NATALIE SUDMAN: “An archaeologist who accepted a position managing construction contracts in Iraq, Natalie Sudman tells the story of her encounter with a roadside bomb (IED) and what happened when she left her body and had a near death experience. In the blink of an eye, Natalie found herself in another dimension, what she calls the Blink Environment. Surrounded by thousands of other-wordly beings, she instantly began downloading minutely detailed information to them about events, thoughts, concepts, judgments, projections and connections regarding her physical life so far. Thus begins this fascinating story of spiritual insight and experience that will have you mesmerized by this Defense Of Freedom Medal recipient. This is a video you don’t want to miss.” ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV
Natalie Sudman worked as an archeologist in the Great Basin states for sixteen years before accepting a position managing construction contracts in Iraq. After being injured by a roadside bomb (improvised explosive device–IED), Natalie has since retired from government service. She is now enjoying art, writing, and continuing explorations into the non-physical.
Natalie has been a subject of studies performed by the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, and welcomes invitations to act as a lab rat for any scientific investigation. Describing herself as an open-minded skeptic, Natalie finds that the rigorous methodology of science appeals to her critical mind, while her artistic nature enjoys the expansive freedom of leaving behind the critical mind in frequent forays into the non-physical. She maintains that an irreverent sense of humor and a willingness to look foolish are the cornerstones of constructive exploration.
Raised in Minnesota, Natlie Sudman has lived most of her adult life in eastern Oregon, Montana and South Dakota. She recently moved to southern Arizona. Her artwork is available through Davis & Cline Galleries in Ashland, Oregon.
WEBSITE: Natalie Sudman’s personal website: http://www.NatalieSudman.com
If you’d like to watch this video, Natalie Sudman Describes Her Near Death Experience Due To A Roadside Bomb In Iraq, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=2328
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
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Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Hi everybody. This is Bob Olson with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. This is where we talk about the afterlife, we look for evidence, and we talk about the meaningful questions, hopefully the meaningful questions. Hopefully, I ask those during these interviews that everybody’s thinking in terms of the afterlife.
Today is a very special conversation, as I like to call them, with an author named Natalie Sudman who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in her little convoy of four vehicles on the way back to basecamp. As a result, she had all kinds of consequences, physical, emotional, and spiritual. We’re going to focus on the spiritual here, but we’ll talk about all three of those.
This is her first interview ever since writing her book, and I’m really grateful that she’s doing it here on Afterlife TV. Thank you, Natalie, for being here.
Natalie Sudman: Thank you for having me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: We’re so excited. This is exciting because you have officially, I guess what people would say, had a near death experience, and yet I think it went so much further than that. Let’s give a little shout out before we get started to Tom, who made this all happen with the technology. You live in a remote area of Arizona. We tried this once before. It didn’t really work, and here you are thanks to Tom, who allowed us to get together. You’re doing it from D.C. now.
I want to show your book. This is called Application of Impossible Things by Natalie Sudman, excellent book. In fact, I’ll be so honest as to say we got this book in from your publisher. I thought, oh, it’s kind of a thin book. There’s probably not much substance in there. Oh no, no, no, just the opposite of that. I just had to read a few pages before I was saying to my wife Melissa, “I have got to have her on Afterlife TV.” Here we are finally. I’m so excited about it.
Let’s start actually with the title, Application of Impossible Things. When you used that title, when you wrote that title, what were you thinking? What does it mean to you?
Natalie Sudman: Well, I think a lot of people consider spiritual things to be sort of separate from our daily physical lives or a lot of them to be impossible to apply to our physical lives. I don’t think they are impossible. I think it’s really important that those spiritual things, whether it be the ideas or ways of being, have to be applied and really are applied whether we realize it or not.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah, that really comes through in your book, which is great. Also, it’s important to point out, I mean you come—we’re going to talk about your background in a second. But when you were working in Iraq, for instance, I mean you’re working with a bunch of soldiers, and so you guys probably aren’t sitting around talking about spiritual things very often, were you?
Natalie Sudman: No, I was actually working mainly with civilian army.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, you were, okay, civilian army.
Natalie Sudman: The command were officers in the army.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, okay.
