HAY HOUSE Living Heaven on Earth WORLD SUMMIT in a Fear-Based Culture 2017

#61 HAY HOUSE Living Heaven on Earth WORLD SUMMIT in a Fear-Based Culture 2017

ANITA MOORJANI IN CONVERSATION WITH GREG SHERWOOD

[Intro music]

SHERWOOD: Hello, and welcome to another session of the 2017 Hay House World Summit. We are delighted to have you taking part in this life-changing annual series. I’m your host, Greg Sherwood. And today we’re gonna get a chance to spend some time with author and teacher Anita Moorjani. Now, my guess is, you may have first encountered Anita’s work like I did through her appearance on one of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s PBS specials. Wayne was celebrating her life-changing insights born of her near-death experience on that program, and I was so blown away by it, I immediately went out and read her New York Times best-selling book, Dying to Be Me. Now in this book—in that original book, Anita describes how her doctors had given her mere hours to live on the morning of February 2, 2006. Unable to move and in deep coma caused by the cancer that ravaged her body for nearly four years, Anita entered another realm where she experienced great clarity and understanding about her life and purpose here on Earth. In that realm, she was given a choice of whether to return to life or continue on to death. Anita chose to return to life when she realized that heaven is a state, not a place, and because of this awareness, she made a remarkable and complete recovery within weeks of coming out of the coma. Now completely cancer free, Anita travels the globe, giving talks and workshops as well as speaking at conferences and special events. Now here’s the really cool thing: Anita has written a second book that in many ways is just as profound as the first. That’s because in it, Anita gives us the simple keys to making our lives indeed heaven on Earth, regardless of our life situation. And the good news—we don’t necessarily have to have a near-death experience to understand her message. Now the book is called, What If This Is Heaven? How Our Cultural Myths Keep Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth. Key insight in the book, of course, is that heaven is a state of being, and I quote Anita here: “Your only work is to love yourself, value yourself, and embody this truth of self-worth and self-love so that you can be love in action. That is true service to yourself and to those who surround you.” Well, if that is not a great notion to start a conversation with, I don’t know what is. Anita Moorjani, welcome to this year’s Hay House World Summit.

MOORJANI: Wow. [Laughs] Thank you so much for that beautiful, beautiful introduction, Greg. Thank you.

SHERWOOD: Well, I’m very jazzed, because I just completed the first book. And I read the first book, and now I just read the second book, and it really is amazing how you’ve taken that experience—and then you were connected with Wayne Dyer, and you became sort of this phenomenon that’s given so many thousands of people, literally around the world, insights about something that most of us just fantasized or feared. And one of the things that I love about your story—and maybe we’ll just start here, is that really, as human beings, as you’ve understood it and gone on to explain even in your second book, we don’t have anything to fear.

MOORJANI: Absolutely. We don’t have anything to fear, and the problem is, we’ve been brought up in a fear- based culture. And I won’t say a fear-based world, because the world is not fear based, but we’ve made it so

by the way we teach people. And so we even teach people to fear death. Not just the dying process but what happens after death. We teach people to fear judgment and retribution and so on. But I realize that death, in and of itself, is actually a beautiful state, and there’s nothing to fear.

SHERWOOD: Well, this is just one of the many ideas, literally the dozens of ideas that you have in the new book. And as your first book was obviously inspired by your near-death experience, this one goes on to explore some of the philosophical and practical revelations you had in the course both of having that experience but then living in the real world with the rest of us after the fact. You had to then come back to us and live in this world, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.

MOORJANI: No. It’s not easy at all, because—so, you know, when I was in the other realm, I realized that everything that I believed was the opposite of what I—of what is truth. Everything that I had been taught to believe was the opposite of actual truth, of what I needed to know in order to make my life work. And when I say everything, I mean everything. You know, we operate from a place of fear. So, one thing is that I had always felt like an outsider. I’d always felt separate from everyone else. In that realm, I realized we’re all connected. We’re all one. We’re not separated. I’d always lived from a place of fear. I realized there’s nothing to fear. I’d always thought we were victims of what happened to us. I realized we’re not. The universe actually watches out for us. The universe or God or whatever we want to call it, or our higher self, has our back, and everything that happens to us, even though it seems difficult at that time to accept it, actually happens for our benefit, to take us to the next level. And so every single thing I learned in that realm, like even the way I perceived illness, was completely wrong. I realized our bodies are actually wise beyond what we give them credit for. And even illness comes in—we think it’s an illness that we have to kill and destroy and battle, but actually, an illness, what we label as an illness, is our body’s way of communicating with us, and it’s our body’s way of trying to heal. But then we battle with this body’s way of trying to heal, and we turn it into this full-blown illness. So there were all these things where I just realized, oh my God, I’ve been living my life completely wrong.

SHERWOOD: I know, and that’s what I love, and that gets to the point, I think, of the subhead in our new book titled, What If This Is Heaven? And the subtitle is, How Our Cultural Myths Keep Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth.

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: And indeed, it’s these myths. What you were just describing as these untruths. These things that we all grow up with and just assume are, you know, just the reality. It’s the water we swim in. Your perspective, born of that extraordinary experience you had, really turned the world upside down. And it’s really fascinating.

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: Was this a conclusion you came to in the moment of that experience, of the near-death experience? Or was it as you reflected upon it later as you recovered and got on in the world?

