What Happens After We Die? With Kelvin Chin

What Happens After We Die? With Kelvin Chin

Where do you go after you die? Is there a previous life’s karma that you are experiencing in this lifetime? Is there heaven and hell? Can we change our destiny? If you have been wondering about these similar things, I invite you to read this interview carefully. Our next guest has many practical answers to these questions because he had some conversation with Jesus and Buddha. He also had some memories of previous lives that spanned more than 6,000 years through meditation. I know you will learn something new from this interview. Please help me welcome Kelvin Chin.

Thank you, Kimchi.

Kelvin, please share with us what you remember from your childhood experience and how it leads you to become a meditation teacher?

I was born in the United States. I was born in Boston and I grew up in a suburb of Boston called Norwood, Massachusetts. My mother was born in China, and she came over when she was three years old in 1929 with her mother. They took a boat over, landed in Seattle and they took a train across to Boston. My grandfather, my mother’s father, had already been here in the United States with his father in the early 1900s. My grandfather was born in China, but he went to high school in Revere, Massachusetts. He graduated high school, but he went there for two years or something when he was sixteen years old or something like that.

As you know, many marriages, especially then, probably all marriages were arranged marriages in China. His father arranged the marriage between my grandmother and my grandfather. My grandfather went back to China and got married. My mother was conceived there and my grandfather came back to work with his father, my great grandfather, here in Massachusetts near Boston somewhere. He saved up money and called from my mother and her mother to come. That was in 1929 when my mom came over. My father was born here in the United States in Chelsea, Massachusetts, but his parents are also Chinese born in Southern China.

I grew up in Norwood, Massachusetts. To give you a sense in terms of the ethnic upbringing, we went to Chinatown to see my grandparents pretty much every weekend. As a young child, I would stay overnight and I’d help. My grandfather had a noodle factory and many people knew it. If anybody reading from the Boston area, even the New York area, his noodles were so delicious. I would go and help make noodles when I was 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 years old. I’d stay over the weekend. His noodles were so amazing that he supplied all the Chinese restaurants in the Massachusetts area and many of them in New York City. He even shipped some down to Washington, DC. That’s how amazing his noodles were. He always told me his secret, which was a little bit more eggs. That’s the first thing that everybody else would take out because it’s the most expensive ingredient.

I would go there on weekends in Chinatown and help my grandfather with his noodle “factory” which was him, my grandmother, aunts and uncles who were growing up, they were 10 or 15 years older than I was. We would all work in the noodle factory and I would help as the little baby guy. I grew up in Norwood, Massachusetts and we were the first ethnic minority of any ethnicity to move into that town of 20,000 people suburb of Boston. I jokingly tell people the other ethnic minority that was already there were the 4 or 5 Jewish families. That was it. It was an Irish Catholic, Italian town basically.

I grew up there and had a fairly normal upbringing. I didn’t have a lot of racial issues. I did have some because any of us Asian-Americans run into it at times somewhere along the way. It was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was so tall. Kimchi, you know that I’m 6’2 barefoot, so that helped and the fact that I could play music well and I was good at all sports. I checked all the boxes off in terms of social acceptance.

I had lots of friends. Some of whom were good academically and some of them weren’t. It didn’t matter to me because to me, it’s about what’s inside the person. Are they a good person? Do they have a good sense of humor? When I was growing up, those were the main two things that I look for in somebody. I think back, years later, a sense of humor is a sign of perspective. Does the person have a perspective on life? Even as a little child, I recognized that as a good trait in people, and for some reason I resonated with those people. They tended to be more loving and open people. They were the ones with a funny sense of humor and the ones who could laugh about themselves too.

That’s a fundamental trait to look for in people as you’re picking friends. Do they take themselves too seriously? I stay away from people like that. I went through school there and I graduated high school. I was the first ethnic minority to graduate from that high school in the history of the town. I graduated number one in my class, went to Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire and I went to Yale graduate school. I studied East Asian Languages and Literature. It’s interesting for your Asian readers here.

Many Asian-Americans in my generation have the same story. Their parents did not want us to speak English with an accent, so they chose to not teach us Chinese. It was all highly intentional. My parents spoke Chinese when they didn’t want us to know what we’re talking about. They didn’t have to talk about us behind our backs. They could talk about us in front of us and we had no idea what they would say. It was good for them and they were thinking, “We don’t want the kids to have an accent, so we’re not going to teach them Chinese.” I learned a teeny little bit at my grandparents on the weekends, but I would forget it because I’m with all these American kids with no other ethnic minorities at all in my growing up.

When I was at Dartmouth, I had to take another class and I was a French major. I had already taken seven years of French before I went to Dartmouth, so I was in advanced French when I got to Dartmouth as a freshman. I became a French major and I studied Psychology in French because I didn’t like the Psychology. They were all behaviorists, BF Skinner theory stuff. At Dartmouth, I wanted to be more humanistic-oriented in terms of psychology, so I studied that in French.

I was so advanced in French that I created my own major in French that was fundamentally a Psychology major in French. I had to take another elective when I was a junior at Dartmouth and I thought, “I’m Chinese-American. I don’t speak Chinese. I’ve always wanted to learn Chinese. My parents won’t teach it, so I’m going to take Chinese.” I took Chinese at Dartmouth because it checked all those boxes and I thought it was great. I learned Mandarin Chinese at Dartmouth and did well at it. One of my professors, Jonathan Mirsky, was one of my Chinese professors, Jonathan and Alex Levin.

Jonathan Mirsky went on and he may still be in London. I’ve been trying to reach him. He left Dartmouth as a Chinese professor and became an international policy expert with a focus in Chinese and he’s a writer for The Economist, a major international journal, or at least he used to be. Jonathan Mirsky was with Henry Kissinger and Nixon in 1972 when they opened up China. He was in the first group after Nixon and Kissinger opened up China. He came back to Dartmouth and he told us that it was amazing.

He was in the first-ever Western group to go to Beijing and met with all the leaders. Zhou Enlai and Mao were there. It was emotionally engaging as well as intellectually engaging for me as a student. It wasn’t only academic, but it had all of this other cultural and historical richness to it. We were in the classroom with Professor Mirsky when he came back from that whole experience in China. I got enamored by the whole Chinese studies thing even though I was a French major, and so I applied to a PhD program at Yale and got in for East Asian Languages and Literature.

Two people got accepted to the program that year, me and this other guy. Kimchi, you know a little bit about my history. I’m the alternative guy. I’m the guy when there’s a fork in the road and everybody’s going left, I take the right fork in the road. The other guy in the program, Jim Feinerman, I probably met him twice during the PhD program there, he continued and finished his PhD. He went to law school, he became an international law school professor at Georgetown University, and he’s probably retired by now. He went that left fork in the road, the traditional route and I went to the right fork and left the program. All that time, I had been meditating since I was nineteen years old. I learned meditation.

I had continued to teach meditation while I was at Yale and that’s the road I went off on when I left Yale and got a Master’s degree. My director of Graduate Studies learned meditation because of me. He wrote me a letter when I was teaching meditation in Asia after that and thanked me, which was interesting because I had probably a total of fifteen minutes of three conversations. Total aggregate time of fifteen minutes the whole time he was there at Yale, but for some reason, I left an impression with him about meditation. That’s the growing up part.

What inspires you or motivates you to keep on practicing and teaching meditation even when you have to manage or handle a professional career?