Natalie Sudman: But no, that kind of thing didn’t come up.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You guys weren’t like saging the room to clear the energy. No, none of that. Well, we’ve got a little picture of you here with President Bush. Why don’t we work our way up to that? First of all, what were you doing in Iraq before you were injured?
Natalie Sudman: I was hired to administer construction contracts for the Corps of Engineers. So I started out, I was kind of on the ground making sure that the right things are done at the site and taking care of problems that came up during the different contracts.
Then I switched over to kind of putting together contracts, making sure the money was in place for them, and getting them awarded to the contractors, and then kind of tracking them on a much more administrative level than I had been earlier. But yeah, that’s what I was doing.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You’re an adventurous type obviously. Originally, you had helped with some of the people who were devastated by the hurricane. Why don’t you tell us just a little bit about that and how you ended up going to Iraq as a result of it?
Natalie Sudman: I worked for the Bureau of Land Management as an archaeologist. In the course of doing that, the Corps of Engineers put a call out to all government employees asking for volunteers to go down and help clean up Katrina. So I volunteered a couple of times, once in Mississippi and once in Louisiana. In the course of that I met some Corps of Engineers employees. A friend called me up one day and said, “We’ve got a job in Iraq if we want it. Do you want to go?” I said, “Sure,” hung up the phone and went, I don’t know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay. That sounds like your personality from what I’ve got to know, kind of like, yeah, and then think about it later, right?
Natalie Sudman: Right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, good. I like that. So you find yourself in Iraq, and you’re actually there for about a year and a half, right?
Natalie Sudman: Right, yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Tell us about the particular day in question here where something happened, a little catalyst to change your life.
Natalie Sudman: There were four of us that went out in the field to look at some construction projects. We looked at three water projects and then a road project. I went along because two of the people didn’t know anything about roads. That was under their jurisdiction, and I knew a lot about roads. I took along this new guy who had only been about five or six weeks in country. So I took him along so he could see the water projects.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What’s his first name?
Natalie Sudman: Jared.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Jared, okay.
Natalie Sudman: So he and I were in one truck, and the two actual Army officers that I was helping with the road, they were in a second truck. Then we had a lead truck and a gun truck in our convoy. Because this province had been turned over to the Iraqis, the government had been turned over to the Iraqis; we had to take along an Iraqi police escort. So we had also a police escort with us.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay. You do your thing; spend the whole day, maybe six hours or something like that while you’re out working.
Natalie Sudman: I can’t remember. It was probably four, five, six hours that we were out, yeah, visiting the sites. We were just not too far out from base, on our way back to base, when the vehicle that I was traveling in was hit with a roadside bomb.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Roadside bomb. Was it a mine? What was it?
Natalie Sudman: I don’t really know. I guess I did get an after report, but they didn’t say how it was—
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Ignited or whatever? Yeah.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, so I don’t know if it was a pressure thing. They set a lot of those off using a cell phone, so it could’ve been detonated in that way.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So you’re riding along in the vehicle, and when this goes off, what’s that experience like?
Natalie Sudman: When it goes off?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, do you even know what’s happened?
Natalie Sudman: Well, I was tired and I was bored, so I had my arm up on the windowsill and had just closed my eyes. When it detonated, I don’t know what it was like because I went immediately out of my body.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow. So just like that?
Natalie Sudman: Mm-hmm.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I love some of the terminology you use in here, and you talk about the blink environment basically because you blinked and you’re in this new environment. Is that kind of the short of it?
Natalie Sudman: Right, yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So here you are. You’re riding along. You’re bored. Blink, now what’s happening?
Natalie Sudman: Now I find myself standing on kind of a stage area maybe 15 or 20 feet wide, and all around me are just thousands of beings, personalities, whatever you want to call them, spirits, like thousands of them. I see them as white-robed beings, and I’m standing there in my fatigues, dirty, hands slouched there, comfortable. I’m downloading all this information for them that I understood as something I had agreed to do for them before I came into this body. It was very, very complex information, but it was all just being sort of—I don’t know how to describe it—transferred as abstract and just all through thought.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: All right. So first of all, when you say thousands of beings, are we talking like a stadium of 20,000, like concert hall stadium, that type of thing, or can you even tell, or does it just seem to go on infinitely?
