There are numerous books on various people’s Near-Death Experiences (NDE). Rob Gentile’s book, “Quark of Light: Near Death Experience (NDE)” is a powerful, honest, and profoundly insightful account of Rob’s NDE after a series of frightening events: heart attack, heart transplant, prostate cancer, and in a coma for four days and “flatlined or clinically dead for 20 minutes”. I felt like I was on a roller coaster ride as I was reading the book. It is incredible to me how Rob endured a harrowing two-year journey with his faith prevailing over his fear, his love for his family, and his encounters with the Divine Source.
In this post, I am very honored to present my interview with Rob Gentile on his book, “Quark of Light: Near Death Experience”. I have so much respect for Rob as a noble human being, father, husband and author. He talked about how his NDE led him to question and shift his belief systems. He currently identifies himself as a Christian. He raised the point that when we are stripped of our various identities based on our personal histories, relationships, religious/spiritual backgrounds etc., we are simply “quarks of light”. He talked about his knowledge that we all come from the Divine Source, and we go back to the Divine Source. He raised the powerful point that experiences marked by adversity and great suffering can be viewed as opportunities to connect and strengthen our relationship with the Divine Source and dig deeper into the self. He talked about dealing with his feelings of betrayal by God when his prayers were not answered, especially his prayers for the healing of his special needs child. In summary, I am in awe of his endurance, strength, commitment to his faith, and love for his family.
INTERVIEW WITH MR. ROB GENTILE: QUARK OF LIGHT
Conversation has been condensed for length purposes
Anindita Ganguly (AG): Namaste Rob! I am super-excited to have you to talk about your book, “Quark of Light: Near Death Experience”. You write about your very powerful, honest and gripping near- death experience in what you call, the “ethereal world”. This shifted your life, and I believe that this will help people reflect on their beliefs and assumptions guiding their lives.
Rob Gentile (RG): Pleasure to be here.
AG: An honor to have you here, Sir.
RG: I was born and raised in a small steel town near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and I am still in the steel industry. But I now live in Charlotte, North Carolina. At age 56, I had gone back to Pittsburg to get an operation with a specialist to remove bone spurs from a previous sports related injury. The procedure is simple and after one night at a Pittsburg hospital, I went back to my home in Charlotte. Unfortunately, I woke up later that night with a blood clot from the operation and a heart attack.
AG: Very scary event. This scary event marked the beginning of a tremendously painful journey…a journey with not just a heart attack, but also a heart transplant, and prostate cancer. You and your family went through a lot of stress. What kept you going on this journey?
RG: This journey took a total of 2 years. Additionally, my daughter, Maria, is a 20-year-old adult with special needs. She has Rett Syndrome, which is a specialized neurological disorder, and she cannot feed herself or talk. She also has a seizure disorder.
On the night of the heart attack, my wife heard me scream and she ran out to check on Maria and then she came to check on me. My wife later said that she saw me flopping around. I had never felt such pain before in my life. I passed away. My wife called 911. The EMT said I had a heart attack and took me to the hospital to stabilize me. Just as the nurse at the hospital said that he is stable and the cardiologist is on his way, my wife later reported that I swung up from the gurney like someone grabbed me. Then, I fell back on the gurney and flatlined. I was clinically dead for more than 20 minutes. I was told that the cardiologist rushed me through a series a of medical procedures. I was in a coma for four days. This is how this journey started.
AG: You discussed a two-year journey with dying, coming back to life with numerous medical emergencies. You talk not just about this struggle but also the difficult journey to get help for your daughter through many endeavors, but never having success with your daughter’s health struggles.
You raise some universal questions, such as, why does God answer some prayers and not others. You talk about feeling abandoned and betrayed by God… how does a loving God allow such horrible things to happen? I think that feelings of abandonment, betrayal by God and finding faith and strength to go on are universal experiences in the human condition.
RG: I grew up as a Catholic and practiced it as an insurance policy. I had a narrow view of the Creator. I now think that suffering, adversity and trauma call us to have a closer relationship with the Divine.
