Science and the Sacred — Life After an NDE with Ray Catania

When I started teaching manifestation, I found that some people would get it right away and just get the things that they were looking for and trying to get, and others did not. So I tried to figure out why those people weren't as successful as the others. And what I figured out is this. The universe, like you said, does not speak English, French, Japanese, or anything else. It speaks vibration. So we have to learn to speak in vibration. How do we do that? Well, we change our words to emotions because our words trigger emotions that stimulate ourselves on a specific frequency.

Welcome to another episode of Sacred Stories of the Spirit. Today's episode is a powerful exploration of awakening intuition and what happens when our worldview is turned completely inside out. My name's Jordan and my guest is Ray Kitanya, Korean coach, author, and bridge builder between science and spirituality. Ray's journey began in an unexpected and life altering way when at 20 years old, he suffered carbon monoxide poisoning during a house fire and he found himself outside of his body, looking down at his own unconscious form. So if you've ever, ever had an experience that you couldn't explain, or if you're interested in what sits at the intersection of science, consciousness and personal transformation, then this episode will be a great one for you. Let's jump in. So, Ray, welcome to the podcast. It's so lovely to be having a conversation with you, Jordan.

Thank you. It is an honor and privilege to be with you today. Thank you so much for having me as your guest.

Yeah, wonderful. Now, Ray, your work bridges science, spirituality, and personal transformation as well. So can you take me back to maybe one of the first turning points, you know, a moment when your worldview really began to shift?

Well, I would say the biggest one for me was my NDE, or near death experience that occurred when I was 20 years old. I'll briefly take you through it. I was living at home with my parents at the time, and there was a gas leak from the stove, which is on the first floor. Now I'm on the second floor. That's where my bedroom is located. So I'm right above the stove and the gas is leaking. In the morning, my mom, you know, I guess, turns on the stove to, you know, make breakfast or what have you. And there was a big ball of flames. It caught the wall on fire. There was smoke. But here's the thing, it wasn't the smoke and it wasn't the fire that got me. It was the gas because I had been inhaling it all night long for who knows how many hours. So I hear the fire Trucks. I hear everything, all the commotion downstairs. And I go to get out of bed and I find parts of my body are paralyzed. I can't move them. My legs just feel like they're £5,000. And I can't get out of the bed because only my arms. I couldn't even yell. Like, my face was numb and I couldn't. Couldn't say anything, couldn't scream. So I could use my right arm. Well, and my left arm. So, so, so I managed to pull and pull and pull till I got to the edge of the bed and finally I roll out and boom, I hit the floor face first. And you know how when you get hit, you're waiting for pain to set in, right? There's like that little pause and you're just like, oh, this is really going to hurt. Well, that pain never came. And it didn't come because I wasn't in that body anymore. I was above it. I was in the corner of the room and I was looking down on my lifeless body. And this sounds scary, but it wasn't. For some reason. It just did not frighten me at all. In fact, Jason, there's this huge cone shaped white light, and I'm really doing it a disservice to call it a light. This is not light. This is light. This is love. This is love, energy. This is painlessness. This is euphoria. This is every positive adjective I can possibly put into this sentence. And. And it's. I'm one with that light. And at the end of the light is a being that tells me it's okay to come into the light. And so I believe it. And I begin to go in a little. And as I go in, it feels better and better. And what happened was, is I guess they heard the thump downstairs. My father came running up first. Then he kicked in the door and he scooped me up and he was screaming for the paramedics. And I'm watching him do this. And my dad and I really, you know, we didn't have a great relationship growing up. In fact, I would say he hugged me a total of five times in my life. And one of them was when I was dead. So it was something that I had longed for. So I asked the being if I could go back. And I don't know if that's why I was allowed to come back. I really have no idea. But I did. And when I came to, I was on the floor in the living room, and the paramedics were working on me with their tools. And I said, I Said, guys, guys, I feel great. I mean, you know, get off me. I'm good, I'm good. I didn't even know. Like, I was trying to figure out why, why are they working on me? Like, I feel so good. It was that euphoria that, that stays with you for a while. And they're like, you know, I'm trying to tell them I've never felt better in my life. Kid, listen, you are so far from okay. Just, you know. And I said, but did you see the light? Did you hear the voice? Wasn't that amazing? And then they start looking at me like, and each other like this guy's, you know, losing it. And I just shut up. Because after that I, I realized that I was telling a story that no one was ever going to believe and I just better keep my mouth shut. But that was the catalyst right there.