Natalie Sudman: The way it looks to me I would say that, yeah, a stadium would be a good visual for it because they’re kind of arrayed up all around me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So you’re like a rock star here on stage in front of all these beings.
Natalie Sudman: Right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: But instantly you’re not confused. You’re not wondering what’s going on. You know you’re there for a purpose, and right away you start downloading this information because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah. I knew exactly where I was. I knew exactly what I was doing. There was no hesitation. There was no doubt. I mean now I look back on it or I can go back into it and have this sort of separate awareness of wow, I knew exactly what I was doing. But at that time, I mean I didn’t even think that way. I just did what I did.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That kind of gives you the impression, or gives me the impression anyways—I’m sure there are people watching who would probably agree—that almost like this was a planned event, like this was meant to be.
Natalie Sudman: Well, I think it was a planned event.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Hold on, I think we lost you there for a second. Start again. We lost your volume.
Natalie Sudman: Oh, okay.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, now you’re back. You’re back. Go ahead. You said you think it was a planned event.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, I think it was a planned event. I think that I planned it quite a while ago.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yes.
Natalie Sudman: Actually, in the physical world there were little hints and clues that something was going to happen. Like a few weeks before this happened I was getting my paperwork ready to extend for another six months and stay there for another six months, but while this was going on I just felt this strong urge to start packing up my stuff. I was throwing some stuff away and thinking, okay, I can pack all this stuff here, this stuff here, and I need to get a couple of trunks. Then I’d stop and go, wait, what am I doing? I’m not leaving. There were a few other things, but that’s kind of the most obvious.
I think that I was getting messages that I was not paying attention to. When you’re working 12 hours a day seven days a week, you’re working. When you get off, you’re exhausted. You’re not really ticking in to some other things that are going on.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, especially when you’re planning for a trip of any sort. I’m going on vacation, and it’s just like you’re trying to do everything you’re normally doing; plus, you’re trying to get ready to go. It’s a little bit crazy.
So you’re in front of these beings. Aside from this sort of stadium-like experience, what is the environment like? I’ve heard someone say who had a near death experience that really everything was like this black velvety environment, yet there was like light within the darkness. Anything like that?
Natalie Sudman: That’s a perfect description.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really?
Natalie Sudman: I’ve kind of described it as being what I imagine space to be like. It’s black, but it’s not really dark. It’s like potential light. As soon as something shows up it’s lit. It’s lit up.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Ah.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, a velvety feel, I think that describes it well. I mean it’s not an intimidating or really empty-feeling darkness. It’s a warm, cozy darkness. In the middle of a blizzard, crawl into bed with this nice, fluffy down thing, nice down pillows, and close your eyes; is that like a scary, empty blackness? No, it’s like this really comfortable, cozy, delicious darkness.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, that’s cool. These beings that are there, you call them the gathering sometimes, right? The gathering, what are you feeling from them? You’re feeling expectation; you’re feeling—to be cliché, but I don’t think it is—love, unconditional love, admiration, what are you thinking? What are you feeling?
Natalie Sudman: There was definitely admiration.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Admiration.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, which was interesting; it’s interesting to look at for me now because at the time when I’m standing there downloading all this information to them and getting back all this admiration I was like kind of indifferent to that admiration. I was accepting it, but it didn’t really mean anything to me. I was doing something that I thought was easy. So I was accepting their admiration but kind of going, yeah, whatever.
