Jonas Elrod says he was living a normal life until one night, he began to see visions -– lights, colors and spiritual beings –- that could not be explained. Was he sick? Could it be a tumor? Elrod feared the worst. In the above video, he tells HuffPost Live how he was eventually able to come to terms with his unexplainable experiences and see them as spiritual revelations -- a topic he's exploring in the new OWN series, "In Deep Shift with Jonas Elrod."
Growing up, Elrod says he never considered himself a religious person. "But in my early 30s, I started having, for lack of a better word, metaphysical experiences," he says. "I would have premonitory dreams, I would have synchronicities, and I would start to see light coming off of people, and then at times it would become colors, which I learned were auras. I would see things like energy centers in the body which are called chakras."
Understandably, these visions frightened him. "I had no idea what these were called so when I started researching what was happening to me –- did I have a brain tumor, was this real? –- I started to see a lot of things I was experiencing were in religious text or spiritual text or whatnot."
Elrod says he had an MRI and underwent psychological evaluation to find a medical explanation for what he was experiencing. With no scientific logic to be found, Elrod began to believe this was all part of a larger spiritual journey and filmed his experiences in the 2010 documentary "Wake Up." Today, Elrod sees life and death in a new light and believes that every person is on a spiritual journey with three basic stages: breakdown, breakthrough and integration. It's the premise of his new series premiering February 8.
Overtime, Elrod says he was able to see his visions as a gift because, to him, they unequivocally prove that something greater exists. "Now some people would call it God, source -– I don't care, I don't get tied up into religion or nomenclature," he says. "But ... these experiences show me, without a shadow of a doubt, that we do survive death and that there is a bigger picture going on.
"That is invaluable because, me, like most people, were fairly afraid of what happens to me after I die," he shares. "But I would have these experiences on such a regular basis, I understand that this is just a small portion of reality and there's a much bigger landscape. How the architecture works, what religion is right, I don't know -– and frankly, I don't care. But what it's done for me is really help me to clean up and become hopefully a better person now that I'm on this rock, as opposed to thinking, 'This is all there is.'"
"In Deep Shift with Jonas Elrod" premieres Sunday, February 8 at noon ET on OWN.
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