MOORJANI: The actual realization that I had been living life all wrong happened within that realm. And I’ll tell you what it feels like. If you imagine that you’ve been blind your entire life—and if you’ve been blind your whole life, you know, the way you perceive the world is completely different from the way it actually is, because you have no perception of color, for example. Like, even if someone describes color to you, how do you even perceive it? How do you even imagine colors if you’ve never seen them? And you have no perception of things like depth of field and distance. You have to walk the distance. You can’t look at a building or a wall, and you don’t have the sight to do that, to gauge, oh, that’s 40 feet away, or 60 feet away. You have to actually pace it, and then you realize how far it is. And you won’t understand when people say, “The sky is blue, and there’s a bird flying in the sky.” You won’t even understand what it means to get into an elevator and come out on a different floor. It’s like, I got into this room, and I came out, and I entered another dimension. So now, imagine if you die and you have a completely different perspective, which is the equivalent of one day, you have sight. You were this blinded person, and one day, you have sight. And in that being sighted, even if it’s for 24 hours, 36 hours, suddenly everything makes sense. It’s like, “Oh my God, that’s what it means to get in an elevator. That’s what a building is.” And I thought I was going into a different dimension, into another reality, and oh, my gosh. I kept bumping into this table. That’s what it is. It’s a table. I can move it out of the way. I thought it was my karma to keep banging into this same thing and having this pain here in my shin, and I thought I attracted it to me. But no, I can walk around it. I can move it away. And you suddenly realize the way you perceived everything was so far out from what it really is. That’s what it felt like. It was like, “Oh my, it’s so different.” And what was really interesting was when I came back, when I came out of the coma. You know, nothing can change that. Once you’ve had that vision, you go back to being blind, but nothing, nothing can change the way you now perceive reality. And I felt I had gone back to being blind, but I had that day of where I had vision. But I was now back in a world where everybody else was still blind. They were still blind from birth. So I thought, you know, everyone will wanna know this, because I truly felt that I had found all the answers. I felt—I believed that I had found a way to cure my cancer. I watched the tumors dissolve from my body, and the doctors couldn’t explain it, and everything was unraveling exactly as I knew it would. And I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. And I thought everyone would be, “Wow, this is amazing. I wanna do that too. I wanna live that way too.” I really wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I wanted to talk about illness, about cancer, what I believed caused it for me and I believe it probably causes it for a lot of people, even if not everyone. I wanted to talk about why we struggle, why we feel lost and depressed and fearful all the time. I wanted to shout all these things out. What I realized, though, is as I started shouting about them, I got a lot of resistance. People were not as open to hearing about it as I thought. I thought I would be welcomed and everyone would say, “Whoa, this is so cool. I can live my life in heaven too.” But they weren’t, because the things I was saying went against medical science. It went against religion, because I talked about what happens in the afterlife. It went against religion. It went against everything that we’re taught in school. It went against education, because I said that competition is really bad for us. We’re actually supposed to collaborate, because we’re all one. We’re facets of one consciousness, and in fact, competition actually—it actually—how would I say? Dulls our creativity, because we’re so focused on the physical. We get into this fear state that we have to get ahead of everyone else. That we are so focused on the physical, we lose our channel to the nonphysical, and we lose our creativity. And I can explain this more in a bit. But anyway, everything I was saying was going against the normal, physical life and the normal paradigms that we’re taught to buy into. But people were resistant, so I kept quiet. I stopped sharing.

SHERWOOD: [Laughs] I bet.

MOORJANI: And I could not integrate back into the life that I had before, because I could not go back to being the person that I used to be. And it’s not even that I didn’t want to. But it’s that you can’t. You’re not that person anymore.

SHERWOOD: Well, that’s what’s fascinating about it. I mean, pushing your metaphor that suddenly a blind person being able to see, but then losing that sight after, let’s say, 24 or 36 hours. So they go back into a world where everybody else is blind and has just the limits of perception that person now has. But you’ve seen the light, so to speak, and nobody else wants to hear it, because so many of the ideas—you know, a couple, like the anticompetitive notion. And I love the notion that you outline in the book, and I’d love for you to discuss it a little bit, because it’s so contradictory to so many things. I think even those of us who are big Hay House fans and read lots of the authors and go the events know the ego—the notion of the idea of the ego is sort of like—even Wayne Dyer, he loved to use the ego as a punching bag sometimes, ’cause it becomes the straw dog that lives inside of us that many, many teachers use to explain to us, we’ve got to get rid of that bad guy, ’cause you’ve got this other side of your life to blossom, and it’s in the way. And yet in your new book you kind of go, “That ain’t necessarily so.”

MOORJANI: [Laughs] I know [laughs]. I like to stretch the boundaries a bit, because truly, I did realize, when I was in the other realm, I was brought up to believe that we have to overcome the ego in order to be spiritual. We have to overcome the ego, and it was only in the other realm did I realize the ego is a part of who I am, and to constantly judge and belittle my ego is to tell myself that there’s something wrong with me. And every time my ego rears its head, my focus is on trying to squash it down, and what ends up happening is that if we’re constantly pushing our ego down and saying, “We shouldn’t be egotistical, we shouldn’t be egotistical,” we start to dim our own light. And so what I actually talk about in the book, it’s not about squashing your ego. It’s about allowing your ego to shine but also about increasing your awareness. Your awareness of the whole, awareness of everyone else. And people who appear to be what we call egotistical, like narcissistic egotistical, their egos are switched way up. But their awareness is low. If somebody’s ego is way up, the way to help them is not to tell them, “Stop being so egotistical.” It’s not about toning down your ego. It’s about tuning up your awareness so the two are balanced.