That was the catalyst. Wow. And in your books you talk about awakening and the process of awakening. Is that where it started for you? Do you think that was the beginning of the journey?

Yeah, that was the first because prior to that I chose atheism. I was raised Catholic, but I really pushed back on that. Not because of Catholicism, it was more because that's what my parents believed in and I was rebelling against them. So I chose to go all the way to the other side of the spectrum and call myself an atheist. I don't even know if I knew that, that what that was, but I bought into that eventually and that was the first step of the process of me returning from that.

Yes. And what did that journey demand of you? You know, that process of awakening, what did it require of you to put down or set aside or reimagine for your life?

Oh my gosh. So I think awakening is. There's a series of events or there was a series of events and you know, each one, like the NDE is something that just strips you to your core and makes you re look at everything. And it's not always pleasant. You know, the, the, the ND itself was magical. But after that, you know, trying to tell people, people told me I was crazy trying to put it together. There was no Internet now there's no PCs yet. I'm showing my age. But, you know, that's the way it was. I, I couldn't go to Google and type in, you know, near death experience.

I, no idea. I had my first out of body experiences when I was about 19 and I started that journey at that time. And for me there was also no reference point. There wasn't A lot of information. You couldn't just look it up online and figure it out and connect with people that way. Even though I think it's different now, I think the journey, as you said, is not easy, is it? So it's a. No, it's a challenging one. How do people equip themselves? How did you equip yourself?

Well, eventually I found mentors. I. When I dove into this and I decided that this is what I wanted to do, I went back to college for metaphysics. I'm now completing my doctorate. And I also found mentors that could help me, you know, kind of make sense of everything. There was a time when I thought I was completely insane, and I. And I really believed that I was insane. And I had just met my second wife and who's a doctor of psychology, of all things, and I'm telling her I think I'm insane. And I expect that she's just gonna say, call this person. Here's your referral. Never call me again. See you by. We were, like, dating for two months at the time. You know, it was new. But that's not what happened at all. She says. In fact, she goes, let me take you to a medium. And I said, what. What's a medium? She goes, well, you might be one. You might be a medium and a psychic, and you just don't even know it. And I said, I don't even know what these things are. What are you talking about? You think I see dead people? I'm like, check, please. She's crazy. I gotta get out of here. So. But no, I, I, you know, I. Seriously, I did it, and it was the best thing I ever did because I was meeting with another person that understood everything I saw, everything I was seeing thereafter. Because afterwards I came back and I was able to see things and know things that I don't know why or how. They just. I just did.

Yeah.

And she was able to clarify that for me.

Well, I hope you're enjoying the second series of Sacred Stories of the Spirit this season. Conversations traverse change, identity and belonging, and they ask us how to live with more integrity, more courage, and more connection, both to ourselves and each other. Together, we're looking at what it means to live story as practice, to let story guide our healing, our growth, and our understanding of what's possible in the day to day. Stay with us as we journey through the landscapes of courage or authenticity and transformation. So in terms of a bit of a guide for listeners who might be going through some kind of transformation or transition, you've spoken about, you know, the idea of finding mentors, finding people that believe and understand what you might need. Any, anything else that you think is important?

