Ray Catania | The Atheist and the Afterlife: N.D.E., Mediumship & Managing Psychic Abilities
Ray Catania joins InnerVerse to discuss his book The Atheist and the Afterlife, an autobiography about his early life Near Death Experience and the psychic abilities that it unlocked. In this episode he retells this story, including things like life-saving spirit guides, the uncomfortable awakening to mediumship, receiving what he describes as verifiable information from deceased people, the synchronistic discovery of mentors, and Ray's theories on the grand questions of our existence.
In the Plus+ Extension, Ray validates some of my own mediumship experiences, we riff about spirit attachments, breaking the cycle of recurring negative patterns, the deprogramming of unhelpful unconscious beliefs, how contact with the beyond puts mundane problems into a bigger perspective, Ray's meetings with a Jesus-like being, and Ray's advice on how to learn the frequency language of one's ethereal guides.
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In this episode
Core themes
The Atheist Who Died and Came Back
Ray Catania opens with the story behind his book The Atheist and the Afterlife. At twenty he breathed natural gas all night from a kitchen stove leak, could not lift his head or legs in the morning, and fell face first onto his bedroom floor without feeling pain. He describes watching his lifeless body from the upper corner of a perfect square room while a white light and a being waited across from him. His father scooped him up, and Ray asked the being to return so he could finally have the bond with his dad he had never known.
Being Called Crazy for Fifty Years
The thread running through Ray's account with Chance Garton is rejection. As a boy hiding in basements and closets for hours, he saw energy in walls and talked with beings he thought everyone could see, and was told never to say it again. Paramedics who heard him ask about the voice and the light decided he was not all right. His mother said it never happened. A maintenance man who checked his haunted apartment a hundred times told him to stop calling. Ray explains how that verdict pushed him into insomnia, drinking, drugs and eventually rehab.
The Father in Law on the Movie Screen
After his future wife bought him a distance clearing for his birthday, Ray started seeing a heavy, bearded, dark haired man on what he calls the movie screen in his third eye, repeating that he had made a mistake and that Ray could help her. His wife, a doctor of psychology and neuropsychology, recognized the description as her dead father and showed a later photo that matched. Instead of diagnosing him, she suggested he was a psychic medium. Ray tells Chance the message he carried actually saved someone's life, and that once delivered, the man stopped appearing.
Mentors, Turning It On and Turning It Off
The medium Ray finally sat with described the vibrations, lines, swirls and screen exactly as he saw them and took him on as a mentee. Her core teaching was control. Ray explains to Chance that the dead only want a message delivered, so refusing plainly makes them leave, while setting an open window like tomorrow afternoon in the living room invites them in. A second mentor, the artist who drew his wife's father, chose eleven applicants from hundreds and became the father figure Ray never had.
Thermodynamics, Dark Energy and the Buddha
Ray likes attaching physics to spiritual claims. He leans on the first law of thermodynamics, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, to argue that consciousness emitted by the brain has to go somewhere at death. His candidate is dark energy, the roughly sixty nine percent of the universe nobody can locate, dark only because we cannot see it. On purpose he cites the Buddha saying on his deathbed that this was his seventh life and he would not return, meaning enlightenment ends the cycle and turns you into a guide for someone else.
Quotes
“It's a square room, it was a perfect square. I am like in the corner, left upper corner, looking down at my lifeless body and this doesn't scare me in the moment at all.”
“So I asked the being if I could go back and when I woke up, I was no longer in his arms and I was no longer in that room. I woke up on the living room floor and the paramedics are working on me and they have all their tools and their gadgets and they're doing their thing”
“So the mythology around the Oracle at Delphi was that it was situated in a cave or something. And the story is that the god Apollo slew a giant serpent called Python and its bones or its body was under the earth decaying and rotting.”
“It's magical, because just being there for a half a second is like, I guess, being there for a decade and learning things in a millisecond.”
“I used to do a lot of psilocybin, kind of recreationally, but also kind of for my own spiritual progression. And what turned me off to continuing to use it was that even the smallest amount would put me into this place where there were people that no one else could see that were in my peripheral vision.”
“Now, on the flip side of that, if you wanna welcome it, you can pick a time and a place. And when I say time, you can't say like two o'clock because they don't know what two o'clock is.”
“And that is called dark energy. And it just made perfect sense to me that that's the physical place that you go because we always say when we die, the dead are right here. It's not like they go someplace else far away.”
“there may be just one person out there, but probably more than one who's had some stuff like this go on, and some knowings or some messages from people on the other side come through and they needed to hear that they're not alone, that they're not crazy for this type of thing happening to them”
Ray Catania is an author and spiritual practitioner who writes and speaks about mediumship and psychic ability following a childhood near-death experience, detailed in his book 'The Atheist and the Afterlife.'
See all Ray episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