SHERWOOD: I see—and also, the whole thing that it seems that when you think of egos—and clearly we have them for a reason. They’re a healthy boundary for us to understand where we are and where we’re not in the world. They obviously get overinflated, and they seem to attach to fear a lot. To get back to what you were just—

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: And I loved in the book how you got a lot of pushback when you brought this ego thing up with a small group, and you relate the story. And particularly—I thought it was particularly funny, ’cause a couple of women in the group go, “Hey, I married a total egomaniac. I’m sorry, I cannot deal with egos.” Right? And yet you explained a little bit of what you explained just now. But that you can help somebody

that might be considered egomaniacal or narcissistic or too full of themselves. You can help pull them back. But it is probably—they’re acting out, probably out their own fears, and their own fact that their awareness is muted in some unfair way.

MOORJANI: Yes. Exactly. And very often, people who do come across as being what we call egotistical are doing it to draw attention to themselves because they lack self-love. So the ego—what appears to be that ego. So, even if I appear to be—if I see my own ego coming up, I just embrace it. Once you embrace it, it’s not even an issue, because it is there to give you your individuality. Because here’s what happens—or here’s what used to happen to me. I was a pushover. I was a doormat, because I never allowed my ego to speak up. Because the ego is the part of you that speaks up, that speaks for your own rights. The ego is the part of you that creates boundaries. If you keep squashing that down, and yet—and if your awareness of other people is constantly at full blast, what you end up doing is you end up constantly giving and giving and giving of yourself. You open yourself up for other people whose awareness is slow and their ego is up. You kind of open yourself to be completely being drained or used up by them.

SHERWOOD: And I think that’s really interesting. And this sounds parallel to many people’s teachings. Particularly, I loved the fact that one of the chapters in your book is devoted to—the myth that you’re addressing is that women are the weaker sex. And I think there’s a parallel between what you were talking about right now, is that women traditionally, in many cultures, certainly the cultures that you’ve experienced over the course of your lifetime—

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: —including the current one here in the United States, we tend to make—have always made women second-class citizens. And you as a species, or as a subset of the species, women are really good at biting their tongue, at swallowing their pride, of playing down their ego, of humbling themselves to the moment for the better good of the group or the better good of the kids, or certainly the better good of their significant other. And this is not necessarily healthy for them.

MOORJANI: No. And it’s not. It’s not. Exactly. So I do feel that when they do, they’re doing it in many cases— with many women—I know this is the case for me before I had cancer. One of the reasons I would suppress my ego was, I didn’t want to be judged as being egotistical.

SHERWOOD: Right.

MOORJANI: Like if someone said to me, “You have to love yourself,” my biggest fear in appearing to love myself or in appearing to stand up for myself or do things for myself, my biggest fear was for other people to judge me as being bitchy, which—you know, for some reason, we do have double standards where it’s okay for men to do it but not for women. The minute women do it, we’re considered bitchy. Now, the interesting thing is, it’s not men who judge us. It’s both. It’s men and women. But the other fear that a lot of women have is that if I stand up for myself, if I’m too strong, I may become undesirable to men. And I know that’s something I used to feel. That’s something I grew up with in my culture.

SHERWOOD: Yeah, and see, that’s just—I mean, even within this world, it’s—you don’t have to have had an extraordinary, a near-death experience to realize how catawampus and ill-informed all those things are. But the fact that you can bring back a perspective from that space of—and I have to ask this question, because when you were in that space, that realm that you got to experience at the—what we thought or what everybody thought was gonna be the end of your life. Did you still have a sense of your ego, or were you observing you? I know you were observing the doctors and observing your husband and as they struggled to deal with your medical crisis. Did you still feel—were you still Anita, or were you something else?

MOORJANI: Interestingly, I was—I was aware that I was still the same soul or spirit or entity that was in the body of Anita, but I realized I was something even more or bigger than just Anita. Like, little Anita was little Anita. This physical—it was a little—this person that existed in this lifetime. But I was something bigger that had chosen to express as Anita in this lifetime, and that’s when it made—for the first time, I realized, “Oh my God, there is a reason for me to express myself as Anita in this lifetime with these circumstances.” It gave meaning to the person who thought that my life was insignificant and meaningless. From that perspective, I saw meaning even in this physical existence as Anita.

SHERWOOD: [Simultaneous talking] and that’s an act of accepting your ego, right?

MOORJANI: Yes. And the I who I was from that realm was much much bigger and more detached to what actually happened to Anita—the physical Anita. Very detached. Because it was a small component of who I truly was, and so from that perspective, the lack of ego would be in that I knew that I had to make a choice from a nonego, unconditionally loving space. Like even whether to live, whether to die. What is best for the whole, not just what is best for little Anita and her husband and her mom, but what is best for the whole tapestry, the whole grand tapestry. Is it better for me to go back and be Anita? Or is it better for me to stay here in this realm?

