified this lifetime with
all that there is.
And I could tell you firsthand that there's not there's
other chapters and it's eternal book that we have.
And so I think it's important for viewers is to say that,
yes, this lifetime is what we have, it's all there is
in front of us, but in the big picture it's not that
they're all there ever is, never was, it's just a small
stop of the soul, and it's a one way journey back home.
For near death experiencers it's a little different, we
have a little stop over on that one way journey back
home, and then we continue life, and then we come back
when it's our time again.
Rod Bland: And at what point did you realize, I know
I'm talking about things in a linear fashion here
because it's the only way that we can at what point
did you realize that who you thought you were was
actually just a little portion of the totality of you?
Jacob Cooper: I think The whole thing just was, I
think two things could be true at the same time, and
my near death experience had that, where on one hand,
I still had attachment to my life as a three year
old, my parents, and there was an adjustment phase.
It wasn't just I went over there and poof I
wasn't, How do I put it?
I wasn't congruent with my surroundings.
It took me some time to adapt to how vast, expansive,
euphoric all this was.
That took some time, but it was still my
soul's experience.
But I think it was really seeing a lot of past lives
that I lived that just reminded me that, wow, I'm
not just this one lifetime.
I have infinite amount of journeys and so this
isn't all that there is.
And so seeing a couple different past lifetimes that
I lived that just reminded me that this is just one
stop in this infinite journey and I'm not that three year
old kid, I'm beyond that.
And, I just felt very old, my soul just felt just very old.
Like it was just ironic and funny how people looked at
me as this like little kid looking, at my, in my NDE,
I just felt it was a weird feeling, it was weird because
sometimes there's, I say the young people are very old
and the old people are very young in this world because
the young people remember who they are and they're still
connected and the old people forget who they really are.
So from a spiritual perspective, those who
connect to me are young in a way, are old in a way,
and those who forget are just younger, spiritually.
And so it just was, weird to just think that I was
playing this role as a three year old and that's
how the world saw me.
But the truth was that was such a small
picture of who I was.
It was just a short experience on the journey of my soul.
Rod Bland: And what did the environment look like once
you went through the tunnel and did you meet any other
entities, spirits, angels, et cetera, while you were there?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah the first real angels that I
experienced are my guardian angels or spirit guides.
Depending on what culture you're in, there's different
ways of expressing it, but I experienced my spirit guides
who were with me on the other side and they helped my body.
I felt them pushing my body down to the ground.
But when I saw my spirit guides, they were a
male and female guide.
The one component of my NDE, you asked me if
I remember everything.
The only component that I struggle to remember
is the exact names of my spirit guides.
I have had like strong inklings after this, of
their exact names, but it's not like a conviction.
I just call them the guides.
But in the moment, to be frank, I knew it was a
male and female guide and I knew their exact names.
And it's like that one thing that I want to get
back in my NDE was just to remember their exact names.
And at times it comes to me, but I can't say it's
as ever as strong when I connect to them as it was
in my NDE, but they were to the right side and left
side of me, and they were right there, to my sides as
if I'm looking right at you.
They were right there, with me but they were the most
beautiful, immaculate, beings you could possibly imagine.
They had human characteristics
but they were the closest extension of my soul that
you could have, and I knew they were with me before I
was born and they're going to be with me after I die.
They're, my, my guardian angels.
And it was a reunion with them and it was also a sense
of, Oh my God, how the heck could I forget that they were
with me this entire time?
So there was some, even amnesia as a three year old
where, I had a little bit of forgetfulness of my guides and
then I saw them right with me.
It was just so beautiful, the reunion that I had
with them and recognizing that they never left me.
They were there with me each step of my journey, my
short chronological journey, but I always say it's never
the amount of years of your life, but rather the
life within their years.
And, you could live a short, chronological life, but that
life could feel like millions of years with the experiences
you have and the love that you create and experience.
So the other side looks at chronological age and time
so differently than we do.
But also to your question, I also, when my body was on the
ground and people surrounded me and were calling my name,
I was able to see them and hear them, but they weren't
really able to see me.
So I felt myself.
My body was on the ground, but I felt my
form next to my body.
