Beyond Death (Documentary)

[Music] some people think it is possible to talk to the dead i had a short conversation with my father who died when i was six years old they'll be tapping on your shoulder to get your attention she didn't see him my sister didn't see him i saw him standing right there others feel they've experienced the afterlife i wanted to go on into the light i wanted to know what was in there what i have is a certainty there is no depth there is only life [Music] temperature here in the hall is 79. now scientists are joining these true believers in their own search for an afterlife i do think that the house is legitimately haunted by my definition [Music] there's strong circumstantial evidence that after death communications are real sound waves are sending people into other realms centrifuges are simulating near-death experiences we've had individuals going back and seeing their families looking over a lake with a sunset at the end of the lake being very peaceful computer code generators are showing scientists evidence of a separate consciousness consciousness can access other parts of space and other parts of time than those in which it is physically immersed in the next two hours we'll examine the wide range of phenomena that has convinced many there is life after death without a doubt these people are on the quest of a lifetime once he was gone i knew i had to know i had to find out how much can we really know about what waits for us all beyond death [Music] today more americans say they believe in an afterlife than at any time in the 20th century it's a fact that has social scientists puzzled at the turn of the century social scientists predicted that the level of religiosity and belief in the afterlife by the end of the 20th century would decline dramatically because of two things one secularization of society through public education and the rise of science in actual fact the opposite has happened the belief in afterlife has almost doubled not only have organized religions continued their popular appeal but belief in the paranormal has also flourished this year over a billion dollars will be spent by americans on psychic services alone since 1996 every other week at least one title on spirituality has appeared on the new york times bestseller list and at major universities studies are challenging our basic scientific assumptions about life after death a 30-year study at the university of virginia has produced cases with apparent physical evidence of reincarnation at princeton university a 20-year engineering study indicates that ordinary people can move objects with their minds and in atlanta cardiologist dr michael saban has documented hundreds of cases that he says show that consciousness can leave the body and that it does so at the time of death these researchers are part of a small but vocal group of highly credentialed academics who insist that science can no longer ignore the evidence that suggests our consciousness lives on after we die i think many of my colleagues are uncomfortable with some of these implications but i also believe that this is sufficiently important that we have to stand up and be counted humans have found many ways to reassure themselves that their ancestors live on after death in some early societies people look to their spiritual leaders known as shaman or seers these were venerated leaders who made sense of a confusing and sometimes cruel universe often they claimed to draw their advice from the ancestors of the tribe the dead were a source of comfort of information and of wisdom the role of the seer in western culture is taken up by the priests and rabbis and by the much more reliable rational science and medicine but when a loved one dies science doesn't give the answers people need to hear and religion doesn't always give the comfort they require into this void have come the mediums who claim to possess the shamanistic power of speaking with the ancestors okay all right well let me see what i can get just a minute no brian hurst is a medium who says he can hear the voices of the dead michael it looks like there's an interest here in spiritual healing energy i've been doing healing someone's talking about laying on of hands and directing through your fingers magnetic healing energy hearst's monthly meetings pack the house at twelve dollars per person they're talking about your father father's passed over yes your father keep saying shall his father he's behind the scenes trying to inspire you or impress you in some way it looks like he's trying to make up for things that he didn't do when he was on the earth do you understand yes i feel this man has a lot to be sorry about a lot to apologize for how do i receive this information there are times when i get a funny sensation in my solar plexus area and almost hear a voice in my belly and there are times when i hear no voice at all but just get a whole lot of thoughts some of it is clairvoyance where i see pictures in my forehead and then there's of course uh clear sentience when you receive sensations and feelings i get a feeling like i can't breathe like i'm i'm getting asthmatic or short of breath and a spirit is coming through who died perhaps of emphysema do you know who somebody called francis would be francis is our friend donna's mother she's dead or she no no donnie tony is oh someone keeps talking about francis francis tell a gift from mediums get many answers wrong skeptics say that's because they are not talking to the dead this is what's called a cold reading technique first of all you make a lot of general comments about uh this lost loved one throwing stuff out you know several times several statements every minute and the person will remember the hits and forget the misses there is this a spanish background it's not it's not um i think i'm with i know i think i'm with walter in front okay i'm sorry i thought i was with you but uh yeah ryan hirst has his own explanation for his inconsistencies when i do my group sessions you know a number of different things are happening i'm trying to sort out a lot of different vibrational frequencies different voices because sometimes there can be two or three people trying to get into my head and not always are the spirits disciplined and sometimes i have to ask them please please come on one at a time i cannot possibly hear you if you're all trying to get through at the same time do you have any friends who are what they call tiatu yes what is choo choo is that's where my that's our background is it yes we're chinese is that a chinese is it chinese religion or language yes a language i was pretty skeptical but there's certain things that like what he says about our dialect 2 no one ever knew about that what brian said is i'm hearing hannah hanum and that was my father's nickname for her hanum which in turkish means honey and it's like you know how many people would know that and then she just started coming in and she was talking the way she would talk and it was for people who believe in mediums a session can be an emotional experience but not everyone thinks you need a medium to talk to the dead i would suggest that the