SHERWOOD: See, it’s so interesting, ’cause you just made me—I got the chills, ’cause I was thinking of the story of the Buddha, of Siddhartha, and when he finally reached enlightenment, he had that same question, right? It was, “I think I’ll just sit here and be in nirvana.” But it was brought to him that, no, you could go back and teach. You can go back and be in that world and be of value. So maybe all of us have that option within us.

MOORJANI: Yeah. I believe we do. We do have that option. And it was really interesting, because I was—and then I sensed my father telling me that “You haven’t completed your purpose. You need to go back.” And I knew there was some big purpose, and I saw myself speaking to people, thousands of people. But I didn’t know what I was going to speak to them about, because, of course, this hadn’t happened yet. And the thing is—when I told you that I came back and I started shouting it from the rooftops and people were resistant, and so I stopped sharing it—I actually stopped sharing it. And then I became more reclusive, much more reclusive. And I started writing about it, and I shared it on the Internet. And as you know, Wayne Dyer discovered my story, and then he brought me on the PBS show, and then Hay House published my book, and so on, and one thing led to another. And it’s just unfolded for me. What is really interesting is that in these last 10 years—so, it was 10 years ago I had that near-death experience.

SHERWOOD: God, it was that long ago. Wow.

MOORJANI: I know. Can you believe it? It was 2006.

SHERWOOD: I know, it doesn’t seem—it’s sort of neat that we’re—yeah. That’s incredible.

MOORJANI: Yeah. And so in these last 10 years, I have still been living my life the way I learned in the other realm. Like I know that I don’t need to chase and pursue anything, because the point is, no matter what we want in our lives, all we have to do is be who we are, and what is truly ours will come. The minute you start chasing and pursuing, it becomes an act of fear. Because that’s why you chase and pursue. You feel, “I’m not worthy. I’m not deserving, so I have to go out and prove myself and chase and work hard to get it.” Whereas when you know that you are worthy and deserving and you know you’re here for a purpose, you just have to be who you are, be authentic, and what’s yours will always come to you, and your true purpose will unfold before you. And that’s exactly what I had been doing these last 10 years. So when I looked back recently, like over the past 10 years, and I thought, “This is really interesting.” You know, I had to move away from my old community and everything, but I have actually been living my life the way I wanted to. And as I look back, I see that everything’s unfolded, and I’m doing—I get to do what I love to do. My fear has completely—has been gone. And I haven’t worried about illnesses. I haven’t worried about finances. I haven’t worried about anything. And I’m just trying to live in joy every day. And I looked back and I thought, “Hmm. This has been kind of fun. This feels like heaven.” And I kind of—I actually said that. I thought—because the real difference between heaven and hell is fear. Fear is hell. And I thought, “These last 10 years, I’ve had no fear. I’ve felt so”—you know, like so good about just following my path and allowing it to unfold, and I thought, This feels like heaven.” And I then I thought, “Maybe when I died, maybe I didn’t come back. Maybe I’m still dead and I’m still there, and this is what it feels like to be in heaven.” That’s how the title of my book came about. What if This Is—

SHERWOOD: That is so amazing, ’cause it’s quite a—when I saw the book some weeks ago, when I first got the privilege of knowing I was gonna talk to you, I thought, “There—that is an audacious title.” But also one that sort of smacks in the face of all the aspirational work that all of us so dutifully have done to try to perfect ourselves. [Chuckles] And I just—it has humor in it. It’s profound, because, yeah. Maybe it’s right here on Earth, here. It’s sort of a more amusing way. You know, decades and decades ago, one of the first books written in the—at least here in the States—that was sort of exploring our, you know, the East meeting the West, and what is our real reason to be on the planet, was Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, right? So, Be Here Now was a great statement, right? And now it’s become a cliché, and almost a humorous cliché for people, ’cause it’s been so woven into the standard culture that we live in. But maybe this has happened [laughs]. It’s such a great idea because, you know that’s—I’m sure you must’ve got some pushback when people said, “Oh, you can’t say that”?

MOORJANI: Oh, a lot [laughs]. A lot. But I expected it, which—I don’t know if you recall the opening line in my introduction where I actually say that “I can actually sense some of you thinking that ‘How can this be heaven when my life feels like hell?’” or something along those lines. I expected the pushback, and yes, I absolutely did get it. And I do like to be a little bit provocative, controversial. I like to push the boundaries. So I did expect it. And so I do have a lot of people who write things. Even people who haven’t even read

the book who’ve said, “I refuse to read, it because this woman obviously doesn’t know what’s happening in developing countries with people who are starving,” and so on. And I do touch on those, as well, in my book, you know, about the developing countries and the fear base and the starving. And I truly do believe that if we truly knew who we are—if we truly knew who we are, we would eliminate all that. The starvation and the crime from our planet. I truly believe that if we—if each of us—if each of us had a glimpse even for a day, for an hour, if we had a glimpse of who we are, we would together eliminate everything that makes this life hell for some people.