And so I was also able to see their guides that they had,
the people that were with me in the playground that day,
I saw their auric fields, and then all of a sudden I look
up and there were, I couldn't tell you like how many,
there was just an infinite amount of angels that were
floating right in front of me.
And they were just overlaying the playground.
And these angels were different than
the spirit guides.
They were very young and youthful, but they were
like a gold and bronze color, and I could hear
their sound and their songs, emanating from them different
than the spirit guides.
Those spirit guides were very focused, they
were micro focused.
The angels, they were very uniformal.
They weren't distinct in their presentation that I saw they
were just almost identical.
And what they were connected to, which is
unconditional love and just sending healing, love.
And they were just almost like God's minions, if you will.
They were just there to just send healing.
And so I was looking at them, but they weren't
really looking at me.
They were just looking in the distance and there was
no individual characteristics other than just to give and
send unconditional love.
And to be honest with you, Rod, I almost just had to
pinch myself because they're just right in front of me.
This thin veil separating this reality and the other
side is so gossamer thin.
I can't describe how thin the separation is, but
angels are among us and around us at all times.
We just sometimes don't see them, but they are here
right now around all of us overlaying this reality.
Rod Bland: Interesting.
So I guess when you're three, there's not much of
a life to review, right?
Which is a fairly common component of
near death experiences.
But it sounds like you spent more time on your past
lives, your past experiences.
And how did that come about?
Was that something that you wanted to see or was it
something that you were shown?
Was there some purpose
Jacob Cooper: To be clear, I was still able
to really feel the depth and vastness of my life.
Like I said before, I know it's, yeah,
there's really, there's.
It's still a great deal of depth of life that I
even had, even as a young three year old but the
past lives just came to me.
I just remembered, one particular lifetime that
really, was in parallel with my near death experience,
and that was a life in which I crossed over due
to a death by suicide.
I remembered in that lifetime, my back was against the wall.
There was no hope.
I just didn't see anything possibly working out.
And I just felt that same suffocating feeling
that I had in my NDE, and I made that decision.
And I just remember looking back in it, how
clearly my NDE is related to that last lifetime.
And how those similar sensations that I was
feeling of suffocation, deprivation of life, lack
of hope, I was experiencing that again in my NDE, and
then it was different.
I was able to have a different move on the chessboard
where I was able to let go.
And from looking at the depths of darkness of the abyss
of the human experience, I was able to transcend that
by simply surrendering to the light within myself
that was always within me.
And, that has informed the work that I do as a
psychotherapist and author and public speaker is just
to remind people the value of surrendering and letting
go to the light of eternity when darkness comes to you
and how pivotal it is to really surrender to all
that's around you inside of you, and that could help to
transcend moments where you feel suffocated by life.
And I am living proof of that.
But I just remember just getting very emotional about
seeing, students that I taught in that lifetime and
reconnecting with them but I saw myself also spanning
the globe and having all kinds of different past life
memories that I have, but this lifetime was the one
that most stuck with me.
Now people could say, oh, this is just a trauma response,
you're making this up, stuff like that, but before I ever
became public in my near death experience, I went
to an intuitive in my later teens, and the intuitive
Picked up exactly what I saw verbatim in my past life in
which I took my own life.
And, she was able to really deliver a lot
of evidential readings.
And she didn't know a thing about me.
I was a complete stranger.
There was no public profile.
I didn't have a single interview at
the time, nothing.
And so it was just validation that I needed
that this was real.
And since that point, as a kid, I kept on getting
a lot of nightmares, from that past life.
But, my life was really about healing that and
really remembering that I moved on and, I'm okay.
And from completion, we begin, and I'm really completing a
lot of that karma from that lifetime in this lifetime.
Rod Bland: So was there a process or was there some sort
of interaction that occurred?
For some people there's a point of going forward and
there's a point of going back.
How did that work out?
Jacob Cooper: There's a point of going forward
or I'm just I'm trying
Rod Bland: I'll ask that again.
So in other guests that I've interviewed during
their NDE there's a point that they reach
where they have a choice.
They can either stay where they are or they can go back
Jacob Cooper: Oh, I see.
Yes.
Rod Bland: Talk about that for us.