I learned meditation when I was at Dartmouth at nineteen years old. At that point, I learned TM, Transcendental Meditation. I studied personally directly with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi a number of times. People know him because he taught the Beatles to meditate in 1968. Transcendental Meditation became popular, especially in the 1970s in the US and throughout the world. I became one of his international leaders in that organization for about ten years before I left the organization when they went off in a different direction, but it helped me a lot.

After We Die: After death, you have a choice. You could choose to come back or not to come back between lifetimes.

I continued doing meditation. I was stressed when I was in college. It’s high pressure at Dartmouth, “Everybody graduates number 1 or 2 in their class, so what?” It’s high-pressure. I jokingly but seriously say that I’m one of those students who have to study for the exam. Some of these guys would show up to class every once in a while and they’d ace the exam. I had to work, so it was stressful for me. I learned to meditate. My anxiety plummeted. It went away and I excelled as a student because of that because it freed up more of my mind. My mind is not all stressed out so much. My memory improved, my ability to focus in my classes, pay attention, follow the train of thought and all of that stuff improved after I learned to meditate. I’ve continued to meditate and I’ve continued teaching meditation after I learned to teach in 1973.

I’ve continued to teach meditation all these years even though all my corporate and legal career jobs over the years because the meditation is such an integral part of helping me perform well in my work and engage with my family, my children and my loved ones. I’ve continued to teach it with other people through all those decades, even on the side having a 60, 80-hour a week job at senior level, executive positions. I’m doing and teaching it full-time for the last few years and doing my afterlife work in helping people with overcoming the fear of death, fears and all kinds of anxieties is my focus.

That leads to the next question that I have. You mentioned the book, Overcoming the Fear of Death. You also guide people through their own beliefs, so they won’t fear death anymore. Would you briefly share the four beliefs and how you work with these people on each of those beliefs?

The title of the book is Overcoming the Fear of Death. It’s available everywhere online like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, wherever. People need to google it. I came up with these four beliefs in a conversation with a good friend of mine because we were talking. Let me go back first in what happened to me and why I became interested in this. I back-ended into the death and dying area when my mom died. My mom died in 1982, my third year of law school. It was such a shock to me emotionally and I had already been meditating for twelve years at that time but still, I’m a human being. I was close to my mom. She died suddenly of cancer. She was asymptomatic almost up to the end, so she died quickly.

All of a sudden, she’s gone so how do I deal with this? It was such a shock. I was almost forced by circumstances to figure out how to deal with this in some way. That’s what got me into the whole death and the dying thing. It was a personal experience that shook me. I figured it out not from studying and not from going to even a psychotherapist, which I do recommend that people do. Psychotherapy is great, but I didn’t know what it was then. I self-helped my way out of it and I started talking to people.

If you were around there, if you were in my law school class I would say, “Kimchi, how are you doing?” You say, “Good. How are you doing, Kelvin?” I’d say, “I’m doing okay, but my mom died.” You’d start telling me all kinds of stuff about relatives, friends or somebody that you had lost that you would not normally have told but for me volunteering about my mom. That’s what happened. Little by little once a month or once every few months, I had a conversation like that and it got to be once every couple of weeks. I started having friends call me up. I was one of the first people to have an answering machine. This was 1982. I had an answering machine and people would call me up. After that, in the mid or late ‘80s I started helping people. That’s how it happened.

The reason I came up with these four beliefs is to figure out some way to talk about death and dying that’s not a cultural or religious way of talking about it. I was talking to people back in the 1980s and people would disagree. It’s like, “No, this is what happen when we die.” “There’s nothing that happens. When you die, you’re done.” That was my dad’s belief system, “Stick me in a box, throw the dirt on me and I’m done.” That’s what my dad would say. That’s the quote from my dad.

People have all these different beliefs, which is fine. I said, “How can we talk about it without arguing about what your beliefs are about that?” I was talking to my friend, George, and we came up with these four beliefs. We said, “This makes sense. These are the underlying beliefs about all the cultural and religious stuff that’s out there.” The four beliefs are this, one of which I told you, my dad’s belief, the science belief. No afterlife, one life, that’s it. The brain and the mind are connected. That was my dad’s belief. Many people have that belief in the world.

The second belief is what I call the fear of continued existence. In other words, you do believe that there’s an afterlife of some sort but there’s some fear. The fear may be there for different reasons. I talked about it with my clients. I talked about that in the conversation. First, we’ve got to figure out where they’re at in the belief system scheme of things because I always talk about things through their belief system because it’s about them, not me. I help them through their belief. I don’t ask them to change their belief.

The third belief is the belief in an afterlife, but no fear. They may even be looking forward to an afterlife experience, whether it’s heaven, the Valhalla or they call it Elysium. They can call it whatever depending on what cultural background they have in the belief system. The fourth belief system is reincarnation. It’s past lives, future lives and the fact that people can come back that there is an afterlife and they can choose to come back in a different physical form and continue their personality. In my experience, the personality continues from body to body even though we have a physical different body in different lifetimes. That’s the fourth belief system.

Everybody falls somewhere in that spectrum. Everybody in the world, doesn’t matter where you live, what culture, what religion you have, what language you speak, everybody falls somewhere there. I’m working now with people from 41 different countries in the world because I work video conference like this with people remotely. It’s very easy. Everybody falls somewhere there. Sometimes people are what I call fence-sitters. They’re in-between belief systems and that’s okay. I help them figure out where are they first and let’s talk about it. Depending on where they’re at, I talk about it through their lens, their belief system filter.

Is your dad still alive?

No, my dad died in 1999. He was 80 when he died.

Did you help him go through the dying process easily?

Yes. It’s interesting you asked that because when my mom died, I was new at this. I was in shock, so I didn’t help my mom. I freaked out myself in dealing with it emotionally and grieving. For my dad, it’s different. I helped him and I didn’t try to change his belief system at all, because he was set in his thinking and that’s fine. I helped set everything up for him like the trust for his condo. He didn’t have a lot of assets when he died, but I helped everything be smooth for him. He told me, “Here’s a list of 40 people.” He knew he was going to die. He had colon cancer, so he knew he was going to be operated and if it was going to come back, it would be in a couple of years. One year and 360 days later, it came back. He knew he had only a certain amount of time after that second diagnosis, so he gave me a list. He said, “These are the people.” He knew I would take care of everything.

My father was a World War II veteran. He wanted to be buried at the US military cemetery in Hawaii. He and my mom loved going to Hawaii. They never lived there, but they love going there. My mom asked to have her ashes dropped in a current headed towards China because in 1982, it was still fairly difficult to get into China. You could probably get in but it’s hard to get out again. She gets the ashes going that direction. My father wanted to be buried in the military cemetery. I helped him arrange all of that stuff. Here’s an interesting experience that you could say I helped him with a couple of different ways specifically. This is a good teaching experience for your audience. I’m going to be doing a video conference training with doctors and nurses at one of the New York City hospitals that’s all COVID-19. They’re dealing with a lot of patients dying or who are afraid of dying, so I’m going to do a workshop with them. I’m going to tell them a brief version of this story that I’m going to tell you now.

Often when people die, and some of your readers probably have had loved ones or friends who have died, they will see things that we can’t see. They will see, “There is my dead great grandmother.” They won’t even say dead because as far as they’re concerned, the person is still alive, they can see them and talk with them. “There’s my friend, Jack. There’s Susan or Dee Dee.” They see these that the nurse, the doctor or you or I may be in the room don’t see what they’re seeing. My instruction to everybody is to treat them normally. Do not treat them like they’re hallucinating. Maybe they are on so much morphine or different medications, maybe they are hallucinating. We don’t know. We cannot tell. The point is to be respectful and acknowledge what they’re experiencing, whether we’re experiencing what they’re experiencing or not. It does not matter.