Well, I, you know, I've read everything that I could possibly get my hands on. Now there are computers at this time that I'm researching, So I watched YouTube videos. But you have to find things that resonate with you because as we know, there's a lot of stuff out there, right. And you know, I wasn't a big woo woo person. I was very analytical in my judgment. I, I needed a plausible scientific theory to support it or I wasn't going to believe it. You know, you can't go from all the way the needle of atheism is back here, right? Go all the way back to becoming a believer without you giving me some sort of science in to help me get along to get there. You know what I mean? So I started studying physics with metaphysics and I learned things. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Tesla. Oh my God. Tesla opened my eyes to so many things. His statement, the secrets of the universe can be found in energy, frequency and vibration. That's so beyond true. And, and now when we look back, that was 1901. Do you know that his inventions, he didn't write them down or chart them or patent them. And in fact, JP Morgan refused to invest in his method of creating electricity because he's like, we don't have to create it. It's already around the whole earth. We should just give it away for free. And JP Morgan is like, free? That's not in my vocabulary. So he went with Thomas Edison, who built a power plant and people could pay the power plant, you know, so he was just so brilliant and he was definitely had that universal connection. Love it.

I love it a lot. There's a couple of questions maybe that I'll come back to, but I want to jump on the, the Nikola Tesla connection and the connection with frequency and vibration. I really have a lot of interest in this area and a lot of my creative work has been around how we find a way to expand language. So rather than just, you know, the language that we have, which is a logical structure, how do we build this more encompassing language that is incorporates intuition and felt sense and knowing and allows a more expansive experience, which I think comes down to using vibration and tapping into that kind of vibrational energy. But what do you think about that? What do you think we would need to reimagine if we were to look at that idea?

When I started, I mean, you hit it right on the head. When I started teaching manifestation, I found that some people would get it right away and just get the things that they were looking for and trying to get, and others did not. So I tried to figure out why those people weren't as successful as the others. And what I figured out is this. The universe, like you said, does not speak English, French, Japanese, or anything else. It speaks vibration. So we have to learn to speak in vibration. How do we do that? Well, we change our words to emotions because our words trigger emotions that stimulate our cells on a specific frequency. Now we're emitting that frequency. And one of the techniques that I came up with, I call it say it three ways. And this is how it works. Most people that teach manifestation will always say, envision it as though you already have it. Now that has value. I'm not taking away from that at all. I'm adding to it. I'm saying, because we know an affirmation, we have to be. We have to be able to conceive it, believe it, to achieve it. All three elements must be there. So if you don't believe it and you're saying something that you don't believe, you can't change your vibration. So if I say, I want to be wealthy, or I am wealthy, I am wealthy. I am wealthy. I am wealthy. Am I wealthy? I can't trick my mind into thinking that I am if I'm not right. But here's what I can do. If I say it three ways and I say, I want to be wealthy, I will be wealthy. I am wealthy. Now, I've built a progression of emotions to get to that state. And it doesn't stop there. Then we go into a visual. A visualization incorporating all six, five senses going into the sixth, because we do have six, all five into the sixth. And we stimulate it more. And we're. The more we stimulate that emotion, the more we stimulate the vibration, the more we push it out. And the farther we push it out, the more likely it is to find its match. So that is learning how to express your words and turn them into a vibration through emotion is the answer to communicating with the universe.

Yeah. Thank you. One of the other things I just wanted to go back to and just circle back to was your. Your idea that we have to resonate with the information that we find so that there's so much information out there, but the importance is that resonance. And I think it's so true. I really want to. I really want to land on that, because you're right that we exist in A sea of information. And there is so much. But I think that resonance is something that we really underestimate. I think that that is one of the best guides that we get from our body and all of our energetic ecosystem pointing us in the right direction. Do you think people understand that resonance experience certain. And how powerful it is?

I don't know. I think that you have to really understand what the feeling is when something resonates versus when it doesn't. Because we force things to resonate. Right. Because people tell us this is supposed to make you happy. Right. So that we buy into that and we push for that and we try to achieve that. But that quote, unquote, may not be what resonates with you. And that was one of the things that, you know, for me that I learned. I always thought, well, I had to have money, I had a power, I had a success. I had to have some sort of a title that made me feel important. And it wasn't until I realized that that's all nonsense and BS that that didn't really resonate with me. What really did was contentment. It's not about how much I have. It's about my happy with what I have. Stop and smell the roses. How do I feel about that? Am I content? Not what does everybody else think I should have? Not do I measure up, so to speak. Push that aside. That's all egoic. All egoic mind. And then you will find what truly resonates with you.

