Dr. Ray Catania is a distinguished author, metaphysical educator, and transformational coach advancing a modern approach to consciousness transformation. He is also something rarer. As a young man, he died, crossed over, and came back. He was a committed atheist at the time, a skeptic with a analytical mind that searched for proof for just about everything. What happened on the far side of that experience did not turn him into a believer overnight. It turned him into an investigator. This is the short version of that story, and an invitation to those who resonate with it.

What actually happened

There was a gas leak. A fall. A heart that stopped.

He woke up above his own body, watching his father hold him and call for help. There was no pain there. No fear. Not a problem in the world. Just a vast, cone-shaped white light shining brightly on him. The new him. The energetic him. Not the dead body. What came with it was complete euphoria, peace, love and the strangest sense of being completely, and finally, all right.

Then he came back.

After being told that could never happen or never tell anyone that, people will think you are crazy, he shut it down as though it never happened. Beginning to make himself believe maybe it wasn’t real after all. Many years later, after publishing his first book, his mother admitted what she had never told him: after the first resuscitation at the house, during the drive to the hospital, the ambulance had to pull over two more times to restart his heart again. He had not nearly died. He had died, and returned. The full account, told in detail, is in his first book, The Atheist and the Afterlife. What follows is what that experience set in motion.

Why Ray calls it a real-death experience, not a near-death

The phrase near-death always bothered him. He did not nearly die. He died. He left his body and went somewhere, felt something, even spoke to someone there, and came back to a body that had stopped working. He uses the term the rest of the world uses, (NDE) because he does not make the rules, but he is blunt about it: from the inside, there was nothing near about it.

In Catania’s own words he has said, “The day I died was the most beautiful day of my life.” He came back almost disappointed to be here. Since that day he has a completely different relationship with death. Diminished fear towards it.

The skeptic's problem: when experience contradicts belief

Most people who go through something like this have a significant reaction. Ray’s was reaching for an explanation. One that would disprove its reality.

He told himself the light was just the sun through a window. The vision was just the gas. A tidy story, and he believed it, because believing it was easier than the alternative. He told no one what he had seen for years, partly out of fear of being ridiculed, and partly because he did not want to believe it himself. Life would be easier and simpler for an atheist if this was all in his head.

But the experiences thereafter were enhanced. Things he could not explain. Things he would not just be ridiculed for, but perhaps even be hospitalized he told anyone. So he did the only thing a skeptic with an analytical mind knows how to do. He started keeping a journal, writing down what he sensed, saw, felt or experienced.

He went to doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists. Eventually, the last person on earth he ever expected to consult with, was an evidential medium. He was not looking for comfort. He was looking for a reason to dismiss the whole thing, but what he received was a validation. Validation for everything that transpired over a twenty year period.

What 20+ years of integration led to

Today Ray Catania, Ph.D., is an author, metaphysical educator, and transformational coach who offers a modern, no-nonsense approach to personal transformation, consciousness, and the power of the mind.

What he shares is not what happens when a person dies. It is what becomes available when the fear of it falls away for one thing. His second book, You Are Still Alive, Now Act Like It, is at its heart a case for staying, and for what becomes possible with the power of consciousness after that. His tagline says it more simply than any paragraph can: what he learned most from dying was a new way to live.

Who this work is for

It is for the person who has been carrying their own inner life privately for years. Who has had experiences they have never said out loud, because the people around them would not understand, or worse, would judge. Who has tried every self-help method in existence and perhaps traditional therapy and found that none of it went quite deep enough.

From that person, the most common thing Ray hears from the people he works with is some version of this: you are the only person I could say this to.