As far as the whole ambience, I mean I guess people use the term love and unconditional love that I guess in some ways doesn’t really cover it for me. We have such human pictures around that. For me, I would say that it was complete and total acceptance, and I use in the book the word co-passion, meaning not compassion, which kind of to me gives the feeling of there’s kind of a hierarchy in that, that the person feeling compassion toward the other person often also feels sorry for them or there’s some kind of pity or something like that. So I use the word co-passion because there was a shared passion for being and a complete equality between everyone.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow. First of all, it sounds incredible. I wonder too, when you were feeling that admiration and you were sort of yeah, whatever, I mean I’m not sure I’m deserving of it, do you think that’s because there’s a lack of ego involved? We’re so used to dealing with our ego. I think it would be hard for most of us to be in front of 20,000 people who are admiring us in this way and maybe not go into our heads. Do you think it’s because you’re a spirit and this lack of ego that we have as human beings?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, I think that’s probably a good explanation of it. Also, there was no ego. There was no competition. I mean I was accepting all this admiration, but in some sense I felt that same admiration for all of these beings. I mean we all knew that it was a two-way street and it was respect and approval and acceptance.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Each one of these beings, had they all had a human experience? What was that like?
Natalie Sudman: No, some of them had had a human experience. In fact, it seemed like some of them were having a human experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Simultaneously?
Natalie Sudman: Mm-hmm. You know, when you’re on that level you have this ability to focus on way more things than we could even sort of keep track of or imagine maybe. In the same way that we walk down the street and we’re paying attention to if there are any threats around us or thinking about what we’re going to do when we get to where we’re going, we’re paying attention to a lot of different things. They seem to be able to do that same thing on a much broader level.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah. Like even to meet someone new and you, at least you think you are, intuitively picking up a bunch of stuff about them. Multiply that times a million and that’s probably what that experience is like. You’re doing this, so yes, there are a lot of beings; but individually, are you like focusing on one and then another and another, or are you able to sort of focus in on each one all at the same time to get a sense of what they’re all like?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, I’m able to do it either way. When I’m standing there downloading, I have this awareness of them all as individuals, and I can tune in to any one at any time. Yeah, it’s hard to describe because if we look out at a crowd, we can’t really connect with each of those individuals as individuals at the same time. But I really had the feeling that I could do that there and was doing that, or I could really focus attention on one if I wanted to do that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Phew, okay, a lot of questions. I’m going to jump around a little bit because so many questions pop into my head. I wanted to go back to the idea of you said some had had human experiences, some had not, some were having them simultaneously at that very time.
How about the others? Were they what I might call in the spirit world, in the spiritual world just hanging out, or were they from other dimensions like at that time simultaneously having some kind of an existence, consciousness, or something in another dimension? What was that all like?
Natalie Sudman: I would say that some of them were having simultaneous lives in another dimension. Then I mean there were some that this was their primary focus, and being in this gathering was not necessarily the only thing that they were doing but that the immediate interests of this gathering were their experience that they were doing at that time. Does that make sense?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It does, it does. I mean maybe from human terms we could think of them as students or scientists or something like that. Would that be human-like accuracy?
Natalie Sudman: Uh—
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: No. No, Bob, you are so far off. This interview is over.
Natalie Sudman: Not really. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I mean I don’t think we’re really that far off because it doesn’t hurt to kind of find a parallel in the physical world so that people can understand it. Yeah, I mean you could think of it as scientists. Yeah, as scientists, I mean in a way that makes sense because some of them were—I’m going to have to think about this more.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Hey, that’s what this is all about, asking the meaningful questions that maybe you haven’t thought of before.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah. As far as what they were doing, there were so many things that they were doing that it’s hard for me to sort of group them all together. But say there was a group who were adept at managing energy flows between dimensions, so maybe that’s more like some kind of manager or an artist even.
Then there were others who maybe were experimenting with how to move energy in this way or that way in this one dimension and because there are energy crossovers in dimensions they were working with this whole group in order to understand implications of this kind of energy movement. Does that make sense?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It does. But now you’ve brought up the question, why don’t they all know this? I tend to, and I’m sure a lot of people do, just assume, you’re in the spiritual world, you’re somewhat omniscient, or how can they not know about all this energy stuff already? You know what I mean? So I don’t know if that makes me feel good or bad, like oh, they’re experimenting here.
Natalie Sudman: You know how when you’re a kid, you think, oh, when I’m an adult then everything’s going to be easy because I can do whatever I want to do. You get to be an adult and you’re like, oh my God, what’s going on?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I want to be a kid again, yeah.