information that psychics get is the same information that you can get if you want to talk to a person i suggest you just sit down one day with a pad and pencil and just allow that dead person's being to come into your body and start writing let natural writing occur you might be surprised what you find out but if you don't want to do that if that's uncomfortable to you and you feel that you'd rather pay 100 bucks or 50 bucks or whatever it costs to go to somebody who's called themselves a psychic and give you that experience then go ahead and do it but remember they're valuable and they may be tricksters and you don't know which they are the american tradition of talking to the dead through a self-appointed medium dates back 150 years to a farmhouse in hydesville new york if your answer is yes not twice there in 1848 teenage sisters margaret and kate fox reported being awakened at night by strange sounds gradually the girls learned to respond to the noises they answered back with wrappings and clicking of their fingers working out a kind of alphabet eventually they announced that the noises were being made by the spirit of a man who told them that he was murdered in the house and buried beneath the cellar the story caused a sensation and the two girls became much in demand all over the country where they were touted as mediums who could talk to the spirit world the american spiritualist movement was born it swept this country and the world the western world literally like wildfire all of a sudden on every corner in every city in every small town in this country as well as in england there were mediums everybody could communicate with the dead and seances became one of the greatest fads of the time so popular that in the white house in the 1850s when franklin pierce was president he and his wife had lost a child a youngster hit by a railroad train they held seances to communicate with their son's spirit they invited the fox sisters there mrs lincoln held sciences in the white house when president lincoln was in the white house the death of six hundred thousand men during the civil war prompted a great rise in the popularity of spiritualism it happened again after world war one even thomas edison became intrigued with the challenge of communicating with the dead in a scientific way he didn't say he believed in life after death what he said is if it exists i might be able to find a way to measure it or communicate with it because he believed also if it did exist it might be of an electrical nature in 1920 scientific american carried an article with details about edison's electronic device but it was never built and edison's own death a decade later put an end to the project since that time mainstream science has all but ignored the issue of communication with the dead even as the demand for the services of mediums is grown but recently prompted by phenomena they cannot scientifically explain serious researchers have begun investigating the world of mediums one such study is being conducted at the university of arizona in the human energy systems laboratory co-directors doctors gary schwartz and linda rusik are trying to understand how mediums get their information a true scientist should be open to any data if it's collected in an appropriate fashion we should look at the data regardless of whether it agrees with our current stories theories were not dr schwartz and russic chose medium laurie campbell for their study because they felt she had a talent for describing her client's dead relatives in quite accurate detail is your mother's father in spirit yes it was a quick passing yes he's been in spirit for a while because he gives a sense of watching lori startled dr schwartz and rusek in her first test she was asked to read the mind of a researcher who was thinking about 12 people six living and six dead much to my absolute disbelief she was 100 percent accurate in guessing age sex and living or deceased during the telepathy phase and so she can read our minds at least in principle can mediums actually read people's minds as russic in short suspect parapsychologists believe some of them can people are able to pick up thought patterns occasionally from other people's minds probably it is a primitive form of communication that became atrophied as we became more reliant on verbal communication which is far more accurate and so now occasionally we get a telepathic signal from another mind but people who are psychics who are sensitives or mediums are able to receive this type of subliminal information through telepathy to a much larger extent than most of us so it could be that the information they're getting is primarily telepathy from other living minds not necessarily from the minds of the dead doctors russic and schwartz are now working on ways to distinguish moments of telepathy from moments when lori claims she is communicating with the dead the study of psychic ability and the survival of consciousness may just be getting interesting the present time most of us find it virtually impossible to imagine that survival of consciousness is real that we can be able to develop communication skills with our loved ones that there will be trained mediums who do this even better that technology may come along to make it possible just like a telephone that all of these things are possible we find it just incomprehensible but i think it's worth remembering that a hundred years ago we felt the same way about airplanes there is no knowledge without experience albert einstein one experience unites aldous huxley d h lawrence august stringberg jack london and goethe each wrote about a vivid event in which he felt his consciousness separate from his body and travel without it could this be evidence of a separate consciousness one that might survive after death studies in the united states england and australia have found that out-of-body experiences are not uncommon and that about one out of five people will have the experience at least once in a lifetime they seem to be spontaneous events that can occur during sleep meditation or while under anesthesia they can also be triggered by concussions stress and physical trauma well who would i mean i looked like a skeleton warmed over you can see there michael joseph had an out-of-body experience when he was a young teenager now an adult it is still one of the most vivid experiences of his life when he was 13 michael went rock climbing in the sierra nevada foothills with his friends i was bragging to them that i could climb the face of this rock the only tricky part was there was a chunk of rock sitting in the middle of this ledge that you had to navigate around and as i stepped around this chunk of rock my sleeve got caught in some briars and i jerked them loose and then the second i jerked it loose the rock turned loose there's no place for me to go except downwind it happened so fast then it's lights out i feel nothing i hear nothing i sense nothing michael was unconscious pinned beneath the weight of the gigantic rock his friends frantically rushed back into town to get help i could see this cloud of light it was really interesting to watch it like