A Near-Life Experience
Forays into the other ‘Other Side’, the Big Issue, and the Veil of Bullshittery
5:15pm, Thursday 14th November, 2025 only happened once. I was on my usual return loop from the supermarket. It was a pleasant, sunny day with a bit of a breeze. I’d picked up pasta for dinner, and a pack of chocolate croissants, as a treat.
On my way back, in the middle of the hustle-and-bustle of Sydney’s famous business centre, Martin Place, I see a fellow selling The Big Issue, a magazine established to support homeless people. Persons affected by homelessness can sell it and make an income.
There is this fellow, standing on the square, surrounded. A flock of people pass him by. They’re on their way out of work. Off to drinks, or home.
Go on then, Joe.
I halt that energy that just wants to get home and tuck into a meal. I make eye contact.
‘You take card?’
He smiles.
‘Yep!’
Damn. I’m committed now.
I reach into my pocket as he pulls out one of those miniature pay-wave devices. I remark at it.
‘How good’s technology?’
‘Yes, it’s good. Here you go!’
He holds out my magazine.
‘Sold many today?’
‘This will be the second.’
He beams. I’ve never seen someone so happy reporting so few sales. If he worked in one of these Martin Place towers, he’d have the good sense to wear a frown, curl his tail between his legs, feel ashamed. Perhaps he needs a lecture on KPIs. Another time, perhaps. He explains:
‘I only work at this two hours a day, between 5 and 7.’
The bastard is still smiling. He looks cheery as.
‘Ah, that’s a good time at this spot, you get to see all the happy-looking people on their way home!’
I gesture to the cross-looking suited sons of b’s around us. Not a smile to be found.
He laughs.
‘Yep, that’s right.’
‘Ah well, thanks for the issue…’
And we move on. We’re just two more balls of energy in this crazy universe, passing each other by—with all our gravity, all our orbit, and all we pull into it.
At that point in time, 5:15pm, Thursday 14th November, 2025, he looked the happiest person in Martin Place.
Quite mad, isn’t it?
I go home and read the Big Issue. On page 6, a remarkable woman tells her story. Immigrating to Australia, building a life here, and subsequent run-in with homelessness. I feel like I’ve been taken, by her story, through the invisible Veil of Bullshittery that blocks us from life and through to the ‘other side’, where everything is rainbows.
Her story doesn’t help me develop my marketing muscles, enhance my net-worth, feed my intellectual ego… yet mystifyingly it has just enhanced my experience of life.
It’s marvellously refreshing. Pure oxygen in my lungs. Joyful breaths. Optimism and hope in me little heart. It feels like a tiny pocket of life, before death.
A tiny insight into the other, other side.
Near-Death Experiences, Near-Life Experiences
I’m rather interested in Near-Death Experiences at the moment, accounts of awe-defying experiences of ‘the other side.’ While getting their sneak peak of the next-world, these people report feeling total goodness, calm, love, and absence of fear.
Until they come back, of course.
Back to the madhouse, the poor scoundrels.
However, they typically find themselves refreshed, re-energised, reinvigorated. They tend to emerge with a renewed energy, passion, and appreciation for life.
Well, that seeded in me a funny thought:
Near-Life Experiences.
The opposite of a Near-Death Experience.
In a Near-Death Experience, you’re technically dead for a few minutes and get to experience the beauty of life on the other side.
In a Near-Life Experience, you’re technically alive—same as you always are—but you seem to feel some portion of this ‘beauty’ feeling people describe on the other side.
It’s the other, Other Side.
The ‘other side’ that exists on this side.
I hope I haven’t confused you about what side we’re talking about. Is everyone still onside? Good.
My working theory is that life throws us curveballs, but we’re meant to get back to the good side. That feeling. Everything that stops us from feeling this way, is just part of the Veil of Bullshittery.
In other words, maybe Anthony de Mello had a point:
I wonder, as I do, about the presence of people like this humble fellow selling the Big Issue, and how they exist in the middle of our BIG BUSINESS ****centres. Maybe society develops the homeless as part of its great balancing act—the way disease controls over-crowding and bushfires regenerate forests, and children, whose fresh eyes rediscover the wonder of the world we take for granted, keep us down-to-earth. Maybe such people are here to help rescue us from the Veil of Bullshittery. Maybe they are integral.
Or, maybe not.
I’m not sure who’s happy and who’s not, who’s happiest and who’s saddest. I just like watching it all—eyes open. Proudly advertising that I gave $9 to a homeless guy, the saint that I am. And laughing at it all—how naturally we contemplate life ‘after death’, but not life before death.
Like the Big Issue, it’s not for everyone…
… and maybe two sales in Martin Place is pretty good, considering.
5:15pm, Thursday 14th November, 2025 only happened once.
But I suppose it happens every day.
The Big Issue, Australia
https://thebigissue.org.au/our-programs/the-magazine/
Maybe we're more like the walking dead and we need these near life experiences to remind us it's okay to live again. That there's something transcendent, bright and awe inspiring here in this life, not just at the end of the tunnel to the other side.