Natalie Sudman: This is supposed to stop. We’re supposed to grow up and all this sort of stuff is supposed to stop. Well, this being here in the physical is a creative experience, and we’re creating while we’re experiencing. My understanding, you go to the spirit world or the nonphysical world and as above, so below, or as here, so between, wherever that world is. We’re still creative beings. I mean as a whole self we’re still a creative being.
Do you want to get in the spirit world and okay, I know everything. How boring is that? We’re still creating out there. We’re still creating our reality and creating our experience and exploring and expanding.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wonderful, I love that. That’s great. Now you can’t wait to get there even more. No, really. The spiritual beings, though, you said they’re here; they’re doing these things. Even these groups that you talked about that are working with energy in a certain way, that’s just one thing that they’re doing out of who knows how many, right?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, I think that would be accurate. Yeah, because they can hold a lot of different focus points at once on a grand scale compared to us holding I’m aware of talking to you and of the wind blowing outside and what’s going on with my feet. I don’t know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. So this is neat. I also wanted to ask because I asked about the environment, the blackness, I’ve also heard people talk about like this sound that most people say they can’t describe. I’m going to say this; I have to mention this. In this book, one of the things that I commented to my wife Melissa about was that so many people who have had near death experiences will give the short answer of that just can’t be described in human terms, whatever the question may be; there’s just really no way to describe it.
You attempt to do that. You attempt to do it, and I love how you do it because you’re very careful about the words you use. So even in this interview so far we’ve talked about you like to use co-passion instead of compassion and there are words that you prefer to use over others.
I even remember when you were talking about the word dimension in the book, you talked about that wasn’t your favorite word; you didn’t think it was the most accurate word, and you went through all these other possible words that you could use and then came back out at the top where that’s why dimension is the best word we have for it. That’s the way my mind works. I think it’s exciting that you try so hard to describe this.
So now that I put you on the spot, did you hear sounds, and how would you describe that sound?
Natalie Sudman: That’s another good question because I don’t think I talked about that in the book.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: No.
Natalie Sudman: I would say that yes, I heard sounds. On that level, for me there was no separation between feeling or visuals and sounds. I mean all of my senses were in a sense one sense. If I wanted to, I could’ve looked at all those beings and instead of seeing those beings I could’ve heard them as a sound, as individual sounds. I could’ve tasted them. I could have just felt them. It seems like all you have to do is choose that through intent.
I mean in my experience one amazing, beautiful sound wasn’t a standout characteristic, but then I was focused in a different way. I think if I had chosen to focus on sound, I could’ve had this whole experience as sound, and it would’ve been the same experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. The interview that I did, her name was MarVeena Meek. She’s a cowgirl who got trampled by her horse. The horse fell on top of her. She had this near death experience. She’s the one who talked about the light within the darkness. When she talked about sound, the best way she could describe it was like when you hear a chime ring it was like the end of it; just sort of the end of that chime resonating out there was the best way.
Natalie Sudman: I would describe that as the sound of creation.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Of what?
Natalie Sudman: They’re sort of a sound of creation, the sound underlying all sound. I mean I can take myself back there and become aware of that. Yeah, it wasn’t a standout kind of experience for me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, the sound of creation. That’s your next book. That’s beautiful. That really is. So I have to stop because I know people are wondering. So you’re having these incredible experiences. You’re in the blink environment, as you call it in the book. You’re with the gathering. You’re downloading all this information. This is information that you’ve gathered from this human lifetime so far, right?
Natalie Sudman: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yet parents and siblings are wondering, did she think of me, was she worried, any of that?
Natalie Sudman: No, sorry. I took no interest, no interest. I was tired and I told the gathering that I’m tired; I’m not going to go back. I had no thoughts, sorry friends and neighbors and family, of any of you. I didn’t care. That was all left behind, and I didn’t have any interest in it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Did you know Tom at that time?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, I did.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Great, he’s going to come take the computer away.
Natalie Sudman: He’ll laugh.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: He’s like, what? Give me that computer. That’s mine. Well, that’s interesting. Okay, so you didn’t think of it, but at the same time I know you can go back like you just did a moment ago. You can go back and you can bring yourself back. Is that because you had a sense that you just knew everything was okay no matter how it happened? You knew everybody was going to be all right. You knew that if you decided to stay there in this other realm and not go back into your body just everything was going to be okay. Did you ever have that kind of a sense?