SHERWOOD: And having just read the book, I know perhaps better than our listeners do that because your idea, your essential notion, which I mentioned briefly in the introduction, is that if we all truly understood our real place in the cosmos, we would love ourselves. We would love ourselves unconditionally. We would love everybody unconditionally, which means fear goes away. Compassion just seems to open up. So I can understand somebody going, “How can you call this world heaven? There’s so much pain. There’s so much sorrow. There’s wars. There’s all these diseases.” I mean, it’s not a vision of anybody’s idea of heaven. But you’re talking about for each individual, if we stop having this battle with ourselves, this war with our own bodies, this war with our own idea of how we have to be in the world. That would manifest itself over and over and over again, and we’d start to solve these problems much more rapidly than we are.

MOORJANI: Yes. Absolutely, because when you look at what’s driving everything—you know, I actually believe that we are longing for—like, look at terrorism and the war, it’s because it comes from this notion that we are separate. We are separate. We are all different cultures. We are all different religions. We are all separate people. We have separate governments, and we’re all killing each other, beating each other up. And then as individuals, people are getting sicker. People are getting cancer. I truly believe that we actually long for that love and that belonging again, that togetherness. That oneness. We actually—we come from that oneness, and we long for it while we’re here. And that is what is driving this pain. And so, because of this pain—so many of our actions here come from pain, and they come from fear. These—I believe these are the two things that are the driving force of a lot of our illnesses and a lot of our crime. Because I’ve even said in my book that all this pain that was inside me, all this fear that was inside me, it manifested as cancer. But it could’ve manifested as violence. So the person in prison is no different from me. And it’s the same—it’s the same thing.

SHERWOOD: Yes, and I love that whole section in your book where you focus on medical issues, ’cause—not surprisingly, as a result of your own somewhat miraculous cure after being at death’s door and having the experience you had, but you also survived a very advanced cancer. So I know you probably don’t go through a day where somebody doesn’t contact you about their own life crisis or someone who they’re close to. So how do you handle that—when people look to you for an answer because they’re frustrated with medical science, they’re at their wits end as far as what their options are? Let’s say they had a cancer, not unlike you. What advice or what gift can you give those people that might give them a little more breathing room?

MOORJANI: So first of all, I tell people that they have to take their power back. You know, the responsibility for their lives. It’s not their fault that they got cancer. It’s absolutely not their fault. But I believe that one of the things that we need to do—like if anybody out there who is a healer, a doctor, a caregiver, the most

important thing you can do for a person is first of all to give them hope that they’re gonna live. I am really against doctors who tell people they have only three months to live, and, “You have this advanced cancer,” blah, blah, blah, because you’re taking away all their hope. I believe people need hope to keep going. Then I encourage people to find their will to live. Like, find reasons why—why do you wanna live long? We’re all gonna die anyway, so what is your reason for being on Earth? Get passionate about why you want to be here. Start celebrating life. Stop obsessing about the illness and start celebrating life. Because very often, our illness is a wake-up call that we were killing ourselves even before the illness. Because my cancer didn’t—the cancer I got didn’t come to try and kill me. It came to try and save my life ’cause I was killing myself even before I had cancer. And what I also like to tell people is, find your joy. Find your passion. Find reasons to celebrate. Don’t wait until you are healed to celebrate. Start celebrating now, because that’s how you’re supposed to live life anyway. And, you know—and so very often, we find that the illness comes when we are quite often in a life that we don’t even like. We go to a job that we hate, and I tell people, “Stop taking jobs that you hate.” And they say, “We have to. We have bills to pay. Otherwise, we’ll die.” And I hate to be so dramatic, but if you go to a job you hate every single day, you’ll probably die earlier as well. So imagine a life of going to a job that you hate just to be able to pay the bills, to earn a living—of living a life of going to a job you hate every day. What is the point in that? So I talk to people about all these kinds of things, and I also talk to them about—I may talk to them about the treatments they’re having. And I say, “Are your treatments making you feel empowered? Are the healers and doctors you’re working with—are they making you feel empowered? Or are they making you feel weaker and scared and fearful?” Because we need to feel loved and cared for while we’re going through an illness. The last thing we need are our very own caregivers and healers making us feel fearful, because fear actually suppresses the immune system. So I do sometimes tell them that it doesn’t matter to me what courses of treatment you choose, whether they’re alternative or whether they’re conventional. The real issue is, how do you feel about those treatments? Those treatments and the people administering them need to make you feel strong and empowered and hopeful. [Simultaneous talking]

SHERWOOD: I think that—I mean, it’s such incredible advice born from such an unusual circumstance, your own personal experience. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting in your segment of the new book—and I can’t remember if you talked about this in the old or your first book, because it was some time ago when I read it—this notion that we love, at least in the West, we love to—particularly when we’re facing a chronic illness or a disease like cancer, we love all the war metaphors and the battle metaphors. And you seem to take issue with that, which to me is a little bit—once again, another example of you kind of turning a metaphor on its head.

MOORJANI: Yeah. I don’t believe in “battling” cancer, because, again, it means hating something about yourself, about your body. Something that your body is presenting to you. I believe in healing cancer or healing—and I wouldn’t even say healing cancer. I believe in healing yourself. And because the minute that we’re battling cancer, we’re waging war on our own body, and we are then in this mode of anger and fear and “I need to win this.” And every day, we’re obsessed. And then, when it’s not disappearing, when it’s not going as fast as we want or when we’re not getting the results we want, we start to get fearful and angry, and then we want to try something else. I say this because I’ve been through it. I’ve been through it. And I have had

people—like doctors have said to me, “How can you speak about all this? You’re not a doctor.” And I actually say, “No. I am not a doctor, but I am someone who has faced a terminal illness all the way up to N stage where doctors said I was going to die. Where my organs shut down. I went into a coma. I did, for all intents and purposes, die. But I still came out the other end and lived.” And this something even doctors have not been through, and so I speak from that perspective.