Jacob Cooper: Oh, that's a great question, Rod.
Thank you for clarifying.
Yeah, I decided, to really ask that question because
it was given to me and I was not sure as to what to do.
It was the most difficult question that I was faced
in my life to this day.
Spirit posed a question, what will you do, Jacob?
And I'm just saying my name, will you stay with
us on the other side or will you continue?
And I just.
I didn't know what to do.
It was so beautiful being there, in the
light realm on the other side, and I had no clue.
And I just said, if I stayed, what will this life be like?
What will I look like?
What would this story look like if I
continued writing it?
I just didn't know what I would look like.
What would I do in this life?
It just felt like an unwritten story and
unfinished, business.
And it was just felt incomplete to a degree, this
journey, and they showed myself speaking in front of,
tons of people and just giving over, this exact message and
seeing the transformation of people right in front of me.
And I just remembered thinking, wow, the other side
will always be there, but this unique window to give
over, this information to other people is really about
what we're all here to do, which is to deliver a piece
of heaven here on earth, as we are all literal fragments
of heaven here on earth.
And we're here to personify that, to remember that.
And so that's what I think near death experiencers are
here for, to remind people, of the heaven on earth
experience, but also, A, we don't die, but also heaven
could be experienced right here through just connecting
to it, remembering it, and, not waiting to lose our breath
to gain it back, that we really could exhale and live
in that, heaven awareness in this body, in this lifetime.
Rod Bland: It sounds like you were given a picture of
what's available, like your
Jacob Cooper: Premonition, yeah.
Rod Bland: And then, and from there you then made
more of an informed decision, which was, I like what you
said about how heaven will always be here, but this
experience that that's the one that you get and
that's, but that particular one, that's really good.
So you decided, okay, I'm going to, I'm
going to go back and,
Jacob Cooper: I made that decision, but yeah, right
after I'm like, Oh my God, what did I just do?
And, to turn down heaven is a big deal.
It just, it looks very good when you're over there.
It looks a lot easier.
And then all of a sudden you come back to this reality.
And it's a lot different of a viewpoint when you're here.
And I just really wasn't certain about my decision.
I had regrets.
I've just felt my guides with me and just seeing
the message of trust that there's a divine plan in
each and every one of us.
The divine intelligence that created us has a plan and the
value of trusting that, and we all have a blueprint in
this life and just trusting that and to really let go of
your doubts and to trust your thoughts, of how when your
thoughts are in alignment with spirit, you could go
through grace and ease and really trust this plan, or
when you doubt it, you doubt your power, you could live a
much, much smaller version of yourself because you listen to
your doubts versus the faith inside of you that forever is
connected to you, a God that believes in your path and all
the angels that help to curate this life that you're living.
Rod Bland: and who did you talk to about your
experience after you woke up in the hospital?
Did you try to talk to people straight away and what was
the general reaction like?
Jacob Cooper: No.
I'm amazed that yeah.
Anyone after their near death experience has the
capacity to talk about it.
I'm not downing it, shunning it.
I just, as a therapist to this day, I think you go
one of two ways, but at least from my perspective,
it was so beyond the confines of human language.
Combine that, the fact that I was just three
years old, and I had a limited English vocabulary.
Words do just not do justice.
But I'm learning to put the pieces of the puzzle more so
together now more than ever.
And I come from a like a religious background.
So my parents are more into religion than they are this
kind of like spirituality.
But my father is also a therapist, came to me within
the last year or two ago.
And he said, when you had This experience, a couple
of years after it, you told me, and I'm just using my
language right now, just, it's hard to, quote directly.
But I'm paraphrasing my own self.
I said, Hey dad, something happened in that day.
One day it will make sense to you, but right now it won't.
I don't have the words to really describe it,
but something profound happened on that day.
And one day it will all make sense to you.
And so that really gave me a lot of validation.
And my dad has never wanted to stretch anything.
It's like what you see is what you get and hearing that
gave me a lot of strength and validation, but also
just put me back in that, position where I had to
keep this close to my heart.
The world around me was not ready for it.
I remembered after my near death experience, I was back
in preschool and my whole life changed from that day forward.