That helps ease people’s fears and anxieties. That helps them ease their transition into death whatever happens after they die. Whatever our belief system is, it doesn’t matter. In that same way, my father was in a wheelchair, mainly because he couldn’t get around well. He could still technically walk but it was difficult for him in those last few days. We moved him to my house and he would sit in a comfortable chair in my living room and go to the wheelchair to go to the bathroom, and went back and forth. The hospice nurse came and all of my siblings flew in from different parts of the country because we knew it was going to be quick, probably 48 hours or less. I vetted all the friends over. I let all these friends that my dad know to tell their friends and friends of friends that knew him, “Come over. If you want to see him, you probably have a short window. Come over to my living room.”

I had 20, 30 or 50 people in my living room saying bye to my dad. Everybody was lined up to go to my dad. My dad had to go to the bathroom. On the way to the bathroom, we’re pushing his wheelchair and he said, “Hold on. I’ve got to do something.” He got out of his wheelchair and he was on my carpeted living room floor on his knees, so I got down on my knees next to him and I said, “What’s up, dad?” Keep in mind, he was on so much morphine that most of the time, I would say 90%, 95% of the time, he was asleep. This is one of those moments when he came too because he had to go to the bathroom. He was conscious, aware and able to talk.

He’s down on his knees. I’m down to my knees next to him and he says, “I need scissors. I need to cut that clipping out of the newspaper.” There’s no newspaper on the floor. It’s only my rug but he’s seeing newspaper on the floor. He’s got to cut the clipping and he can’t find the scissors to cut this clipping out of the newspaper with some article he’s looking at. I said, “Here, dad. Here’s a pair of scissors.” I didn’t give him a pair of scissors. I was going along with whatever he was seeing. I gave him what you and I would consider imaginary scissors, “Here’s a pair of scissors, dad.” I gave it to him, he took it from my hand and clipped some article and said, “Great, good, that’s done.” He got back up on his wheelchair and went to the bathroom.

After We Die: The mind and body are not the same things, but they influence each other.

That, to me, is a teaching moment for everybody. That’s what we should be doing with our loved ones who are dying. We treat them whatever is going on with them. We’re there and present with them. That is what it means to be present with them. We’re not there saying, “Dad, there’s no newspaper there. You don’t need scissors.” That’s what some people would do. That’s disrespectful to whatever they’re experiencing. We’re not there to try to change their experience of how they’re dying. That’s not our role. That’s not helpful. What’s helpful is to facilitate whatever experience they’re experiencing as long as they’re not hurting themselves. If he’s walking towards a lit flame on my gas stove, that’s a different situation. We want to prevent somebody from hurting themselves but at this moment, that was right the thing to do. He relaxed and it made him feel more at ease. That’s my objective when I’m helping people die.

Another example with my dad to answer your questions more specifically. I called all these people because a lot of the list are 40, 50, 60 people who were long distance. They were in Boston, they were here and they were in different parts of Chicago and different parts of the country. I called them up and my dad all slumped over. Ninety-five percent of the time, he’s asleep. He’s out but he got so much morphine to control the pain in him.  I would dial the number and I would say, “Dad, I’m holding the phone up next to you now.” First, I’d call George Ruboy, his lawyer and close friend who lives up the street from us. He and my dad were Boy Scout leaders. I was a Boy Scout. I called George Ruboy up and said, “George, my dad’s passing away quickly but I’m sitting here next to him. I’m going to give him the phone. I’m going to put the phone up to his ear. You start talking and he will come too. I’ll tell you when to start talking.”

I call him up. I prep him like that and I put the phone up to my dad’s ear. I said, “George, start talking.” He started talking to my dad and my dad would be like a rheostat or a dimmer switch on a dining room light. The energy and life force would go back in him and he would sit up, “George, how are you doing?” George would say, “How are you doing, Henry?” My dad said, “I’m doing okay. Cancer came back, but I’m doing okay.” This was hours before my dad died, single digits. My dad would slump back down again. The call would last 20 or 30 seconds tops. I take the phone because I was holding the phone. I’d say, “George, that was great. He heard everything you said. Thanks for talking to him.” I did that 30 times, so my dad could connect and they could say goodbye. That’s another example of something that we can do, something proactive.

Thank you for sharing that story. Thank you for those tips with those stories because I’ve experienced those things too with my mom. There are certain things that when we don’t understand, we would say that she’s hallucinating. When we tell the doctor, they would continue to subscribe with a stronger dosage of anti-hallucination to put her to sleep. We did not know how to deal with that.

It’s an issue in our medical profession and I’m not here to tell the doctors what to do and certainly not on the video conference call that I’m going to do with them. I’m not here to tell them how to practice medicine. We do need to understand it better as a culture so a lot of things, how the family, the doctors and healthcare people deal with it is more consistent with the dying person is experiencing and not try to stop it from happening. It’s a normal part of the dying process. We don’t know for sure if they are seeing a dead loved one or not. It does not matter. What matters is we’re there and they’re not in any pain. If they’re in pain, the medical provider needs to intercede. That’s a different story.

What happens after we die?

I’ve had many experiences on this side. I have memories of being on the other side. I’ve had experiences being on this side, meaning in physical form like I am now Kelvin Chin, communicating with the other side and having experiences on the other side while I’m still here in physical form. I’ve had all of the above. I had a near-death experience when I was 21 years old. I almost drowned off of San Diego. If you have readers in the San Diego or Southern California area where I am, I’m here in Los Angeles, know that there are strong rip currents off of San Diego in Torrey Pines beach there.

I was swimming off there with a friend and there was nobody else on the beach that afternoon for some reason, for that stretch of the beach anyway. I got pulled out in the rip current and I was out about 1.7 miles. I asked this a friend of mine who’s a ship captain. I told him the 300-foot-high cliffs were about three or four inches tall. He said, “You were 1.7 miles out,” in a matter of 30 seconds probably. I don’t know. I wasn’t timing it. I was freaking out and I was getting pulled out by this rip current. A rip current is a river within the ocean. There are many rip currents around the world and often they come in the shore and they go back out to sea. It’s a river.

You get caught in that river and the river is moving fast. You can get moved pulled out fast, so I was out almost two miles. I started swimming in and I got tired because I was panicking and I was swimming too hard, too fast and I was swimming directly against the current. You’re supposed to swim 45 degrees and get an angle to the shore to increase the likelihood of probably getting out of the current because the current is going out to sea. You want to swim that way to try to get out of the current. I don’t remember I didn’t remember any of my Boy Scout rules that I learned in swimming and lifesaving class. I was swimming and I started getting exhausted. I started going down underwater. It’s like in the movies. The water is 1 or 2 feet above you and you’re starting to sink. My mind left my body and I saw myself for a split second and I decided to go back into my body. I had a nearing death experience.

I didn’t have the near-death experience that some people have where they are full-blown on the other side, and they’re talking to angels, Jesus or Buddha, depending on what belief system they have, that’s who often shows up. Yogananda may show up for some people if they’re followers of him or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may show up or friends or loved ones. I didn’t have that. I didn’t get that far into the death experience. The reason is, in retrospect, because I’d been meditating for two years already when this happened.

