Triggering a Near Death Experience at Will

 

There are 1.6 billion units of Coca Cola sold each day and there are nearly 1 billion smokers. Imagine what would happen if everyone replaced that habit with breathwork.

~ Niraj Naik

Breathe or Die.

Breathe and get high... high on your own supply.

I made this my modality, which is like a combination of guided hypnotic language which speaks direct to the unconscious mind with this sequence of rhythmic breathing pranayama techniques... by holding your breath. What I realized was the magic in all of this tantric breathing is the breath hold... your ability to hold your breath; the deeper you can hold your breath, the longer you can hold your breath - for around 60 to 90 seconds. Around that time, you trigger this state called intermittent hypoxia, which is the lowering of the normal oxygen level in your blood. And what it does is it basically wakes up this whole cocktail of feel good positive hormones... which I refer to with the acronym “D O S E” for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

With deeper and deeper DOSE's, you get your own version of DMT (a serotonergic hallucinogen and investigational drug of the tryptamine family that occurs naturally in many plants and animals, including humans) - you increasingly get these very deep, mystical states of consciousness. And with the right guided affirmation, you can actually totally reprogram the unconscious mind.

The biggest realization I had was that we can reprogram our core identity through breathing after it has become distracted from our true life path where we are connected to spirit.

If you start identifying with the world as being hopeless... there's no hope for humanity... the universe is out to get me... I've sinned so much in the past... that's why I'm getting all this bad luck... if that's your default state, you're going to be negatively affected. It will affect your breathing and so many different parts of your physiology, and you'll end up getting a chronic disease, like I did.

The healing happens when you wake up, when you have an awareness, an awakening to your true self. You become suddenly super aware of your past, and you see it in a new light. When you can look back and see everything as a gift and a blessing, that's the beginning of when transformation happens.

And so that's what I did. I had to rewire a lot of my past beliefs that I had about God, Spirit, reality... you know, why me? Why me? Why me? And in the end, I was like, thank you God. You know, I mean, because now I have insight... insight into exactly what it takes to get better, which I didn't have before.

Now I suddenly had the real insight of how to help people heal, because I went through it myself. So in the end, it became the best gift ever in having the disease. These techniques can help reprogram the subconscious mind. If you want to fix chronic pain, you can do that; unblock your nose, sleep better, lower your blood pressure, get high, whatever. You can do all that.

It is essentially pranayama. There are many different breathing techniques. Imagine that your mind is an operating system and your physical body is the hardware. There's sequences of breathing techniques that help strengthen your your hardware.

Where is your mind in all this? Never mind. No one quite knows. But we have different layers of consciousness that we all exist in. And there are these higher states of consciousness, these mystical states of consciousness you can turn on through the breath and with breath control techniques; you can get into these psychedelic-like states where you start to see yourself in a whole new way, just like if you were to take psychedelics.

And what psychedelics do, like say, psilocybin or LSD or ketamine, is they change your default mode network, and they quiet down areas of the brain associated with ego. It is the ego that gets programmed. That's the deep part of you that gets programmed from early childhood... from school, media, TV, life experiences, relationships, friends, etc. The programming creates a sense of self, sense of identity, right? For some people, it serves them very well. For others, their ego is not serving them.

But there is a way we can reprogram that. Your own consciousness gives you the ability to be your own software programmer – through breath control.

There is a way to speak to the inner programming, like your inner hardware and software, using guided imagery, like using the right symbolism through metaphor or analogy... like a lot of prayers and religious stories use metaphorical energies.

It's a way to speak to the unconscious mind. The right side of the brain is connected to this. So using the right affirmation, the right coded language, we can begin to reprogram the ego, the sense of self.

It really helps to understand how we are involuntarily programmed... because awareness is key. If you have awareness of how the mind is programmed from the womb, how we're totally at the mercy of our mom, and how it creates reality, the way you see the world, your belief system, the environment... that's when we really start to reprogram.

Your nervous system forms there and your reptilian brain is the first level of programming of your hardware. These are hard-wired programs. It's like when you get a computer, you have the motherboard, chips hard-wired in so they really create a sense of a fixed sense of self, of your ego that can stay with you. For most people it never shifts this part of them. It is a part of you, it creates your sense of what's safe and unsafe, like a safety filter.

How do you see the world? Do you see the world where the universe is out to get you, or do you see the world where the universe is pure love and supports everything that you do? This can be shaped by your experience in the womb. The first level after that, after the womb is birth. Think about this... how are most people born these days? C sections, or at least usually in a clinical environment, completely sterile. Masked doctors staring at you is the first thing you see. It's cold and horrible. And then the first thing that happens is you get slapped on the ass to get the breathing process going. We've been surviving up to this point with the mother giving us oxygen. So now we have to fend for ourselves... and the first thing we do is... take a deep breath, right? And sometimes we hold it in, and that's why the doctor slaps your bum to get the breathing going... to get you to exhale.