Once I got back to school and I was discharged from
inpatient, the hospital due to pertussis, I remember just
sitting in my classroom and feeling this thin sliver of
light going into my brain.
And I knew from the trauma of my brain that my brain
was cracked wide open and I could connect to the spirit
realm on a regular basis.
And so I would just go to the bathroom just to
really connect to the other side and cross over.
And at hand I could go there whenever I really wanted
to, to the higher realms.
And also I remember being able to see things so clearly
from the spirit realm.
from having this near death experience.
And I just remember one example that I don't
remember too much from my childhood other than
spiritual experiences, because those seem to stick.
They're beyond this reality and the confines of the
brain, because they're not created from the brain.
They're, experienced from a much higher dimension.
But I looked at a classmate and I say, wow, do you see
this totem flying around the room and I was connecting
to loved ones and the class, the classmate looked at
me like I was like smoking some type of crack pipe or
something like, he was like, what is wrong with you?
I don't see what you're going through.
And again, it just reminded me it was a very isolating
feeling where I just felt so alienated, so alone.
And so I kept it close to my heart.
I kept it very close to my chest, but I saw things.
New things hurt things, throughout my childhood,
looking back in it, that, just did not make sense.
And this intuition that I had was more of a nuisance.
I was just like, I just want to live my normal life,
but I would just see things come to pass, before they
happened, that would happen.
I just I just wanted to bury it away and just
fit in and be normal.
It wasn't until a lot of different experiences that
happened in my teenage years that really allowed
me to take ownership.
But one of the things that really changed my life was
getting a book gifted by an author named Betty Ady, who
wrote a book called Embraced by the Light, which is about
her near death experience.
And when I was gifted that book, it just blew my brain
because here I was thinking I was the only one on the
planet that had this thing.
Then again, there was like a term for it and there was
other people who had this and it was on one hand very
cathartic, the other hand frustrating because I thought
I was so special and so unique and all these other people
are having these things.
So it was like a little deflating in a way,
but also uplifting at the same time too.
That got me on my quest to really process this
with other people and to feel more comfortable
and confident to do so.
Rod Bland: right, and did you ever reach a stage
where you're like, okay, I'm just, I just want
to be a normal person.
I don't want to remember this and can we just turn
the switch off for a while?
Did you ever feel that way?
Jacob Cooper: I tried, but you ever go to a pool and just
try to put a beach ball down on the bottom of the pool.
It just eventually pops up.
So no matter what I tried and do, my intuition
was always popping up.
And to this day, like I saw things back as a kid that
are coming true, in crazy ways, and not always good
things some difficult things.
I remembered, just being teased by this one kid,
and then eventually right when that happened, and
then I saw that this kid is going to die, cross
over in a couple of years, and I saw his whole death.
And I was driving my car early in the morning and
that morning on the road that I was driving to,
the whole road was closed.
And I was like, what the heck is going on?
It's just like a random road on my commute to work.
Then a couple of hours later, I found out that I
was a kid who passed away driving, through a ramp.
And I was right there a couple hours after on this random
road right after he passed.
So it's just like things like that, just I was
right there that morning driving in the car.
And I saw him a decade before that, just crossing over.
So stuff like that would happen.
It's just, it freaked me out because they didn't
have a term for it.
It's not like I said, Oh, this is psychic.
This is intuition.
I said, this is annoying and leave me alone.
Just, I want to play basketball and
sports and be a kid.
But, once I was able to really identify it.
As this kind of thing and take away the stigma and understand
that other people had this was really, liberating to myself.
But, in one sense it was just annoying, but once I embraced
it as a gift and not a curse, was then it was perceived
and embodied as such.
Rod Bland: And do you connect with guides or the angels
that you saw when you first crossed over as a part of your
everyday life now as well?
Jacob Cooper: They're there.
Not as full blown, right directly in front of me in my
NDE that I had, to be honest, like I, I wish I go back to
those moments in memory all the time, and I'm there,
but there's a homesickness that I have, like many near
death experiences have, and there's a part of me
that just wants to go back.
back there, not so much for what was there,
but just the feeling.
You could get high as anything and I've tried marijuana
before and stuff like that, but geez, nothing compares
to how high you can get while you're over there.