SHERWOOD: Which is an extraordinary perspective to speak from, and it’s so interesting, ’cause one of the things I love about you, Anita, is that you were not raised to be a guru or [laughs]—you know. You have an extraordinary personal history, because you were born in China, and you’re ethnically Indian. And then you’ve lived in different places, and you’ve had a wonderful experience. And then you were a businesswoman, if I’m not mistaken.

MOORJANI: Yeah. I worked in a corporate culture, yes.

SHERWOOD: Yeah, so here’s this—so you’re not somebody who—like, many of my generation in the sixties quit college, quit whatever, and went out on a mountaintop and tried to meditate, for 30 years, their way into enlightenment. You were living your life, a married woman in the business world. You have this extraordinary life challenge of this diagnosis and struggling with it for many years. Then you have this incredible epiphany born of this near-death experience. And I’m wondering if—’cause other people have survived cancer. Many people have not. But a lot of people have survived it. A lot of people have survived it by maybe doing some of the things you’ve talked about, by willing themselves into a more positive state or just letting go and letting God, as our friend Wayne Dyer would say, or they did it because they took massive radiation and chemo treatments. Why do you think—why you? How come you had this extraordinary—and I’m sure everybody listening, myself included—I have lost some of my best, closest friends and family to cancer over the course of my 65 years on the planet. Many of whom I lost at far too young an age. And it’s a great sadness, I think, for all of us who have lost people in that way. You had the opportunity to survive. Why you? Why do you think you were plucked from the cosmos to be the person you’ve become?

MOORJANI: You know what I like to say? I like to say, “Maybe I was the unlucky one and didn’t get to stay on that side.”

SHERWOOD: [Laughs] You made the choice, girlfriend. You made the choice.

MOORJANI: [Laughs] That’s true, I did make the choice to come back. But I felt I was encouraged to come back, and there was work to do. And I think that there were a lot of circumstances to making me come back. But I don’t—one thing I want to be clear is that I don’t feel that I am special or chosen for having come back. I feel it’s more of a, “Okay, you still have work to do, young lady, so get out there and finish your work,” type of thing. Because after having experienced the other realm, I truly feel that even though one’s crossed over, they’re so blessed, and they’re so lucky. We, on this side, we miss them. But we seem to think they lost their battle. They lost their battle to cancer or whatever. But maybe they didn’t.

SHERWOOD: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

MOORJANI: Maybe this—the cancer gave them a graceful way of leaving this world, and also, it’s—we all have to go at some point. But I’m interested to know if you had an opinion or a view as to why I was the one that came back. What would you say to that?

SHERWOOD: Well, here’s my—and this is totally just born of my own experience of having read your books. It is because you had an extraordinary experience growing up in a culture that was not your native culture. An Indian child growing up in Hong Kong, probably under the British. So you had all these different cultures that weren’t your native or parents’ native culture. So in one sense, one of the reasons I would attribute you having had this experience is that you maybe have a certain power of observation that other people who live in a culture that is their culture haven’t had to exercise. And so for some reason, that’s my pop analysis of why maybe you have a certain quality of gifts that allowed you to experience that near-death moment and bring it back to us in a way that maybe some others have chosen not to do or just didn’t see the opportunity.

MOORJANI: I really like your perspective on it. Because when I was growing up, I never felt I belonged anywhere, because I was different from everybody. I’m ethnically Indian, and I grew up in Hong Kong, which is a Chinese city. So the local people around me were all Chinese. But I went to a British school where the other kids in my class, my classmates and all, were all British. So I never belonged with the British kids. I never belonged with the local Chinese people, because I’m Indian, even though I speak fluent Chinese, fluent Cantonese, fluent English. And I speak my parents’ Indian dialect. So even when they would take me to India to visit, I never even felt I belonged there, because I was too westernized for India. And so I never belonged anywhere. My whole life has been feeling like a foreigner or a stranger in a foreign land, and there was no country in the world that has ever felt like home to me. The first time—in fact, when I crossed to the other realm, that was the first time I felt I was at home. And interestingly, when my father said, “It’s not your time. You have to go back,” I actually said to my father, I didn’t—I said to my dad, “I don’t want to go back. For the first time, I feel I’m at home.” And he said, “You’ve always been home. You just didn’t realize it.”

SHERWOOD: Hmm. What do you think he meant by that? Where is home in that statement?

MOORJANI: Home is within us. That’s what I realized. Home is that state of oneness that we are actually all connected. We’re all brothers and sisters. It doesn’t matter where we are on the planet. It’s all home. We’re all one. We’re all connected.

SHERWOOD: And you certainly had that powerful experience when you were in the state of the near-death experience. But you’ve managed to bring that back. You chose to come back, and you’ve managed to—over these last 10 years now, you’ve proven that one can live in this world and live without fear. Live feeling no need to compete tooth and nail with every other person on the planet.

MOORJANI: Yeah.

SHERWOOD: That you’ve realized that the world is not a zero-sum game in which you have to eke out your existence. And that’s pretty extraordinary.