I’ve already been familiar with my mind and body not being the same thing. The mind and the body influence each other, but not exactly. I had experienced through meditation many times that my mind was separate and not identical with my body, in other words. I could have separate experiences mentally from what my physical body was doing. That gave me a perspective when I almost drowned and that perspective saved my life, quite frankly. If I had been caught up in the drowning experience, I would have kept going down another 30 or 40 feet deep because the waters are deep there. I could have kept going down. By then, even if I wanted to get up, it would have been difficult because I was so tired and exhausted that I wouldn’t have been able to get to the surface.

That perspective of having been meditating for two years literally saved my life because I left and I decided and I willed myself, “Nope. Back in the body and don’t swim so fast.” That’s what I told myself. I consciously decided not to swim so fast and took my time. It took me about an hour to swim back in. I was exhausted when I got back. The college student, my friend, the girl I was with said I slept for about a half an hour on the beach, passed out, when I pulled myself up on the shore, far enough out of the water. It’s like what you see in the shipwreck movies. I passed out for half an hour she said.

What’s the answer for what happens after we die?

After we die, my experience now having had other experiences since then is our mind continues and that our personality continues. I still am aware of who I am after I die. I’m still aware of who I was and my mind continues. I take my mind with me after my physical body dies and ends. In a sense, there is no death because my mind is continuing. When I say mind, some people may think to use the word soul, spirit, consciousness and awareness. It’s the same thing the way I use the word mind. Because I work across many different cultures around the world, I use the word, mind, so it doesn’t trigger any cultural or religious beliefs. Soul, for some people, sounds too religious to them. I use the word, mind, but your readers may substitute any of those words if they like that and they’re more comfortable with that. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about my huge mind. The focusing mind that’s talking to you now on the Zoom call, what we’re doing together, and my huge, vast mind. It’s all of my mind. That continues after we physically die. I also have experienced that we continue to have what I refer to as an identifiable energy pattern on the other side. That means that if you and I die and you and I run into each other on the other side, I recognize your energy. That’s what I call it an identifiable energy pattern. I recognize your energy. You may not have the same face on the other side because you don’t have a physical body. What do we have on the other side?

Physicists would call it a physical body but not a physical-biological body. There’s no biology going on on the other side, but an energy body. Physicists would call that there’s something there, something identifiable. A physicist might say, “You don’t have a biological body, but you still have an energy body.” I would agree with that because there’s something that’s identifiable. I’ve had experiences, you could call it visits, from people who are dead that visit me here on this side in the physical planet Earth side, and I see their energy body. They can show me their face or their whole body even but it’s a vibrating energy.

It’s a body of light energy that’s vibrating, but I can see a form they can show me their face. After I’ve had that experience with somebody in that form, they don’t have to show me what their face looks like from the other side, if they’re communicating with Kelvin Chin on this side because I recognize their energy. I can feel their energy. That’s why I came up with this phrase that we have what I call an identifiable energy pattern when we’re on the other side. It’s recognizable. I may not see you after we die, but I’ll recognize your energy. Something about it I recognize it as you that’s distinguished from my other friends. We can continue to do things on the other side. I have all kinds of stories. We could talk about this if you want about what people are doing on the other side because there’s a huge range of stuff.

How long would our mind go to the next phase and what do we do over there, wherever there is?

Let’s talk about all. There are about six things you said that we could talk about in that. Where is that? It’s right here. It’s not any place far away. I call it the other side because it’s not this side. How else do we talk about it? It’s not a physical reality with physical-biological bodies, physical forms in sweaters, and objects like that. There are energetic objects on the other side. You can create that. You can see what we on this side we call physical forms and the other side, they may even call it physical forms but it’s energy. We would think of it as energy but it looks like a table. It looks a whatever. We can have experiences like that on the other side too. It’s not far away from where we are now it’s because we don’t see it because it’s vibrating at a different frequency than what we’re vibrating at from an atomic and molecular level from that functioning perspective. The atoms and molecules are vibrating at a certain frequency here where we are in physical Earth and they’re vibrating at a different frequency on the other side.

How long are we on the other side? The short answer is as long as you want to. You have a choice and you could choose to come back or not choose to come back for a long time. I’ve hung out on the other side for hundreds of Earth years sometimes between lifetimes. In my last lifetime, when I was in World War II, I was on the other side for eight Earth years before I came back this lifetime. That was a short time period on the other side. Some people have come back immediately. There are stories of babies dying. Let’s say a 2 or 3-year-old.

The story is like this. A 2 or 3-year-old child dies while they were alive on planet earth with their parents, they fell and they cut themselves on something. They’ve got a scar on their arm or something where they fell and cut themselves or whatever. When that baby dies, there are stories of that young child who’s 2 or 3 years old that comes back and is reborn into the same family 9, 10 or 12 with a birthmark on the exact same arm, shape, and location as where they cut themselves in the previous lifetime. A birthmark with the same shape that looks the exact scar.

Moreover, the personality of the baby likes the same toys, TV show, and movies. All that stuff is the same. It can have transference of physical issues, not a scar, but in this case, a birthmark that looks exactly like the scar, the exact same place, but personality and mind continuing, their likes and dislikes, loves broccoli, hates zucchini. It’s that kind of stuff. It’s a different physical form. There are many stories like that. Back to the experience of time, we can come back whenever we want to or hang out for as long as we want on the other side. That’s the bottom line.

Nobody’s forcing you. There’s no, “Your time’s up, Kimchi. You’ve got to go back to planet Earth. Your 30-day, 30-year, or 300-year vacation is up.” You decide when you want to come back or if you don’t want to, just hang out over there. The way I would describe the other side is like a vacation mode. It’s rest and relaxation. You go there and you chill. Think about it, you don’t have a biological body. That means you don’t have to eat, feed it and you don’t have to go to work to make money to buy food to feed it or shelter and all this stuff. We don’t have to worry about COVID-19 viruses, etc. We still carry our same emotions in mind with us. What am I doing in my work? I’m trying to help reduce people’s fear and anxieties about everything. Not only death and dying, but everything and anything. Why? Because we take our minds with us.

I don’t often tell people this in my classes, but since we’re talking about it, I’ll mention that I’m helping people experience a happier and enjoyable afterlife by helping them now because we are in the continual present all the time. We, our minds, we are always living in the continual present. Your continual present is going to be different. It already is different from five minutes ago or two seconds ago, however long ago when we started this. We are now in the continual present. The present is always changing so I call it the continual present. It’s to illustrate that it is changing all the time.

After we die, if we do continue, and everybody will know when they know. Even people who believe in an afterlife, I would say, “You’re going to find out. You’ll find out for sure when you physically die.” I’ve had experiences on the other side but not everybody has, so I don’t try to change people’s belief system. We’ll find out when we find out. My point is that in my nonprofit work, I’m helping people live for the moment they’re in right then. If they continue and mind continues after they physically die, that moment is them in heaven, afterlife, or whatever they call it, I want them to be as fear-free as possible. Does that make sense?

It makes sense. What form will we be when we reincarnate? Let’s say that I want to go back, but what form will we be? A human, an animal, a rock or a tree?

Not so much for rocks and trees, I don’t think. Most people are going to choose to be human again for various reasons and I have theories about it. Each individual mind will make up their own decision about that. Could you choose to go back and be an animal? It’s possible. You could make that choice to be an animal. A rock or tree? I don’t have any memories of being rocks or trees. I have memories of being humans and I remember being an animal and I can talk to you about that. I had another experience of that animal lifetime. I can tell you about that. These memories come into bits and pieces. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle. It’s like this hundred-million-piece jigsaw puzzle that you don’t have the cover of the box for, so you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. That’s like a lifetime.