But I found, throughout my life through doing a lot of
inner work and connection through meditation, exercise,
taking pristine care of my health as much as I can.
I could feel droplets of that at times, and, in...
Hard to get into, but in my early twenties, I had a
out of body experience that lasted several weeks, again,
the month of September.
And that felt quite possibly better than my near death
experience in many ways.
And it's very affirmative in my adult years that this
wasn't just something, that happened as a kid and I
could push it away because I'm my own biggest skeptic,
but you know, what I was tapping into was real.
And I think this is all inside of us.
It's just really connecting to that pure source energetically
and removing a lot of the barriers that we could have
on the emotional level, the psychological level and
physical level, to this.
But when you burn away all those things.
That's that pure connection that we all have.
We're all divine sparks.
I connect to my guides on a regular basis.
They've helped me write both of my books behind me,
Life After Breath and The Wisdom of Jacob's Ladder.
But, in moments where my life is like difficult, I feel
them very strongly and they send powerful messages to me,
and they're there with me.
And I feel them, throughout time.
I just remembered one instance, particularly when
there was a principal who was talking over a megaphone
and he said, whoever's talking, this is in front
of the entire school, middle school and high school,
we were out on a field, he said, whoever's talking,
I'm going to call them out and they're going to leave.
And I was not talking, but he, I guess I had a baseball
mitt by my mouth and he screamed my name to the top
of his lungs over a megaphone.
And I had to walk in front of the whole school and I was
very overweight at the time.
It was embarrassing.
And everyone was looking at me.
And that moment I felt both of my guardian angels with
me and they were there very strongly just telling me like,
this is just a blip in time.
It's going to pass.
Like everything passes, even the most painful traumatic
moments of your life, just trust us and it will be okay.
And that moment, the principal Met with me.
He was expecting me to probably curse him out
or stuff like that.
And I was just like, smiling, like all good, dude.
And people are coming to me.
But again, it just reminds you that pain is so temporary.
It comes and goes and just trust in what outlasts
pain, which is love, which is our eternity.
And that allowed me to transcend that moment and many
other moments of my life where I just remembered what was
real, what lasts, and what is just a temporary experience
of this life, which is a temporary experience itself.
Rod Bland: So I have one final question for you.
You mentioned the out of body experience.
I don't know if I heard you correctly there.
Did you say for two to three weeks?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah, you could they, I am in
the works of talking to producers about my NDE,
and including the OBE, but.
I literally woke up, one day and I was
looking down on my body.
It was the craziest thing.
And that lasted for three weeks, but I think really
what started it, I work in the mental health field.
I could tell what a manic experiences of a bipolar
experiences or a psychotic experiences, but this.
Was it a psychic experience?
It wasn't a psychotic experience, but essentially
I just remembered myself just laughing hysterically
at how seriously we take all these things in reality in
this life, and I just looked at the illusion and just the
facade of the things that we think that are real, that
are just a farce, they're not real, but we identify them.
We take everything so seriously.
And I was just laughing hysterically to where every
part of my body was like a wet towel and just wrung out
all the pain, all the stress, all the sadness that I ever
held onto in this lifetime.
And I woke up the next day completely out of my body.
And I just was.
like flabbergasted.
I was like, my body's here and I'm over there.
And I just could feel myself like using my vocal cords,
talking through my own gut.
Like I was over here, but my body was here and that
lasted for several weeks.
And I just remembered myself sitting in a temple,
at the time of September, the Jewish high holiday,
and just felt myself, flying outside my body.
And I could feel wings of my animal totem with me.
And it was so profound.
And I saw myself looking over all the congregants.
But I saw this one strand of energy that connected every
single participant, but I also saw how people were just
in their own minds, in their own boxes, and they weren't
connected to their energy and the energy of others.
And I've read before, we are one, all this kind of
stuff, and it sounds great.
But when you see it directly in front of you, the one
strand of energy that connects all of humanity, and you
see it in front of you it's undeniable that, yes, we are
all from the same source, connected to the same source.
Despite, our forgetfulness, we could think we are
what we are, but that does not change the ultimate
reality of oneness that we're connected to.