I have never learned anything from my success… everything I ever learned is from my failures. If you turn the suffering thing around, God pushes us into a corner and forces us to peel the onion so that we can look at the core of the self…to ask questions like Who am I? Adversity has the power to help us discover the answer to the question who am I?…we are part of a Divine Loving God.
When things are great, we do not take pauses to contemplate deeper questions. With adversity, if you are not pushed into darkness, adversity allows us to discover who we are…our light…because in regular life we are covered by the vicissitudes of life. With suffering, we have an opportunity to grow and look at things differently.
AG: You discuss the concepts of faith, fear and doubt. How did you deal with these ideas?
RG: Faith and fear are the same thing. It is like looking at the glass as half empty or half full. I choose faith, not fear. Choosing faith does not mean that we do not have challenges but that we must learn something from the challenges. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging…climb out and find out a way to not fall back into the hole. That is how we evolve.
AG: What does faith mean for you?
RG: I am not in control of many things…the only thing that I can control are my actions daily. You can only control your actions and God has control over everything else. Freedom means that I did the best that I could do. Rest is in God’s hands. All I can do is my best.
I went through many dark nights of the soul…negative thinking…Why me? Why did it happen to me? I have a special needs child. I am 56 years old. I have lost everything. I can’t work. My arms are paralyzed. One thing begets another. Once the negative thinking starts, you become a magnet and draw unfortunate circumstances. When I took the higher road in my thoughts, while in bed waiting for the donor heart, I used to exercise to keep myself stronger. It is important to keep myself stronger before the transplant because after the transplant, all the muscles atrophy.
AG: That is incredible. In the book you discuss that one of your strongest drives to get better was to go back to your wife and daughter. I believe your wife said, “you can’t leave me”. You are married and have a special needs child that both you and your wife take care of. Was the love that you have for your family a strong factor that led you back to them?
RG: Very much so. I have so much love for my daughter. She is a beautiful spirit. She cannot talk… She has no malice, no bad intent, no ulterior motive… she is pure Divine energy. But I know that my wife cannot take care of my daughter alone because it is such a full-time job. I cannot think of putting my daughter into an institution and someone else must take care of her. That was a powerful drive to beat this thing. That is the power of love.
AG: Power of love. That came through in the book.
RG: When you are on a list for heart transplant, you need extensive pre-testing. When you receive a heart transplant, you cannot have other conditions because with immune suppressant medications which are given in a heart transplant, your immune system is compromised and you can get other diseases.
At this point in time, I was in the hospital for six months and I was a skeleton. The transplant team told me that they did all the testing and found prostate cancer in me and I was to be taken off the transplant list. At that point, I believed that I was going to die. My wife had a nervous breakdown. I was at one of the upper floors of the University of Chicago Medical center and pacing the floor, when an unbelievable storm blew up in Lake Michigan. I experienced very negative thinking, such as, I am worthless, no good, and I remembered everything that I ever thought that I was not proud of, such as, wishing my daughter was dead while struggling to take care of her. I had high anxiety, heart pacing and thoughts that I should end my life. Then, I cried out to God “Do with me what you will because I am tired of fighting”.
AG: Wow
RG: After surrendering to the Divine, I was pulled up into the ethereal space (in between space) where I was whole and saw my body below. I remember feeling disappointed because I did not see a Divine being, Jesus Christ, angels or my parents. In that ethereal world, communication is telepathic and synchronistic. It was placed on my mind and spirit, “This is the Divine Source, and I am the foundation for everything. My power is omnipotent. This is your real identity”. I knew at that moment that I was not my body, race or religion. I was part of Divine energy. Then I became part of this magnificent web of twinkling lights… what looked like a neuron with a nucleus and intertwined tentacles which formed an interconnected web, stretched into infinity and hung on the ceiling of the universe. It was shown to me that each of the twinkling lights, in the nucleus, was a life. The twinkling light was the building block of life…some call it photon… I saw it as a quark. Quark is the smallest building block of life. I discovered that quarks are used to make up an infinite number of things, tree, dog, person or planet.
I learned that everything is connected…animate and inanimate objects. We are all made of the same stuff. It was shown to me that God uses light to create, heal and transform us. That is the recipe. We manifest differently.
