What is the message we would bring back to our families and friends if we survived a near-death experience? It’s the kind of event that could change our lives in a big way. What would we most want the people closest to us to realize from our close encounter with the veil?

Such close encounters reveal profound insights and perceptions that can change a life’s direction, or bring new understanding about the human’s larger universal purpose and potential.

Being brought back “online” from an unexpected near-departure also highlights a view of human life as the integration of many different systems in a unified, harmonious whole — physical, mental, and spiritual. An illness or other struggle can be seen as a form of dis-integration, while weaving to reintegrate the parts back together, physical and energetic, enables a larger healing. It brings a clearer vision of the river of life flowing seamlessly within a stream of universal possibility.

Longtime Portals friend David Price Francis recently survived a very close call: a scheduled heart surgery did not go as planned. In the latest chapter of the Current Openings series, he talks with Aviv Shahar about the perceptions and meaning the experience unlocked, and the message he’d like us to contemplate. Among their insights:

• That's how I think of human beings: we're not finished, we're not completed. We're here to learn, to grow, to develop. We're in an embryonic state, which is why planet Earth is so messy.
• Make the most of life while we're here; pay attention, try to understand how the universe works. Partly why we're here is to read God's signature in the world around us.
• We can’t have the evolutionary stream without being in the river of life; we need to love both. Not trying to be in the realm of consciousness and leaving behind regular life.
• Instructing and talking to our soul is part of wellbeing and healing. We talk with our intention, our consciousness; we speak to our brain, our body, our soul about what’s happening in our life.
• We might see life in the universe and on Earth as random. Yet the distance from the sun to Earth is exact. In life there is often an exactness to a fraction of a degree. What does this mean for how we live?

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.