Natalie Sudman: I don’t think I really thought of it that way necessarily, but that was underlying it. I think if I felt like I left things undone or if I felt like somebody, just their lives would be destroyed if I chose to go on, which I can’t imagine, then maybe I would’ve felt more of a pull to go back. I mean I don’t have any kids and things like that. Maybe something like that would’ve given me more of a pull to go back.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: But the one thing that you did learn, or at least recognize, thanks to this gathering of thousands of beings was how important your work here really was, right?
Natalie Sudman: Well, not just mine, everybody’s.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, expand on that. Why?
Natalie Sudman: A lot of times we think that our lives are small and petty and are not very valuable. I’m not as valuable as the person who has control over millions of dollars, or I’m not as valuable as the person who runs a country. But it’s not true. All of our lives are valuable. If you do nothing more than enjoy your day, then you have done something valuable for creation, for the all that is God, whatever you want to call it. Just our being here is amazing, and everything we do matters. Everything has value.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You do touch upon that a little bit about—what was the word that you used—how amazing, is the word I remember you using; how amazing humans are, how amazing it is, at least you got this sense, for us to have this human experience because of the skills required, the whatever it requires to be able to do that. You get a lot of admiration for that alone, correct?
Natalie Sudman: Right, yeah. Yeah, we don’t really realize how amazing and totally cool we are that we can, as spirit, maintain the focus that it takes to stay in our physical bodies and work in a physical environment. It takes a special kind of skill, and not all spirits or beings or whole beings or whatever have developed themselves in that direction.
So what looked easy to me because I had done it and I knew how to do it and I was pretty good at it, it didn’t look amazing to me because I had gotten good enough at it that it wasn’t that difficult. But that kind of razor focus that it takes us to stay here is a real high. It’s a real thrill for the whole self to be able to do that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s pretty cool. Did you have any sense that you had had other lifetimes? I wonder why you were so good at it, like this whole gathering of the information that you had and being able to download it to all these beings. Did you have a sense that maybe you had done this before and that’s why you were good at it, or you just have a natural ability for this? Did you find out?
Natalie Sudman: Well, yeah, I had a definite sense that I had done this before and I’ve done it a lot, that in some sense I’d become an expert at it. I don’t know how to talk about other lives or past lives because from that nonphysical plane it doesn’t make sense to talk about past lives because it’s all one; so that only makes sense if we’re totally focused in this physical life to talk about it as past or future.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: But other would make some sense, right, another life?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, other would make sense, I guess.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, okay. I’ve heard people talk about the folds. Like because everything’s happening at the same time that sometimes like déjà vu might be like a fold in time; like recognizing say if you folded the line, because of course it’s not linear, but you folded the line of two lives or even the future and the past, what we would see as that, that déjà vu might be as a result of that fold in time. I don’t even know what I’m talking about because I haven’t been there. Does that make any sense to you? What would you think, having had this experience, that déjà vu is all about?
Natalie Sudman: Well, I guess, wow, that could take some explaining.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay.
Natalie Sudman: Okay, I’ll see if I can nutshell it. I think that your way of thinking about a fold makes sense to me, say a fold in energy. I mean we think of time and space as one thing when really they’re something else. They’re one strand of something much, much bigger, and it’s not set. I mean we have clocks, and we think of an hour as this long and space as this. But that’s not the way it is. Even like Einstein’s theory of relativity touches on that. Time is relative to the individual. Okay, that’s one string.
Then I’m going to hop over to something else and see if I can bring them together. Who knows? But as a whole being, there is no time of course. So in a sense everything’s happening at once and yet it’s not. It’s happening not in a linear way but in a much more complex way than we think of linear time.