Gasping is what we do when we're scared. So your sense of fear, safety, all this gets programmed in this first early imprinting... even before being nurtured by the mother. So if there's any trauma here, right in the process of being born and then breast-fed by the mother, it can program you to have a worldview where you don't trust, or you have serious anxiety about the future, and your mind may be full of worry. This is actually more common than one might think.

Look at America. One in five people are on anti-depressants and something like, 50 to 60% of people who are on anti-depressants have addictions or are alcoholics. So why is this happening? Why are people obsessed with abusing substances? Could it be because they see the world with fear, not love?

And if you look at the media, the TV, they're all reinforcing that fear and worry and tension. So yeah, people are walking around neurotic, anxious, depressed, and fearful. And a lot of it, I think, comes from the way we're born. There's been a lot of studies now showing that these early birth traumas are hard on the psyche. It has more impact than we think. Stanislav Grof actually did a lot of studies on this. That's the first level.

The second level of programming is when we start to walk or crawl around. It's the toddler stage, and this creates our sense of what's mine, what's yours... territory, okay? And you start to learn about emotion and the significance of this. And so these first two levels are the most fixed, hard-wired programs and

circuits in your motherboard... and they're very hard to shift, so only certain substances like psychedelics, and certain practices, have been shown to actually allow you to clear these traumas from these early imprints.

So psilocybin and MDMA are being used clinically now, and show much promise in helping people with severe depression. And severe depression is the result of programming that's gone wrong in the first two imprints. And PTSD as well. All is based on these early programs happening in the first seven years of your life.

What they found is that what makes the psychedelic experience even more potent is the mystical experience - a mystical-like experience where you feel like you've been touched by something beyond yourself, say a conversation with God, a kind of a experience which you can't even put into words, a profound experience that bring you back to spirit. Connection to spirit makes us believe in something beyond ourselves. These kinds of experience are shown to be the most transformative, and what actually gets us there in a much more controlled way than psychedelics is breath work.

With breath work, rhythmic breathing, breathing in a rhythm, perfect rhythm, doing it together, in unison with each other, you produce a cascade of neurotransmitters – DOSE - dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. It creates rapport, a bond, and it's a social hormone. It's like it creates connection, right now. What they found, though, is a connection to neurogenesis, neuroplasticity. So like with a special rhythmic breathing protocol followed by holding a breath, when you get to around 69 seconds breath hold time, we create what we call the soma within.

You breathe in and you hold your breath and you send the cerebral spinal fluid up. This goes up into the brain and it turns on neuroplasticity. Now, as I was saying, the hardware is what we need to shift, okay, so when you create a powerful intention, especially high oxytocin, we can invoke direct to neurogenesis, where we change the brain on command, according to will. And if you think about it, your outer world is a reflection of what's going on in your inner world and is a mirror of your entire nervous system.

We can use the power of intention with invoking this cocktail of neurotransmitters to reprogram like a software programmer. But then there's higher levels. So the higher levels of consciousness come from more advanced breath work practices, where we get into the Fifth Circuit, which is bliss, the sixth which is the intuition circuit, Third Eye activation. The seventh is where we get into the Meta Programming circuit. And this meta programming conscious state is where you can wipe the slate clean. It's like doing a big dose of DMT. Then the eighth is like doing ketamine, which is when you go into non-local states of consciousness, like the astral realms. The seventh is where you start to tap into the collective consciousness of everything that exists. Carl Jung talks about the collective consciousness, where you get divine downloads, like as an artist.

We can get into these very trippy states where we feel like we're getting divine downloads all the time. The eighth is where we start to get the connection to God, universe, spirit, whatever you want to call it... higher power... where you can tap into a source of healing, like energy that's from something beyond yourself that helps clear you of all the negativity that you've built up over time.

It really helps to just reformat the drive, to defrag it and to reprogram it how you want. So what we teach is how to tap into these states of consciousness in order

to reprogram these first four levels of programming that creat your sense of identity.

Our 21-day awakening journey is designed step by step to take you through all these higher states of consciousness, allowing you to wipe the slate clean, reprogram yourself and so really learn about who you truly are, and to step back into your truth and really start to live life based on your truth, rather than continuing on with some false belief system that's been built up over time, which made you sick in the first place.

I believe in models of reality. There's so many different ways to explain reality. You know... different levels, different ways to talk about why we're here. Religion is just one model of reality. I like the simulation theory that this is a game. The breath, in my opinion, is the remote control for your mind, body, and spirit. And when you understand the breath code and how to use it, you can start to hack reality.