MOORJANI: Thank you. Well, yeah, and life is not a zero-sum game. And what I tell people whenever people say, “Oh, I wanna find my purpose. How do I find my purpose? I wanna know what to do.” Or, “I wanna go off to that dream. I wanna chase that, and that person’s ahead of me, and they stole my job description,” blah, blah. I always tell people, no matter what it is, what they’re going through, all you have to do is ask yourself one question: “Who am I?”

SHERWOOD: Mm-hmm.

MOORJANI: That’s all. “Who am I? Who have come here to be? What am I? When I shine my light as brightly as I can, what is that? What do I look like when I’m being myself fully?” Once we know who we are, that’s all—then every action stems from that, from being who we are. It’s not about, “What do I do?” It’s about, “Who am I?” And that’s really—when people realize that is it, then we lose all the competition and stuff. It’s not about, “I have to be better than them, I have to be better than him or her, I have to get ahead of him or her.” No. It’s about, “Who am I?” And that’s it.

SHERWOOD: Well, and this is really interesting, ’cause this gets back to the conversation we had a few minutes ago about ego. When you can make the statement and answer the question, “Who am I?”—and you answered—you obviously hope that everybody will answer it in the most positive, the most joyous, the most shine-your-light-the-brightest way they can do it. Is that coming from a combination of—in my case, Greg’s ego opening up to my awareness, and it’s a dual light of both awareness, but also I’m a distinct person who has these gifts and skills and has these joys.

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: And so in one sense, you’re not telling me, “Oh, Greg, to feel this thing, you have to make Greg disappear.” It’s, “You just have to let Greg blossom”—out of the fear and negativity that I’ve been trained to believe is real life.

MOORJANI: Yes. You’ve got it 100 percent. It’s a recognition. So, it’s like almost the greater self, the bigger self, the infinite Greg. The God that shines out from behind Greg’s eyes recognizes why it has chosen to come into this life as Greg. So it has to recognize Greg’s specific traits. And it has to go through the ego to recognize that. So you need the ego to identify those traits, because if you’re constantly playing down those traits because you believe it’s egotistical, you will never allow your light to shine bright. And the reason why it’s important to shine your light bright is because if you stay in darkness, it doesn’t do anyone else any good. Because if the people around you are in darkness, it doesn’t—more darkness doesn’t make light. It makes more darkness. At least if you shine your light, at least the others will be able to see.

SHERWOOD: Yeah, and I just see—I think, to me, this is one of the most critically important, unique facets to your most recent book and your teaching as your currently articulating it here, 10 years after that phenomenal event that changed your life, is that we don’t disappear when we blossom into a person who might honestly be able to agree with the rhetorical statement in your book title. “Hey, maybe this is heaven. You know, this is not bad.” Right? And if I can give up all this self-denying, self-hurtful—all the inquisitiveness about, “Why

am I not better? Why am I not feeling happier than I think I am feeling?” And that you strip the thing down to this core nut of—that you’re actually arguing—and in your book, you argue a way to give us conceptually space to blossom.

MOORJANI: Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, that’s a great way of putting it. And that’s—that is what I truly believe, and I’m so—I love the way you articulate it. In fact, I’m blown away by the way you articulated it. And again, I’m going to say something which might be a little bit provocative. But I truly believe that most people who are brought up with a lot of spiritual awareness unfortunately have been taught to suppress their egos.

SHERWOOD: Mm-hmm.

MOORJANI: And this is why people who are—this is why, in fact, most of the leaders in our world are full of egos but no spiritual awareness. Anybody with spiritual awareness has been discouraged to have an ego. You need to have both to truly be a great leader. You truly need both the way the world is right now, because if somebody has no ego, they’re not going to stand up and say, “I want to lead these people out,” if they don’t have an ego. Unfortunately, most people who have the awareness do not have the ego to stand up and be leaders.

SHERWOOD: That is such a fascinating insight. Because as you were saying that, I was thinking of our mutual friend, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who was one of those people who could articulate a way out and a healing opportunity for everybody who cared to listen to him over dozens of books and hundreds of hours of lectures and hundreds of hours of programs on PBS and other places. And as you know, you spent a number of years with him, as have I, till he passed recently.

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: He had an ego. He had a kind of playful ego. But he loved to be the center of attention.

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: He loved to hold court. He had all the things that I would attribute to—he probably wouldn’t like me saying this—kind of a grandfatherly sense of pride in himself and in his family and his abilities to do what he does. But it wasn’t offensive. It wasn’t something that required other people to be pushed down.

MOORJANI: Exactly right. Exactly right. And he would make a great leader. And personalities like him, who have both the spiritual awareness and enough of an ego to give them that ability to lead, to really lead.

SHERWOOD: And so, could you just relate briefly the story that you end the book with that happened the day that we lost Wayne, now many months ago? But it’s in the book. You recall what I’m talking about?

MOORJANI: Yes.

SHERWOOD: You were having a—I think you were having a dinner party or something, and unaware that—if you just tell that lovely story that involves orange [laughs].

