The former chief anaesthetist at Bakersfield Heart Hospital in California, gave a harrowing first person account of his out-of body experience as he went under the knife.
And the ordeal convinced him to leave conventional medicine and sell off his luxury possessions, including his mansion and fleet of supercars, in order to lead a simpler, more virtuous life.
As he felt himself leave his anaesthetized body he said: “”I was now seriously frightened. What was going on? Would my untethered consciousness ever get back into my body — or was I destined to roam through eternity as a spirit?
“I flew up to the ceiling as the medics operated.
“Was I dead? I felt like an astronaut who’d left his spacesuit, only to find that a suit was unnecessary to begin with. With rising panic, I looked back and forth at the two scenes — until both started to fade like a fast-setting sun. Everything went dark. I was relieved: I’m returning to my body, I thought.
“Then came a jolt of pure fear. To my right, I heard screams of pain and anguish. I was drawn in, as if on a moving pavement, to the edge of a flaming canyon. Smoke filled my nostrils, and with it the sickening odour of burning flesh. I knew then that I was on the lip of hell.
“I tried to turn away, but each time I took a step back, an unseen force moved me forward. A voice spoke to me telepathically. ‘You have led a materialistic and selfish life,’ it said. I knew that was true, and felt ashamed. Over the years, I’d lost empathy for my patients.”
In his new book Dr Parti described how he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008, with the subsequent operation to remove the tumour going wrong.
Two weeks after a fifth, failed operation to correct scar tissue in 2010, the then 51-year-old fell ill at home, and instantly recognised his own symptoms – he was going into septic shock and would die unless he was treated immediately.
After being rushed into the operating theatre, Dr Parti claims to remember the moment he was put under anaesthetic – a procedure he himself had carried out on thousands of patients.
Until that moment, he had given little consideration to people who had claimed to have left their body and witnessed their own surgery – even though sometimes they could recount specific moments that occurred while they were meant to be deep asleep.
But now, as surgeons worked to save his life, Dr Parti said he felt himself “zooming up” to the ceiling and looking down at the doctors carrying out his procedure.
He said he overheard his own anaesthesiologist tell an “off-colour” joke and saw his mother and sister at home in India discussing what to have for dinner.
He was dragged towards a “flaming canyon” amid screams of “pain and anguish”, he said.
He wrote: “I knew I was on the lip of hell.”
Dr Parti said he heard a voice admonishing him for leading a “selfish and materalistic life” after losing empathy for his patients. He was reminded of a time when he dismissed a crying women from his office who was distressed about her husband’s terminal cancer.
“As the smoke billowed and the burning souls screamed around me, I thought of my possessions and how meaningless they were,” he claimed.
“Why did I have all these things? Why did I need a home so big that, when we were in different parts of the house, we had to communicate through our iPhones?”
A desperate Dr Parti then prayed to God for a second chance as he felt himself being dragged towards damnation.
But it seems his prayers were answered when a figure – who Dr Parti recognised instantly as his late father – grabbed him by the hand and pulled him away from the fiery vortex.
For the first time his dad, who Dr Parti described as “cruel” and despotic” in life, held him affectionatley and delivered a message that changed the course of his salvaged existence: “Simple love is the most important thing in the universe.”
After then seeing a vision of his late grandfather, Dr Parti’s unlikely spiritual awakening continued when he was visited by the archangels Michael and Rapheal.
They carried him up to “a landscape of clear light” where he was embraced by an astral being which told the former medical practioner he was destined to be “a healer of souls”.
After waking up back in his body in the hospital, Dr Parti told his sceptical aneasethetist about his experince – and was predictably ignored, just as he had done so many times before.
Now the reformed Dr Parti has published a book about his rebirth, Dying To Wake Up.
He now works as a spiritual lhealer and has renounced his former selfish ways.
“The divine Light Being’s instructions were very vivid in my mind.,” he says on his website.
“I needed to follow my Dharma and help people with diseases of the soul.”