So in my physical body it may be that my whole self, for instance, hops ahead to look at something and then hops back through focus, just through focus or intent. When that hop happens, then there’s going to be some interaction between those two points. So I think it would make sense that then also there’s some awareness brought into this physical being of, whoa, wait a minute, I’ve done this before. Well, yeah, you have. You’ve already done it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right. That was brilliant, first of all. I mean wonderful, in fact. If people liked that explanation, that’s what they get a lot of in this book, first of all. That was one of the things that I really enjoyed about it. Second of all, I think you were thinking so hard you blew my light. If I’m in the dark here a little, I could go turn another one on, but who cares? Because I think the metaphor of me being in the dark is pretty good actually, and look how lit up you are. So that makes a lot of sense. I’m just going to leave it this way.
But we’re also wrapping up here, and there was so much more to the story. I will say that just to give people a sense, because they should go out and get this book, Application of Impossible Things by Natalie Sudman. The blink environment is just one environment out of three that you go through, and you also have a rest environment where you go through another whole experience and a healing environment where you go through this whole experience.
There’s never enough time for an experience with this much depth to cover it all in an interview, so that’s okay. I can live with that because you’ve written it all down. I mean it would be especially sad if you hadn’t. But you have, and people can get the rest of the information there.
The thing that I just want to cover before we go because I find it a very important part of your experience is that one of the things that I gained from your book, and you just tell me if I’m wrong, is that when it comes to—and there’s so much to talk about here we can’t do it in five minutes—but one of the things about life, and I’m just going to say this, to me the purpose of life is just to have experiences, good or bad, negative, positive, that doesn’t even come into play. It’s just to have experiences.
You had this experience when you were still in the truck. You blinked again and you’re back in your body. You had chosen to come back into your body, and in my mind you’ve still got one foot there in the other realm. Tell us about this idea of you had this thought that you might be blind in one eye. Tell us about that little story.
Natalie Sudman: Yeah. When I came to, we were rolling down the road in the truck, blown up, all kinds of—I won’t go into that. The truck came to a stop. I was trying to look out the window, and I realized that I couldn’t see out of the eye that my hand had been covering when I took a nap. So the first thing that popped into my mind when I realized that I couldn’t see out of that eye was excitement.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Excitement?
Natalie Sudman: Excitement. I’ve never had this happen. I’ve never been one-eyed before. This could be fun. I remembered a dream. When I was in graduate school I had a dream about my grandmother. In the dream she was blind. She had died a couple years before, and she wasn’t blind in real life but in the dream she was.
She was painting these beautiful pictures in my mind, and I asked her, grandma, how can you paint such beautiful pictures in my mind when you’re blind? As soon as I said it, I thought, how stupid was that? She leaned in and she said, Natalie, you don’t need eyes to see.
So here I am, can’t see out of one eye, and I’m thinking of this and I’m excited. I was honestly getting really excited. I thought, maybe if I can’t see out of this eye it’ll let me see other worlds more clearly. Then I thought, wow, that’s really kind of demented. I want to see out of both eyes. It’s like snapping back out. But that excitement, that was real. That was very, very real, and it still informs the way I understand my injuries and how I understand the world. I mean it changed things for me definitely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So would I be at all correct in saying, I mean, we can almost think of our souls as having that same sort of excitement for even the negative experiences, what we would consider the negative experiences, in our lives. So our soul saying, wow, I’ve never had that experience before, to have that challenge, that’s exciting to me.
Natalie Sudman: It was completely devoid of fear, devoid of all the things I should think, devoid of me judging that experience by whether it be a cultural context or a personal context. It was just being right in that moment and being excited for that moment and what that moment could hold for me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: To me that is so powerful. I’m going to end what we’re going to learn about here, and I’m going to ask you about your injuries next. But to me that is just so powerful. It’s just a great way to end this interview. I don’t think I need to beat it to death. You know what I mean? I think people certainly will get that. That’s hugely powerful to me, so thank you. I think if that was the only thing that I came away with in this book and in this interview that alone could change my life.
Tell us about your injuries first, the injuries that resulted from this whole thing.
Natalie Sudman: Some shrapnel broke my right heel. I had a bunch of shrapnel in my left leg. My right wrist was broken, and both the bones of my arm were shattered. I had a hole in my skull here with some shrapnel in the frontal sinus. I had shrapnel in both eyes, lots of cuts and stuff of course. But also, all the bones on this side of my face were broken, and I had a skull fracture, which I think is redundant. Then things like broken teeth that had taken a quick exit through my face and some other scratches and stuff like that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: How about your eye?