I thought if I hurt myself, I will hurt everything connected to me, but if I love, the light will spread. That is how light is spread. In that place I thought about all this senseless fighting and killing that happens on earth. We are all one, we are all connected, and we are all from the same place. I realized that I do not come from my parents… I came through my parents…I come from God. That was a huge profound NDE experience.
The other transformative experience was when my daughter, Maria, came out of web. Maria was whole and perfect. She walked up to me. In this temporal world, she cannot walk, talk or feed herself. I had a conversation with her… my first conversation in 20 years. I saw spiritual light in her, not the light we see in this world, but spiritual light which animates the world. I said to my daughter “Marina, I have never heard you say a word or that I love you daddy… your mother and I have done everything and taken you to many places to find a cure for you and ease your suffering, what do you want from us?” She said three things which transformed my life. She said, “Just love me”.
AG: Wow. That is incredible.
RG: That is when I cried out that I never wanted to leave this space.
AG: Wow. You say that God is love. All of us want to be loved in this human condition. Yet in this human world, there is conditional love. In other words, you do certain things to be loved. You talk about unconditional love.
RG: Unconditional love is important. But what we do on this planet also matters. I saw parts of the web which had no light, very dark portions. I wondered if that was evil. I understood that in these parts of the web, God was not expressed with love and light. Divine energy was not expressed through these people.
The web reflects what we do on earth. It impacts our spiritual life and vice versa.
The struggle between light and the dark is how we evolve as humanity.
God expresses and experiences life through us. God is a spirit and so the Divine Source does not experience life like us… God cannot taste, or feel, as we can experience in the flesh.
It is very important to understand that the Divine Source wants to express through us and how do we find this. We need to find what we are created to be, what we love to do, what gets us going, and what makes us shine. We are here to express the Divinity in us and share with the world.
AG: So, shining the light through kindness and love is important for ourselves and others.
RG: Yes, that is important. I have one chapter in the book, called “All One”. I was very lucky because I had people of different faiths, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, who were part of my journey. I am a Christian, but I do not condemn other people for their beliefs unless they are doing harm to others. That is the ultimate line in the sand.
The essential core of all belief and religious systems is love… we as human beings screw it up and skew this core principle of love by trying to fit it in our agenda.
AG: So, the fundamental issue is to love and do no harm. Christianity’s Golden rule says its beautifully.
RG: I can talk about my daughter Maria now. For years, I was resentful because all our resources, time, and money went to help my daughter. But now I see value in my daughter. I see her as a teacher. She grounds me. She draws out the best in me.
I work full time, do diaper changes for my daughter at night and wrote from 4:30-7:30 am every morning for three years to finish this book.
The Holy Spirit told me to testify, and I had to write the book. Especially, as the government made an exception for me to get the transplant, despite prostate cancer. I have not had prostate cancer in three years.
AG: Incredible.
Please tell us what it is that the Holy Spirit wanted you to testify about. That is why you were allowed to come back.
RG: It is all very complicated. But the fundamental issue is to know and understand that we are all connected, we are all from the same place, we are loved. What we do matters, and we are all made of the same stuff. Love is the best way to connect, not destruction
AG: You make another great point which is that we do not have to die to experience the Divine.
RG: Yes, after the transplant, I was very depressed because I did not want to be on earth. I wanted to be back with the Creator and love and light. My boss brought his pastor to meet with me and I told the pastor everything. I did not care if he thought I was crazy. I told the pastor that I feel guilt that I got a heart when so many people, including younger people, died because they could not get a heart. I did not know where I belonged… I had one foot in this world and another foot in the ethereal world. The pastor reminded me that I did not need to die to experience the Divine. I started to connect with the Divine through going back to nature which I loved as a kid, showing love and kindness. Divinity is all around us, within me and you.
AG: It is important to cultivate a connection to the Divine, whether it is through exploring nature, practicing kindness or connecting with loved ones. The other part which you address is that there are dark parts of the web where people do not express God’s love and lightness and make decisions to hurt others.
RG: It is very complicated because there are so many reasons why people hurt others.
AG: Yes, it is a complicated subject.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. Thank you for a wonderful interview.
Please note that this is not a therapy site. Please seek professional medical and therapy services, as needed.