Yes. Yes. And I think one of the challenges with resonance is that it's not necessarily direct. You know, it's not. It's not a very clear, loud voice externally saying, this does it. This is the resonance. You have to. You have to learn how to feel it. You have to learn how to trust it, don't you? It's a. Yeah. It's an evolution of how you connect with your sensory experience. I think to know that, oh, this feeling is a feeling that I'm going in the right direction. It sounds basic, and I think for some people, it's very intuitive, and some people are very good at it. But I think it's worth stepping back and saying, actually, we can learn to feel into it more because it's. I think it's. I think it's really honest. I think it's one of the most honest things that we have to go by.

It sure is. And it's one of the biggest things I work on with my clients. We go through, you know, whose thoughts are actually yours and whose are somebody else's that you think is important because we have so much dialogue and so much information that has been given to us since birth. Right. And all of that is in there, and we react to it through the egoic mind, not even realizing that we do that.

No, we never realize because people don't tell us. We grow up not having this information.

That's exactly right. So when you break away from that, you break away from the ego and you start to communicate with your awareness, because your awareness is the highest level of your consciousness. You become aware of your consciousness or aware of your awareness. Now, from this level, you can see and. Or I should say, feel what resonates and what's garbage or not. I won't say garbage, but what was given to you. And now you can decide for yourself which things are right for you.

Yes. Yes. I love it. Thank you. So if we talk about the role of storytelling in your own healing journey, what did you do in the. In the sense of being able to evolve your story or be able to release an old story that. That isn't true anymore?

Yeah. So one of the biggest things for me was journaling. And I. If you read the first book, I actually take the journal entries to the best of recollection, and I. And I put them in the book. Now, when the first book goes all the way back to my early days, so I didn't have the exact dates and things of that nature, but the second book actually has the dates because it was planned. Anyway, the point is, I took the experiences and I journaled them and I wrote about them, and it was very cathartic because it allowed me to look at myself from the third person. And from there I was able to become what I call the director of my own life. So do I want to behave that way when that happens again? Is that the person that I want to be, or am I just being reactive because that's what I saw as a child? Am I being reactive because that's what I was taught was right. That's the way you're supposed to be, and you really start to look at yourself. And when I put these things in the book, it was never meant to be a book, by the way. My wife looked at it and said, you can help a lot of people with this. And I said, but, yeah, that's. That's my raw. You know, I don't think I want to put this out anywhere. But I did, and it got a tremendous response as a result. And now when I meet people at conferences or speaking events and they say, Your book changed me. That means a lot to me.

Yeah, that's lovely. Thank you. So what do you think is the thing that we struggle with? You know, a lot of people have these stories that are very precious to them. It may be about their connection with self or with spirit or their spiritual experiences, or stories of personal evolution and growth, but I think we find it hard very often to share them in daylight hours, you know, with the people that we know, with friends and family, people that we work with. What do you think the barrier is? Do you think we can shift the dial? I mean, I would love to move to a place where we can have these conversations more openly and broadly. And it's really, you know, one of the, the purposes of this podcast. But what are the challenges that you think we are facing today?