Natalie Sudman: The eye, at first they just thought it was blunt force trauma injuries. They got the tiny little pieces of shrapnel out. That really wasn’t a huge problem, but the retina had been tattered really from the explosion. When the swelling went down in this eye, the retina detached. They reattached that even though it was all tattered, but because there was also a little bit of optic nerve damage that eye doesn’t read all the light.
They took the lens out because of all these surgeries, and the damage to this part of my face damaged some of the muscles. So now I see not quite as much light as this eye reads, and it’s blurry because there’s no lens in it. It’s tilted because of the muscle damage. They did move some muscles around and fix that a little bit, but they can’t fix it entirely. So I kind of have double vision.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. How about emotionally after that? Have you had emotional kind of reactions since then? Everybody talks about PTSD. Have you experienced that sort of a thing?
Natalie Sudman: Well, you know, it’s kind of interesting to me. I didn’t experience any PTSD symptoms until I got out of the hospital. Then they were mainly sort of physical reaction things, like if I walked outside I was running scenarios through my mind all the time. Anything could happen, anything.
I’m thinking, okay, what if a car jumps the curb or what if that tree falls down on me or what if there’s a sniper on the roof. I was running through all the things that could possibly happen. I mean that could not even probably possibly happen. A satellite could fall out of the sky and slam into me. I mean I’ve talked to other soldiers and they understand this. Anything could happen.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah.
Natalie Sudman: Walking by a piece of garbage on the road, I would walk to the other side of the road and go around it because that garbage could blow up. So I did. I mean it probably seems like I shouldn’t have PTSD symptoms after having this experience, but I do. I do. I still do. They’re different now, but I still do have them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: How do you deal with them? I’m sure some days are better than others, right?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, some days are better than others. I did a lot of sort of work on my own that probably psychiatrists or psychologists do with other people. When I’d see that trash by the side of the road, I would walk right up to it. I would make myself walk right up to it, and honestly sometimes shaking and sweating. I would walk up to it. I would touch it. I would pick it up. I would hold it, and I would look around and say, I’m here. Then I’d set it back down.
I did that kind of thing over and over, or I’d sit on the couch and go, a tree could fall through the ceiling right now or the gas line could blow up. Then I’d stop myself and say, is it likely that the gas line is going to blow up? Probably not. You can go down and check it if you want to. I just kind of slowly worked those kinds of things out of my system. Now they’re different things, like I said.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So you certainly haven’t come out of this unscathed, and yet how do you feel about life? Are you glad that you came back into your body?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah, it’s fun. I mean even with all this. Sometimes even when I’m in the midst of a shaking kind of PTSD experience there’s a part of me that’s still standing back and kind of giggling and going, well, I’ve never done this before. This is new.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah.
Natalie Sudman: Even interviews, I mean I told you that interviews make me really nervous, and part of that is the PTSD. I’ve got all these scenarios running through my mind. But even within that there’s a part of me giggling in the back room going, this is different.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Good for you. Good for you. Well, I think it’s great, and I think you’re a great example and an inspiration to so many of us. I was going to show a couple pictures from the book, but my light has gone so I’ll be surprised if anybody could really see those. I guess we can try now that I mentioned it. I go and mention that. I don’t know if you can see that, but that’s her in her fatigues. Then there’s another one on the next page. This is when you’re getting an award, right?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: The civilian version of the Purple Heart, is that correct?
Natalie Sudman: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What’s that called?
Natalie Sudman: The Defense of Freedom Medal.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow, that’s quite an honor. It’s been quite an honor to have you here. Honestly, I can’t thank you enough, first of all, for your patience with the technological issues that we were able to overcome. We overcame. To tell your story and share it with everybody, it’s been absolutely amazing. I know that you don’t have anything; I asked you in the last interview that we couldn’t show. You don’t have anything to promote other than the book, Application of Impossible Things by Natalie Sudman. Thank you so much. I just wish you the very best.
Natalie Sudman: Thank you, Bob.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Bye now.
Natalie Sudman: Bye.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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