You may get two pieces that locked together, “It fits. Look at that,” and you get a little memory. You get another memory, maybe another twenty pieces, “That’s amazing. I’ve got twenty pieces that all fit together of that lifetime,” but it’s a tiny percentage of 100 million pieces in that lifetime. It’s like these little pieces and some of all the pieces, the two pieces, and the twenty pieces may not even fit together, but it’s the same lifetime.

The 22 pieces don’t even fit together with each other, but the 20 and the 2 are separate. It could be that. My point is we have these lifetimes and we can come back and all these different forms. I don’t think rocks or trees because there’s no consciousness there in a similar way. What do I mean by consciousness? Conscious awareness in order to make decisions that can change chaos. What does that mean? Do you know what entropy is in physics? Entropy means there is a tendency in physics for everything to become chaotic and a big mess.

A simple example, you cook a bunch of food and you leave the dirty dishes in your sink. Let’s say you go on a long trip for six months. When you come back, that sink is going to be nasty. It’s like roads of stuff. Who knows what? If you go away for 60 or 100 years, you leave the sink like that and you have wooden dishes, bowls or whatever, you’ll come back and the wood is degraded. Things go if you don’t keep them up is the point. Look at the forest, the tree falls down and if you just leave it for 60, 70, 80 years, it degrades. That’s the natural course of things in our physical reality. What does the human mind have the ability to do? The human mind has the ability to change that and take what might be considered like chaotic pieces of metal, for example. The human mind can put them together and create a laptop. All it is is a bunch of metal and plastic. If you think about it, you strip it down. It’s metal and plastic. Maybe it’s got some glass in it, but that’s a bunch of silicon. The human mind has this ability. Animals can do variations of that too to some degree.

That’s a short answer to why we would choose to come back, something like that. Most people are going to come back as humans because we’re familiar with it and we like it. We can do a lot more manipulating this normal state of what I’m calling chaotic stuff than we can if as an animal. I remember being an eagle, I remember flying. I had this memory of knowingness of being an eagle and a memory of flying as an eagle for a long period of time. Sometimes in dreams, you dream like, “I’m flying.” This was a memory I remember explicitly. I could see my wings and everything. Eagles have a big wingspan. I could look and I could see my wings. That’s an old memory from many years ago that I’ve had this.

One time, I was lying down, resting after I meditated like I’ve taught you. You rest after you meditate. I was lying there, resting in that relaxing state. I am awake but I’m not wide awake. I’m not meditating and not dreaming. I’m in that in-between state just lying there resting and then all of a sudden, the TV screen went on in my mind and I could see myself flying again. I saw the treetops maybe about 500 feet down and I swooped down and I glided along the treetops. I went back up to 500 or 800 feet or whatever the heck I was way up high. I could see the panoramic view in the mountains and everything. No people, no buildings or anything. The interesting thing is what I remembered was emotionally how I felt. It wasn’t just a vision. Often in these reincarnation memories that I have, there’s emotional content.

In this one, I had emotional content of how comfortable I was being alone. You think about it. I never thought about this until I had this experience, but eagles are alone. They don’t travel in flocks. They’re doing their thing. I remember being emotionally feeling comfortable having a solitary existence. It reminded me of some of my Buddhist monk lifetimes where I’ve lived in a monastery. I’ve had several Buddhist monk memories and it reminded me of those lifetimes being comfortable with the seclusion. It was interesting that my personality as an eagle remembering the personality as a Buddhist monk, but the emotion, comfort and familiarity with the experience of seclusion. It’s an example of personality continuing even in an animal form and remembering the emotional experience.

After We Die: If you don’t know what you told yourself before you incarnated, you still should be following your inner voice and guidance by turning within.

If we decide to come back as a human, does that mean we want to do something in this lifetime? Let’s say, “I want to do this. I want to try this. I want to learn this.”

I think so. People will choose to come back because they want to come back and they want to do something. That something will be different for different people because we all have free will, meaning personal choice. We all have different personalities, likes and dislikes, wants and needs, and desires. For some people coming back, maybe they’re coming back to help other people like you and I do in our different ways. Maybe we want to come back and help other people, and maybe I do it in different ways like I’ve done it with lawyers in my earlier careers and so forth. I’ve taught meditation and I’m doing that full-time on people with death and dying. You help people in other different ways. That may be a reason to come back. Not everybody wants to come back to help other people. Some people just want to come back and have fun, and that’s what they want to come back.

I jokingly but seriously said this to one of my clients because she loves ice cream. I said, “You love ice cream.” Maybe they’re just coming back because they miss soft serve ice cream and they go, “I miss that soft-serve ice cream. I’ll go back to planet Earth.” They forget about everything else that comes along with coming back to the planet. “Do you mean I got to get a job now? I got to pay for this soft-serve ice cream? I just missed soft serve ice cream.” I say that jokingly but seriously. This huge range is my point of why somebody might choose to come back. They may choose to come back for a loved one, on a serious note, or desire because they miss that loved one and they want to be with that loved one again. Maybe that loved one is not even from the previous lifetime, maybe it’s from many lifetimes before. For whatever reason, they haven’t connected, etc. Even if we want to connect with somebody, it doesn’t always work out perfectly because there are all these other millions of minds involved indirectly in choices that everybody is making all the time.

There are people that we don’t even know. Our local state and federal government make laws. We don’t know the people who are making the laws but that affects us and affects our choices and so forth. All of those things are at play at any given moment. Coming back could be an intimate reason because I miss being with that person and I want to explore what it’s like being in a personal intimate relationship with that person this lifetime. I want to see my kids again because I miss my children. I want to be with my children again. Maybe they come back as my children or maybe they come back as my parents or my friends. They used to be my children and now they’re friends of mine or clients of mine. I teach a lot of people. I don’t tell them this, but I recognize some of them as my children. I don’t want to freak them out.

Do you recognize it as a personality from the previous life?

Yes. It depends on the person. It also depends on me, but how much I’m perceiving, it varies. Sometimes, I just have a feeling or a knowingness about it or sometimes I have a feeling and I’m not sure whether they’re my children or just friends of mine or whatever but we have had a previous close connection of some kind. I don’t know if it’s a family or friends or whatever. I don’t know which subset within that either so it’s often like that. Occasionally, it’s more specific. That’s rare.

You have multiple experiences like hundreds of past lives before. That was thousands of years.

I remember 20 to 25 different lifetimes. I don’t know how many. I’ve probably had thousands, but I have memories from 20 to 25 and they go back 6,000 years.

Do you remember the key lessons for those lifetimes that you have experienced?

Some of them. Here’s the thing. Is there a key lesson from a lifetime that we’re supposed to remember? I don’t think there’s a key lesson. In other words, there’s not some organization somewhere saying, “Kimchi, you’re going to go down and you’re going to have this lesson.” You figure it out as you go and I figure it out as I go. We can decide before we get born, “I want to do this. I want to fix this relationship. I would like to do this. I’d like to help people in this way through my teaching.” We can have that conversation with ourselves and we could even have that conversation with other people on the other side. I have stories about that where we have a little group or committee meeting and then decide and say, “Okay.” I come down and then I try to make happen, so that can happen. I don’t think there’s somebody telling you, “Kimchi, this is your life purpose or this is what you’ve got to do.” My thing is I personally, because you know me and how I think, I try to learn from stuff. Not everybody does, but that’s my thing because I have an emotional need to understand things. I like learning. I like understanding stuff. It emotionally makes me happy. That’s why I do it.