That it's all fear based? Right. Because let's go back to my NDA for a moment. When I started to tell people about that, they judged me and told me I was crazy. My own mother was in complete denial of the, of the whole situation. Now I understand why, because if my son died on my watch, I would be in denial too. She, I didn't write the book until I GUESS she was 82 years old or we had a conversation. She picked up the phone, she goes, you must hate me in it. I said, I don't hate you at all. I said, I understand you now. I understand everything now about our relationship. We're closer now than we've ever been. And she's like, okay, well, then let me tell you, you actually died four times. And she told me the whole story about how I died on the way to the hospital and the ambulance kept pulling over because they had the paddles. They wouldn't use them while they're driving, I guess. So they pulled over or whatever. So there was more to the story that I finally got. But the point was, is after, you know, it was accepted and we're able to let our guard down and we're able to say these things without fear. And I know that's easier said than done, I really do. But that's what we must do and find a person that's not going to reject you and push back and say, no, that's impossible, that can't happen. You know, we're out there. We are. We really are. There's a big community of us now like you doing this podcast. Then thank you for doing this podcast.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's good to know. And I remind myself frequently that there are people out there. It's Keeping that in the back of our minds. I think that's fantastic. There's more than anything, I think that's amazing. And I think if more people can know that and feel that and hear that, that's exactly what we want. So thank you for that. Your background and your work spans the spiritual and the business world. So how do you reconcile this in daily life? And do you find it easier now than you once did or still challenging?

So when I was. Before I did this full time, I was a business person, and I was trying to be as successful as possible and have that title and, you know, do all the things that were supposed to make me happy. And part of my awakening was stepping away from that and knowing that I had to end that and move into a different path. Now this is very difficult to do, especially given a set of circumstances. So, you know, I was. My kids were getting older, okay. So they were at a point where they were about to go to college, and I was able to do it a little bit easier. If you have small children and you have to make a certain amount of money, you could be, you know, stuck. But it could be a means to an end. And that's what I tell people. It could be a means to an end. So study and learn. And then when the day comes that you can walk away and do what you want to do and, you know, there are ways to make a living. It may not be as great as it. As it was when you were on top of the business world, or maybe it is. I, you know, I don't know. But. Point being is you've got to do what you believe in, what aligns with you and who you really are. And this is who I really am. That business guy, that's not me. That was my ego just driving my life.

Yeah, I love. I love hearing that. I think, you know, I think a lot of people will hear something in that that will resonate for them. Do you think you're. There's still a little bit of you that's kind of still in the system, or you kind of feel like you've migrated completely out of the system?

Well, you know, we still have kids to put through college, and. And we still have a mortgage to pay, and we still have, you know, the regular stuff that everybody has. So, you know, to some degree, we're still in it. But the thing is that it's from a different perspective, and we do what we love. Now, I think if your business is about helping other people, you have a spiritual side to your business, and A monetary side, you'll be more successful than if you did not. I read a book a very long time ago called Rich Dad, Poor dad, and it was written by Robert Kiyosaki. And he said something that I'll never forget. He said the most successful businesses in the world have both a spiritual aspect and a monetary one.

You.

If you give people something that changes their life at the same time and you're rewarded monetarily, I think that's okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. Great. Well, listen, right, thank you so much for the conversation, but tell me, where can people find you and what are you up to at the moment?

Sure. Thank you. People can reach me@raycatania.com and you can check out my website and see what's going on. You can learn more about the books that I've written and they're available in 52 countries. I also have private coaching and there's some new stuff that I'm rolling out, but I can't quite say anything about it yet. But I'm really excited. Second, I can. I'll put it right on the website. So subscribe and you'll get everything. First, thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you, Ray. Lovely to chat.

Thank you.

Jordan, thank you for joining me for a conversation with Ray Catania. I hope this story offered you something meaningful, whether that's a new way of understanding vibration and resonance, or a reminder to trust your intuitive senses, or simply the reassurance that you're not alone if your experiences don't fit within conventional frameworks. If you'd like like to learn more about Ray's books, coaching, or upcoming projects, you can find everything@reikatanya.com and if this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, review the podcast, and help other people who are curious about the nature of consciousness and storytelling find the podcast. Until next time, take good care. If you're new to sacred stories of the Spirit, you might like to go back and listen to series one of the podcasts, where the Journey Began. In this first series, we explore the transformative power of story and how the act of sharing, reflecting and reframing our experiences can help us make sense of who we are. So if you haven't already, I invite you to take a listen and hopefully you'll find something in each episode that's timeless. Whether it's an insight, a question, or just a moment of recognition and reflection, enjoy.