If you think about it, the first four levels of programming create the perception of how you feel, how you see reality right now. You can only tune into so much of reality at any one time, so that's why we have these reality tunnels, where for some people it's very narrow... they see a very narrow, rigid world view. But if you want to expand that reality tunnel and to start to see into all other people's realities and learn from them and expand your model of reality, the breath is an amazing modality.

It's like a code. It's a hack, sort of a cheat sheet, for getting into these super high states of consciousness which give you greater insight, and it allows you to start to reprogram the perception filters, your belief systems. If you're a very insecure person with lacks, lacking self esteem and confidence, you can reprogram self confidence.

People may have absolute awakenings, not only spiritual awakenings. Even finding bliss. They are sometimes out of body, having almost near death experiences.

How does this work? When you hold your breath for such a long time, you're lowering the oxygen level in your bloodstream. What it does is it actually suppresses oxygen to certain areas of the brain that deal with consciousness. And then you go into an “other than” conscious state. And what it does is it takes you back into the earliest imprint, the womb imprint, the birth imprint.

With deeper practice, if you go beyond 4 minutes, some people will relive the birth process itself, and they'll have extremely profound, mystical-like experiences.

What we do is more focused on the tantric methods, a combination of rhythmic breathing with music. When you breathe in a perfect rhythm, you trigger oxytocin. So what I'm taking people into is more of this bliss-like experience. And so the protocol is rhythmic breathing, followed by holding your breath.

During rhythmic breathing you breathe out CO2. CO2 is what tells your brain you need to inhale. So if you have less CO2 in your body, you can hold your breath for much longer because your brain's not being told to inhale.

Normally, most people breathe in and out. They'll hold their breath about 30 seconds. We're holding our breath for two minutes, two and a half, three minutes. So when you get into these breath hold states where you're holding your breath two to three times longer than you normally do, magical things happen. When you get to that state, pausing your breath for that long (think of life as a series of inhales and exhales)... when you press pause on your breath, you press pause on life.

Your thoughts are a direct result of breathing. When you breathe fast, you start to get erratic thoughts. When you breathe slowly, you get calm thoughts. It calms everything down. If you pause your breath for a long period, it's like pressing pause on reality. And if you go deep enough, you get this huge awakening of this endogenous DMT because DMT has been shown to be utilized by cells when the oxygen levels are low.

The other thing that wakes up is stem cells - endogenous stem cells. That's why you get a lot of healing, because stem cells hate oxygen. So when you lower the oxygen for a brief period, stem cells come out to play, and then also these positive tryptamines, which make us trip out when we breathe in at the end, holding your breath in, and sending the energy up. You get this electric current. It feels like a charge of electricity up into the third eye and you have this huge white light-like experience.

It's like a near death experience. Because you're holding your breath for so long, you're tricking the brain into dying. It's not actually dying. But this is what the mystics used to do. They used to experiment with their breath to get into near death.

When I did Ayahuasca it was one of the most profound mystical experiences

I'd ever had... mind blowingly incredible... and it was my confirmation that there's a spirit world. It was like Snow White came down with all these dwarfs who were healing me from within. She was telling me the meaning of life and its purpose. I kept asking questions. It's like you become the observer, and you see this conversation going on between your ego and this entity. You're observing it, and it's like a mood. It's like cinema.

It's so hard to explain what's going on. I kept asking what's the point of all this. If that's how it's all meant to be and everyone's connected, what's the point? Who made this? What's the point and who created them? I kept asking all these curious questions. And she says: You don't need to know. Your purpose is just to live right.

In the end I got so frustrated. I remember seeing this whole thing. I start to rise out of my body, and I'm heading towards the white light tunnel with these angels saying: Come to me. It was super trippy. And I'm going up and up and up and up... and I'm about to go somewhere which is definitely not planet Earth, and I realize I actually am about to die. And at that point, the terror hit me so hard, the fear of actually dying, I just came crashing back, puked, and then the angel comes back and told me that I was not yet ready to know, because the only way to really know everything like that, the ultimate answers to all the questions I was asking is to actually die for real.

So the mystics have always been experimenting with dying while still conscious. I think a lot of religions are based on that, either using psychoactive substances, breath work, advanced yoga practices, burying themselves, all these kinds of things to get into near death-like states.

There's a lot of benefits to this, but it can also be quite scary. But what if we can get close to it without going to extremes? I wanted to give people a method to tap into these states of consciousness without having to take psychoactive substances. Anyone can do this anywhere, anytime, or go very deep with an instructor. It is my mission to make people naturally high, happy, and healthy.

What we've done with breathing is the closest you can get to a method which works like a medicine or a pill without having any of the side effects. Anything we can do to help people to be naturally happy, to step into their truth, to live by their actual truth, the better. And so that's the mission I'm on now.

interview with Niraj Naik by Alex Ferrari at Next Level Soul podcast on May 20, 2025