In my lifetimes, I’ve always tried to learn something from it and sometimes many things from one lifetime. In this lifetime as Kelvin, I hope I’m learning more than one thing. I hope I’m learning lots of things. In my past lives, I’ve extracted certain things from some of those past lives. For example, the one I talked about in my book, Overcoming the Fear of Death, I tell a story about one of my lifetimes, as I call it my Carthage memory. If you have my book, it’s on page 124. I talked about my Carthage memory where I was a slave. I was African and then I was enslaved by the Carthaginians. I fought as a slave for them rowing in one of the boats in the Mediterranean in a war with Rome. That’s all I knew. The first memory I had, I didn’t know anything about where or anything or when it was. My first memory was I was dying on a piece of wreckage on what I thought was the ocean because I couldn’t see any land, and it was hot. I was dying because I was thirsty and hungry and I was probably thirsty and hungry for many days by the time I am having this memory in that lifetime.

I had other memories of that and then I remembered Rome. I remember what our ship looked like. I started looking things up. This is the following the breadcrumbs tip that I give people if they start having memories like this. They can follow these breadcrumbs. I followed the breadcrumbs. I looked up what these ships look like a long time ago and I looked through a whole bunch of ships. I’m like, “That looks like the ship that I was on. We were fighting the Romans. I was probably a slave.” I was African clearly because I could see my skin. It was brown-black skin and I almost died. What did that lifetime teach me? That lifetime taught me that the willpower of my mind was strong. I willed myself to stay alive on that piece of wreckage for a long time. I’m not sure how long, but it was a long time. I remember I could easily have given up and died like in the drowning experience. I didn’t realize when I had the drowning experience, this lifetime when I was 21 years old, that that’s what I was drawing from. Emotionally, I was drawing from that memory of almost dying. That’s the point. My willpower kept me alive 2,300 years ago in that war between Rome and Carthage when I was a slave.

That emotional memory and remembering the willpower indirectly. This is 2020 and I connected the dots. I didn’t realize this in 1972 when I was almost drowning. That memory fed me because my willpower kicked in and I swam slowly to shore for an hour and saved my life in 1972. That’s an example. Another example is I’ve been laid off from my job five times since I was fifty years old, raising a family of 4, 2 little kids, and everything. I was the sole breadwinner. That Carthage memory has fed my willpower to survive financially through horrific times in the year 2000. I remember I got laid off in 2008 again. I got laid off again in 2013. Five times since I was fifty years old. That Carthage memory, the willpower to survive, the strength of my mind is what’s pulled me through.

Do you believe in reincarnation? Of course, because you experienced it.

I’ve had memories and it spontaneously happened. People sometimes ask, “How does that happen?” For me, it was just automatic. It just spontaneously started happening. 1977 was the first time and I’d been meditating for several years. I had never read any books about past lives. I intellectually knew what reincarnation was but I didn’t know anything more than the word’s definition. I never read any books about spiritual stuff like that. I’ve never seen any movies or I don’t even know we had videos. I don’t think we didn’t have videos back then in 1977. I didn’t have any external knowledge about it, which was my point. My experience purely came internally from me. I was naive and a neophyte about all of this. I’d never read or studied anything.

When I heard people talk about it, I always thought they were making it up. I just poo-pooed it. I was sarcastic about it, quite frankly before I had my own experience. That thing is what changed my belief system. It’s purely based on my own personal experiences. To this day, I haven’t read any books about past lives. I just am not interested. I have so many experiences of myself to explore. It’s like, “Why do I want to read somebody else’s past life?” I’m still up to wading through all of my experiences, trying to interpret them and learn.

Have you ever thought about having life regression?

My own past life regression?

Yes. Working with somebody so that they can guide you and that you can come to see that right away instead of relying on yourself. It depends on whenever it can come because you don’t know when it will come.

Maybe I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never done that because who cares? I have so much and it keeps coming. It’s like, “I have so many library books already sitting on my floor. Why do I need to go to the library and get another 50 books?” I got 50 books sitting on my floor. I haven’t gotten to it yet. I can’t read them, so why don’t I need to get more books? It has no value for me. I can understand why people do it and people want to do that. I encourage them to do it with somebody who knows what they’re doing. I’m not discouraging it. I’m saying personally that there’s no real need. Plus, I’ve had outside corroboration about some of my experiences from other people who didn’t know me and not doing past life regression with me who just have said, “There’s this meditation teacher guy in our organization.” By the way, this was 1973. I heard about a man named Charlie Lutes. He was one of the first people Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught meditation to. Charlie Lutes had already been involved in other meditation techniques before that and other spiritual schools before he met Maharishi in 1959.

He was one of the first people, but in 1973, I heard this story that Charlie Lutes was telling people about a meditation teacher who was in the TM organization at the time who has the soul of Frederick the Great and the Apostle Peter. That was four years before I had my first past life memory. I didn’t even know this guy, Charlie Lutes. I’d never heard him talk. I never read any of his lectures. I never saw any of his recordings. I knew who he was and I knew his name. He was telling stories about this person who was a TM teacher. The person who told me this, I met this person and he always thought that I was the person who told Charlie Lutes that I had these past life memories. Charlie Lutes wasn’t saying my name, but he was telling people this in his lectures in Los Angeles when I lived in Boston. I didn’t know Charlie Lutes at all. I never talked to him. He somehow separately had insight or memory or somehow awareness that I had incarnated this lifetime and I was a TM teacher somewhere in the TM organization.

After We Die: Looking behind the curtain and seeing what’s driving your emotional patterns will help you align more with what is going to make you happy at that time in your life.

I don’t know if Charlie knew me, but Charlie was there 2,000 years ago also. Charlie happened to be the Roman centurion who was at Jesus’ crucifixion the whole time standing there. When you read in the Bible about the Roman centurion who was with Jesus, this guy is Charlie Lutes. Charlie died in 2000 or 2001. Charlie told us what happened because he was standing there on duty while Jesus was dying and at his death. Charlie later left the Palestine area about a year later and got stationed back in Rome. He began teaching Jesus’ teaching in Rome. He was the first teacher of Jesus’ teaching in Rome before I got there or anybody else got there. We covered a bunch of stuff there. People are probably going, “What the heck are we talking about? Where did we go?”

You mentioned that you had a conversation with the Buddha or with Jesus before. Do you remember that conversation and what the message was, if you could share it with us?

I’ve had many conversations with Jesus, but not so many with Buddha. I’ve had conversations with some subsequent to Buddha, some of the Buddhist leaders whose names I don’t know, but they’ve come to me and shown me themselves. I don’t know who they are, but assuming they are who they say they are that they’re some of the early Buddhist leaders. I’ve never talked to Buddha himself, but I was a Buddhist monk for at least three complete lifetimes, in Tibet and also in China. At least two in Tibet and at least one in China as a Buddhist monk myself. I’ve had conversations with Jesus. He’s come to me right after my meditation as I told you in the rest period thing. He’s come to me in quiet moments, generally speaking. Not necessarily around even my meditation, but if I’m just sitting quietly alone and so forth. I’ve had some conversations with Him. What do you want to know?

What does he say?

I’ve had personal conversations with him about what I’m doing. I’ll talk about what I’m doing. Let’s go back first. John the Baptist and Jesus were around the same time 2,000 years ago. I was a follower of John the Baptist first 2,000 years ago and back in his life in the 20th century, he was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who I studied with as my original meditation teacher in 1970, ‘71, ‘73, in a previous lifetime, he was John the Baptist, similar strong, righteous indignation personality. Maharishi and John the Baptist are spiritual revolutionaries. Part of that project, we’ll call it, that Jehovah, Jesus and John the Baptist, those personalities known by those names, before they were incarnated on planet Earth and had a meeting. A number of us had a meeting on the other side like a little committee meeting. They said, “John the Baptist, you’re going to go down first and you’re going to do baptism and get people starting to think about their behavior and so forth. You’re going to do that through baptizing them and that whole thing. You’re going to go down first and then Jesus, you’re going to go down after him. Then you’re going to work together. You’re going to help people overcome the fear of death.”