MOORJANI: [Laughs] Yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about. In fact, I was having a lunch party, and a friend of mine, Jennifer McLain, she was coming over, and I had a couple of other friends there. So she walks into my home bearing this huge bouquet of orange roses, and they were beautiful. And she presents them to me, and I said, “Wow. These are beautiful.” And she said to me, “What’s with the orange?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “You obviously have somebody on the other realm with very strong energy, male energy on the other realm, who knows that you love orange, because I was reaching for the red roses, and this person—and I could just hear this voice in my head going, ‘Get her the orange ones. Get her the orange ones.’” And I said, “Really?” And I was fascinated by this. But I said, “I can’t think of anyone.” And I was just putting the roses away, and I was thinking to myself, “Oh God, I hope no one I know has passed away.” And so I put them away. Then I forgot about it. And we were eating lunch. And as we were eating lunch, my cell phone rings, and I look at the caller ID. It was Maya Labos, who is Wayne’s booking manager. And she’s been his manager for like 37, 38 years, and I know her pretty well, because we see each other in every country every time we travel, and we’ve been on tour together. So I picked up the phone and I said, “Hey, Maya. What’s up?” And she was crying, and she said, “It’s Wayne. He went in his sleep this morning.” And, wow, I was just really shocked to hear that. Just really shocked. And later I realized it was Wayne that said, ‘Get her the orange roses,’ because Wayne knew that my favorite color was orange. He always teased me about my handbag, and exactly those words when I would come with an orange handbag, an orange purse, an orange phone case—he would be, “What’s with the orange?” And the interesting thing is that he always had an orange with him on stage with him. Every time he’d go onstage, he would take an orange, and he would share that analogy of, “When you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. Because when you squeeze something, you get what’s inside.” So when you squeeze a person, like if you stress out a person or annoy or irritate a person, what comes out is what’s inside. So if anger and fear comes out, that’s what’s inside. And so he says, “What’s inside of you?” And he always finishes that little story, and I think he says it more elegantly than I just did. But he always finishes it by throwing the orange at somebody in the audience. And so—and then his very last—in fact, that very evening after he passed away, I looked on his Facebook page, and I noticed his very last Facebook post before he passed away was that orange story with a photo of him holding an orange.

SHERWOOD: Wow.

MOORJANI: And I thought, Wow. This was amazing. So I really felt the roses were a present from Wayne from the other side.

SHERWOOD: And you know, what I love about that story—I mean, it’s got a lot of wonderful things about it. But it sort of proof positive to me from somebody like you, who has exhibited the capacity to go into another realm, that our good, dear friend Dr. Wayne Dyer is happily ensconced somewhere else, looking down on all of us.

MOORJANI: Oh, yes.

SHERWOOD: Observing, I’m sure with some humor, the world that he was so successful in and shared so many brilliant insights with. Now, we’re coming to the end of our time together, Anita, but I know you wanted to share, and it’s part—it’s actually the PDF attachment, the practice, to this session. But I had hoped that you would lead us through a short little exercise, which will give us, in a small way, a way of thinking our way through towards some of these insights that you share in your new book.

MOORJANI: Oh, sure. I would like to do something like a little exercise. You could say it’s a tiny little meditation, which is only two or three minutes long.

SHERWOOD: Perfect.

MOORJANI: So, if I can—yes, if I can guide the audience through this, the listeners through this.

SHERWOOD: Please.

MOORJANI: And I would like to invite everybody to just sit comfortably or lie comfortably, and just put your feet comfortably on the floor and your hands relaxed on your lap, and close your eyes. Now I want you to visualize that you are at the end of your life. You’re lying there on a bed, and you are aware that you are in the final moments of your life. You’re about to take your final breath. And you’re aware that with the next breath, you’ll cross over. But in this long moment before you cross over, I’d like you to look back on your life. Just look back. Look back at everything you’ve done. Look at the work you’ve done. Look at your accomplishments, at the people. The people you love and the people in your life and your relationships. I want you to ask yourself: is there anything in your life that you did that you regret doing? Are there things you felt you spent time doing which you wish you hadn’t, which you wish you hadn’t given so much time to? Are there things you wish you had more of which you didn’t give time to? What are those things that you wish you did? Are there things you wished you’d done which you hadn’t? Visualize: what are those things? Are there people who you wished you spent more time with, people you love who you wished you’d spent more time with? Are there things you wished you’d said to them? Now I want you to hold on to that feeling, and I want you to slowly come back into your body and become aware that you’ve been given the gift of a second lease of life. And I want you to open your eyes and make a commitment to yourself. You’re now going to spend your life doing the things that you’d wished you’d done, that you want to do, and spending your time with the people who you want to spend your time with. Congratulations, you’ve got another lease at life.

SHERWOOD: Anita Moorjani, what a beautiful way for us to conclude this extraordinary conversation. Thanks for all the good work you do, and thanks for writing this book. It’s such a joy to read and such a joy to spend time with you.

MOORJANI: Thank you so much. I’ve really, really enjoyed this hour so much, really. It’s such a blessing to talk to you.

SHERWOOD: Well, you’re welcome. And thank you all for listening to yet another extraordinary Hay House World Summit session.

ANNOUNCER: Thanks for joining us for the Hay House World Summit 2017. We’re glad you’re a part of our community of spiritual seekers. We hope to continue to inspire you to make real life changes with messages from some of today’s best authors, speakers, and spiritual teachers. We wish you well as you continue on your journey.

[Closing music]

[End of session – 62:05 in length]