And yeah, no, that experience stays with me to this day
and it was just a complete energetic explosion where
I felt just those same feelings that I had in my
NDE, 20 years later about.
And without having anything traumatic or, it's that
to me blows me away more.
You can't say, Oh, you're hallucinating.
You're, I wasn't on any drugs, nothing.
It was just it was perfectly clean.
I was a fit athlete to this day.
And just by letting go much like I had in my NDE and
looking past the illusion of suffering, much like I
had in my NDE, I had that in my OB, by looking at it
directly, the illusion of this experience rising above it.
Was when I was able to transcend this reality.
Remember that I was a spiritual being having
this human experience.
Rod Bland: So it sounds almost like you were bi located
because my first impression was you're laid on a couch and
you were there for two weeks.
How's that possible?
But it's like you had your you had your awareness of
your being your body, but also you had this other awareness.
Is that, does that describe that accurately?
Jacob Cooper: In a way, but yes, I was felt my soul,
like outside of my body, for several weeks where I was
just looking down on myself.
And I didn't have an NDE.
This was an OBE, so under the umbrellas of NDEs are sTs
STs, Spiritual Transformative Experiences, out of body
experience phenomena, which I had, but you could have
an OBE without an NDE.
And I had that for a prolonged period of time.
At times I felt more grounded, at times when I
was really able to connect, I felt myself just totally
elevated looking down at my body, throughout the day.
So I somehow managed to have a 4.
0 in college that year.
I don't know how that's possible, it just
it all worked out,
Rod Bland: Amazing.
Jacob Cooper: but people look at me.
They're like, you're laughing hysterically.
And I lost 10 to 15 pounds during that time.
It's just I didn't have an attachment to this reality.
Like nothing of this reality brought me something that
I didn't already have.
And we use this things to get to a certain destination, but.
The destination was already there.
I didn't need the routes, it was already there.
Rod Bland: All right.
How about you tell us what you've got
going on there, Jacob.
So tell us about your books and the other work that you
do and how people can get in touch if they want to.
Jacob Cooper: Oh, sure.
I have my own platform right now.
The Wisdom of Jacobs Ladder.
It's available on YouTube and many other platforms.
So I have that, going on.
And I mentioned my two books, Life After Breath and the
Wisdom of Jacobs Ladder, both available through Amazon.
I have a website, jacoblcooper.
com, and I speak internationally, to
different groups.
I talk from a mental health perspective
as also, a spiritual perspective as well, too.
So I work with mental health groups, I provide continuing
educational training as well for, therapists.
So I have that coming up in late October.
So all events and stuff like that are on my
website at JacobLCooper.
com, as well as social media links where you can
find my daily insights and reflections, there too.
Rod Bland: Okay.
Terrific.
And have you got any last positive message that you
want to leave people with before we wrap it up?
Jacob Cooper: Yeah.
I hope people, took something out of it.
It's important to be a skeptic and not a cynic.
And I know my near death experience poses a lot of
curiosity and hopefully will allow people to look at
life a little differently.
Just the many facets of it.
It's unique.
I'll give it that.
But what I really want for people to remember is,
first of all, we don't die.
We go on beyond this body.
What's important is to live while we live.
Many people are just focused on the end
game and the afterlife.
And certainly the viewpoints of the afterlife can inform
this life in many ways, but it's this life that will
influence our afterlife.
And so we carry many things that we do here, our passions,
our interests, our hobbies, Gifts that we experience is
all a part of our afterlife.
So don't look at the afterlife as just after this life,
is connected to the life that we will live when we
go on beyond this body.
And the important thing is to remember the things that we
could take with us, we can't take the house, the job, the
cars, but we take with us the love that we give, the impact
that we have in the service to humanity that we offer.
So just, I think people to remember the macro focus of
this life and to not get so micro focussed on things that
come and go, to not attach to them, if that makes sense.
Rod Bland: Yeah, that's a great message.
Live while we live.
I like that.
Thanks so much, Jacob.
Jacob Cooper: Death is a given, but life is a
choice while we're here,
Rod Bland: Yeah, look, I appreciate you coming
on the show today and thank you for being my
Jacob Cooper: An honor.
Thank you, Rod.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you.