This was the conversation that Jehovah had with John the Baptist, Jesus, and a number of us on the other side before any of us are born. John the Baptist goes down because of free will and how the other minds make choices. Sometimes they make surprise choices. They make choices we don’t foresee. King Herod’s wife was a little bit of a nutjob. She wanted John the Baptist head on a platter and Herod, in order to appease his wife, put him in prison, and cut his head off. John was getting followers. This made the local leadership of King Herod nervous because they’re worried about these religious leaders becoming too powerful. They were worried about John the Baptist becoming too powerful, so they locked him up in prison and all that. I was a follower, a student of John the Baptist then with my brother Andrew.

I have memories of sitting up on a big rock promontory up on the side of a hillside. It was all desert and I remember seeing this long line of people winding their way down to the river. John was in the river baptizing people and I was sitting up on a rock watching him do this. He met Jesus and he baptized Jesus. When he saw Jesus, they saw eye to eye. John knew who Jesus was, that he was Jesus. I don’t know if John remembered at that moment about the pre-birth conversation that everybody had with Jehovah or not, but he recognized Jesus. He saw his soul in his eyes and he knew who he was. John told some of us, he told Andrew and me that we need to go be a follower and help Jesus with his work, so we went with Jesus.

What message does Jesus have?

That message was helping overcome the fear of death. What is one of my nonprofits called? Overcoming the Fear of Death. I’ve been asked by Jesus and John the Baptist aka Maharishi. Maharishi died in 2008, but he has visited me many times since he died also. In around 2014 or so, they asked me to continue this work that we all started that got derailed by two things. It got derailed by the project back then 2,000 years ago. The Overcoming the Fear of Death project got derailed by John’s beheading. He got killed and that was premature, unforeseen by anybody. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it happened. Jesus’ crucifixion was also unforeseen. That was a confluence of jealousy and hatred by the Sanhedrin, who are the Jewish priests in the temple in Jerusalem, and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who had his own fears, hesitations, trepidations and dislike for being assigned in Judea at the time. His wife said, “Take it. It would be a stepping stone to something better. Go to Judea because it’s in the middle of nowhere in the desert.”

Nobody in Rome wanted to leave Rome and go to Judea, but he was given this governorship, so he took it. Pontius Pilate didn’t want to annoy anybody in Rome. The Jewish priests are getting all ticked off at this guy Jesus for developing this following and teaching and so forth. Jesus was not a revolutionary type. He was loving and he still is a loving person. The last thing he wanted to do was create a revolution, but he was changing people’s thinking about spirituality, about sin, doing good, loving people and what love meant. He was, in a sense, revolutionary but not politically.

Pontius Pilate saw this and said, “The best way to make this go away so I don’t get stuck here in Judea forever for the rest of my life being the governor of Judea is to let the Jewish priests have their way.” He let them have Jesus even though Pontius Pilate would not have killed Jesus. It was the Jewish priests, the Sanhedrin, who were jealous. That’s how that happened. That’s the reality. It was not foreseen. They were supposed to be working and we were all supposed to be with John the Baptist and Jesus. All of us were supposed to be working together to help people reduce their fears, so they could live more present in the moment. The fear of death is the big one, so we were working together. That’s what I’m doing. To your question, that’s what I’ve been asked to continue by Jesus and John the Baptist.

You probably have been wanting to know the answer to that question. Is that like, “What am I supposed to do in this lifetime? Am I going the right way? Do I follow the right path? Am I fulfilling my destiny?” Most of us don’t remember what we’re supposed to be doing in this lifetime and we’ll keep saying, “Try these things out. Try that thing out.” It’s always good to know for certain that you are following the right path and continue doing it because this is what people are needing or on this lifetime, people are looking for you to give them this message.

Even without this knowledge, I have pursued this lifetime of helping people because it makes me happy. Even if you don’t know what you told yourself before you incarnated or maybe even you met with a small group of friends and you said, “Let’s do this.” Even if you don’t remember that, we still all should be following our inner voice and inner guidance. What guides us inside? How do we access that? By turning within. Meditation is a way that I teach to help access that more clearly because we have all this white noise. We have all this other chatter going on. It’s like, “There are all these other distractions, but I could do this and I could do that but which one do I choose?” That’s true. There are choices to be made all the time, and I have made choices along the way in my lifetime. Quite frankly, if I had made the choice that I’m doing, I don’t know if I would have been able to raise a family and support them. Seriously from a financial standpoint, there are those realities.

When I’m coaching young people, I tell them that I made a choice when I was young in my 30s to choose to prioritize my family as my focal point. I made them a priority. If you ask me, “What would you like to do personally, Kelvin, if everybody doesn’t exist in the world?” I’d say, “I’d love to be teaching meditation full-time,” but it wasn’t a real possibility to make that income in order to raise a family. I made a choice to prioritize my family first and that was a conscious decision. I have no regrets about it at all. At the same time, I still met my other emotional needs, and you could call it my sole purpose, to help people because I always did that in all of the work that I ever did. Those who worked with me in all of those other careers that I had in business and in law know that about me. They would totally agree with that statement, regardless of how I was helping them. That’s always my goal.

I was always looking out on how I can help you. Because if I help you, it helps me. I always did it in a non-selfish way. As much as humanly possible, I’m not perfect. Nobody’s perfect, but that was always my overall intent. We don’t need to know, “What’s my life purpose this lifetime? I had this agreement with Jehovah, Jesus and John the Baptist before I came.” I don’t ever remember that. I don’t need to remember that. We need to find what makes us happy and how we can provide more knowledge about ourselves because to me, that’s what propels us forward in our own self-development. Knowing ourselves, “What do I like? What do I dislike? Why do I don’t like that? What drives us?” There are these emotional patterns that drive us. We don’t need to remember our past lives. We don’t have to have conversations with Jesus and John the Baptist. If we look at our emotional patterns, which everybody can access, and we pay more attention to those emotional patterns and try to look behind the curtain at what those emotional patterns are telling us about ourselves, that’s the know thyself thing. That’s self-development and self-realization.

If we look behind the curtain and see what’s driving those desires in our emotional patterns, then that will help us align more with what is going to make us happy at that time in our life. That may change because some people may think, “I have a life purpose.” We have life purposes like we have soulmates. There may be one that’s higher up on the food chain and others, I get that, but we all have many soulmates, many souls who we connect with. Some of our friends, lovers, and children are soulmates. There’s this connection of the soul on a deep level. In the same way, our life purposes exist. I don’t think there is one life purpose for anybody. Destiny is fraught with potential suffering because if people don’t feel like they are meeting their destiny, then they feel like they failed. They feel like they’re suffering until they can fulfill their destiny or whatever. No. Life has lived moment to moment and it’s based on choices that we are making as free will, free-thinking minds in the universe. We need to spend more of our time and energy focusing on making good choices.

What do I mean by good? Good that feels fulfilling to us and it’s not hurtful to other people. That’s where we, as a human race, need to spend more of our time and worry less about what is the life purpose that I have that I should be doing? It’s purposes. We have many life purposes in our life that can make us happy and we just need to choose and focus on one of them and ride that wave for as long as we ride it and then we may hop on another one. If people Google me, Kelvin Chin, and look at my LinkedIn, you’ll go, “How many careers has this guy have? You lose count.” I always channeled my energy through that filter about helping other people be more effective and happier at what they’re doing. That’s always been my thing. I’m doing it in a more deeply, focused way in terms of teaching my meditation, helping people with afterlife understanding, and fear of death. I’ve always done it.

You shared some tips. What would you say are the three tips that you want people to practice now and for the rest of their lives so that they can have inner peace and find happiness and joy in this lifetime and they can prepare for the afterlife?

The first thing is to find a way to turn within. I call my meditation, Turning Within Meditation. Find a way to turn within whether it’s through my meditation technique or some other way. Find a way that is as easy and effortless as possible, not difficult, not involving focus or controlling the mind, not involving manipulation or clearing the mind of thoughts. Something that’s easy because the easier it is, number one, you’ll do it. Number two, it’s more effective. You’ll be able to expand your conscious capacity for mental experience and reduce your fears and anxiety by balancing out the opposite of the fight or flight response.

Number one, turn within. Find an easy, effortless way to turn within and connect with oneself in that different way that happens as a result of the meditation. The second thing is don’t buy into fear. If you see TV news and they’re promulgating fear about things, change the channel. You are in control of the remote. Fear is a contracting energy. It contracts our minds and it tenses up our bodies. It restricts our creativity and our ability to love other people. It’s a contracting energy. Do things and when you have control because we have more control and less control over life than we realize. Take control over what we do have control over and let go of the stuff that we don’t have control over. Don’t worry about it. Change the channel. Control the fear module, so to speak. Modulate the fear. It’s not helpful.

The third thing is to learn how to work on accepting people’s free will choices. Don’t try to change them into something that they’re not. This is what Jesus taught about love. This is Jesus’ definition of love. He said, “Love is accepting the other person for who they are, not who you wish they were.” It’s easy to say but it’s not easy to do. I’m not perfect at it, but it’s something that we should all work at, that definition of love. Love not in a romantic way. Love is sometimes romantic. That’s a subset of that. That’s not Love. I’m talking about Love. That’s what Jesus is teaching.

There are all these subsets of it which are real, but we need to remember the big definition, accepting other people for who they are and not who they wish they were. That would make us less tribal worldwide. Tribal, meaning, “I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m going to be in my tribe. You’re not my tribe. Stay away,” that whole thing. I use this phrase a lot when I am in conflict resolution. I used to be a vice president for the American Arbitration Association for years. Where’s the overlap of the Venn diagram? That mathematical thing, where’s the overlap of the two circles? That’s where we want to communicate with people in that overlap. Instead of trying to talk at them and convince them of all the stuff we disagree with, where’s the overlap of the little pieces that we agree with each other?

That’s an expression of what Jesus taught. That’s a tactical tip on how to execute on what the principle was that Jesus taught. Accepting the other person for who they are, not who you wish they were. Where’s the overlap of the Venn diagram? Where’s the overlapping common interest? Have a conversation there, then you can have a conversation about what you don’t agree on. You can never start having a conversation with somebody about what you don’t agree on to try to convince them to agree with you. There’s no commonality. There’s no real conversation. It’s not a conversation. It’s a lecture at the person. If we want to have dialogue, we have to start with a commonality. That would be the third thing.

I like the third tip. I already bought the number one tip, which is by enrolling in your program. Number two, I’m still managing it because it’s always good to be informed, so that you can make the appropriate wise choice when you have all the information. Number three, you have to learn to accept people’s free will, which is hard even for me. Sometimes, we don’t understand why people do certain things. It’s obvious to us that it’s not a good thing to do but still, people are doing that and they still have followers. That’s why it’s hard for me to accept that but I will do my best to control myself for my own benefit.

Who’s living your life? You are. Who are you living it for? Yourself. You help people through these podcasts and so forth, but why do you do that? You do that because you like to do that and you like helping people just like I do. Ultimately, we’re helping ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with self-interest. Self-interest is what we all are. We’re all self-interested, but when we become too self-interested, then we become selfish. That’s not good. When you become selfish, you become insecure. When you become insecure, how do you become happy? You make other people around you unhappy and you feel better. That’s bullying. That’s cruelty.

How do I define cruelty? The bully gets happiness out of making other people unhappy, but he or she has the same goal that we all do, which is happiness. Because they are insecure and unhappy, they depress other people around them and they feel better, but it’s temporary. This cruelty idea and transcending cruelty idea is also one of the teachings that Jehovah, Jesus and John the Baptist are encouraging us to promote. Turning within, reducing fear, acknowledging freewill and transcending cruelty. Transcending cruelty is a subset of 2 and 3.

Where do you want people to go to learn more about what you do?

Probably the easiest thing is they google my name, Kelvin Chin. I was named after a British physicist. Lord William Thompson, the Kelvin temperature scale, that’s how people can remember me. Anyway, google me or you can go to KelvinChin.org and they can access all of my nonprofits through that one website. The footer on every page of all my websites has a link to all the other four websites. They should join my YouTube channel. They should look for me, KelvinChinTurningWithin is what my YouTube channel is called. They can follow my videos there. There are lots of free audios and videos on my websites that people can go and learn more about what we touched together. I know you’ve heard a lot of them. You can attest to that.

Thank you so much, Kelvin, for being here for sharing your knowledge with us. We appreciate that. For our readers, please subscribe to the Asian Women of Power YouTube channel as well as this podcast, so you won’t miss any future episodes. Until the next time, live, life, loud.

Links Mentioned:

• Kelvin Chin
• Overcoming the Fear of Death
• Amazon – Overcoming the Fear of Death
• Barnes and Noble – Overcoming the Fear of Death
• LinkedIn – Kelvin Chin
• KelvinChin.org
• Turning Within Meditation
• KelvinChinTurningWithin – YouTube channel
• Asian Women of Power YouTube channel
• www.OvercomingtheFearofDeath.org
• www.TurningWithin.org
• http://linkedin.com/in/kelvinchin
• @Kelvin.Chin1 on Facebook
• @KelvinHChin on Twitter
• @Kelvin.H.Chin on Instagram

Episode Quotes

"A sense of humor is a sign of perspective; people with a sense of humor tend to be more loving people."
"Each of us will be in an identifiable energy pattern when we are on the other side."
"Fear is a contrasting energy."
"Love is accepting who they are, not what you wish them to be."
"A sense of humor is a sign of perspective."
"After you die, your mind and your personality continue."
"There are choices to be made all the time."

About Kelvin Chin

Kelvin Chin is Executive Director & Founder of the “Turning Within” Meditation and Overcoming the Fear of Death Foundations. He is an internationally-recognized meditation teacher featured in Business Insider, Newsweek, Kaiser Health News, and has taught meditation at West Point and in the U.S. Army, including on the DMZ in Korea. Kelvin is also the author of the best-selling “Overcoming the Fear of Death: Through Each of the 4 Main Belief Systems” — a nonreligious approach to the 4 Beliefs that underlie all religious and cultural beliefs. He has had many experiences “piercing the veil” over the past 35 years, and his past life memories reach back 6,000 years.

Kelvin was the featured speaker on opening night at the 2019 IANDS conference in King of Prussia, PA and has spoken at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Yale, Dartmouth, and healthcare firms, and many more.

He is a graduate of Dartmouth, Yale and Boston College Law, has lived in 7 countries and worked with people from 40 countries.