these little tiny sparkles of light slowly lifting off like a mist floating off i'm looking at this thing and i'm looking at it i notice that it's squashed flat underneath this boulder like oh gosh i know this face from some place where have i seen it before suddenly it hits me that this is my face and i flew into a panic i mean i was terrorized i'm going oh my god dad is going to spank me for this i broke this body and i've got to figure out how to get it going and then bang i feel this pop in the back of my head suddenly i am in agony and i'm laying under this boulder i can't breathe i can't move and i hear energy crackling everywhere i mean i felt so powerful i was full of energy i pushed this boulder over like it's made out of paper mache but then i instantly passed out [Music] some psychiatrists have found that out of body experiences can be triggered by emotional stresses as well as physical ones for example we know about people who are being sexually or physically abused who then report looking at themselves from the ceiling of the room and seeing what's going on with them which is very much like what people talk about when they're almost physically dead and what is happening is that the mind the psyche is trying to protect itself in both of these instances by separating itself and trying to look down on what's happening and understand it and keep itself protected a part of itself at least protected in the operating room michael experienced leaving his body again they're over there putting the stain of some kind on my chest you know i'm going they're going to cut me and i'm not asleep this is starting to scare me you know and then i hear my mom and my dad pray next thing i know i'm i'm i'm out in the hallway and i can see him down near the reception area pray so i'm beginning to have that weird experience again because i can see them out there in the hallway when i'm really supposed to be behind several doors in this operating room and they began to operate on me and then some guy's saying bp is getting low we're losing him and then all of a sudden i hear this bee and this guy says we've lost him and this doctor says no we have it and he just rips my chest open with this knife michael seemed to be aware of many of the events in the hospital while he was apparently unconscious could there be a physical explanation for this people in surgery they're often not completely under now if this happens at a teaching hospital or any hospital where for example the surgeon is there with assistants and other students medical students where he's explaining what's going on then you can incorporate what was said into your memory and then report that back later michael may have overheard the surgeon but one doctor who has studied over 300 such cases doesn't think that explains all of them could they have been hearing conversation in the room when they were presumed to be unconscious at the time and then later report that as a visual image having seen it from the ceiling i've looked into that explanation i've looked into the explanation of perhaps they read about it perhaps they saw it on television and they were just reconstructing from their own knowledge general knowledge of what a resuscitation would be like and then saying yes that's what happened to me i've looked into those possibilities and in a few instances have found that really i can find no explanation for how these people were able to visually recall what was going on in a room when they were unconscious while they were being resuscitated today michael is married the father of two sons he is still convinced that when he was 13 his spirit or consciousness separated twice from his body and was aware of his environment while his physical body was unconscious to some scientists that seems entirely plausible [Music] out of body experience is the natural state of consciousness itself being in body is what's the artifact is what's hard is what we have to work at when we are dealing for example with children very young children they have a hard time being in their bodies they're out of the body a lot in fact we as parents are often telling them pay attention to what you're doing watch where you're walking because kids are just not paying attention they're out of their bodies they're in the imaginal realm out-of-body experiences are often associated with spiritual journeys and different cultures use various methods to stimulate them including dancing chanting and music [Music] today researchers are discovering that these ancient traditions may hold the key to altered states of consciousness some claim to have found a way to use monitored sounds to create out-of-body experiences we find that there are no limits to [Music] what people can experience to where they can go there we are only as limited as our limited beliefs darlene miller is the program director at the monroe institute it was founded in 1956 by robert monroe an engineer and broadcaster who was trying to develop techniques for learning while asleep he discovered that certain sound frequencies could be used to promote altered states of consciousness since it opened to the public in nineteen seventy four over six thousand people have come to the monroe institute to study and be studied in monroe's patented hemisink chamber the institute reports successful application of this process in managing stress pain and sleep disorders and estimates that over two million people have used their patented hemisink tapes [Music] the physical changing of the brainwave state has to do with stimulating the brainstem providing neurotransmitters to the cortex which alter the arousal level of the cortex so that you can stay in these focused states of consciousness for prolonged periods of time all right i'm going to turn on the sounds now as the brainwave patterns go by as time passes we can see the emergence of these alpha waves here which indicate he's in a relaxed state we want him to move to a state of delta and theta we want them to kind of balance on this mind awake and yet body asleep kind of state one of the very surprising things in the first workshop that i did here is that i understood what they mean when they say body asleep mind awake i was listening in the headset and all of a sudden i heard some snoring and i kind of wondered uh uh where was that what's going on here and i looked around and i realized that it was me snoring so my body really was sound asleep and my mind was quite awake and it's a little bit surprising [Music] dick whirling has taken four week-long seminars that involve numerous sessions in the hemisink chamber his goal each time is to maintain the state of mind that produces theta waves which are associated with hypnosis euphoria and vivid mental imagery in this state many subjects at the monroe institute report the sensation of talking to the dead let me tell you what happened the first time that i experienced the uh level of consciousness that's associated with with physical death and i start by telling you and i can laugh about it now but i was scared to death that if i experienced that i would die i saw nothing all i saw was a kind of a white fog and it wasn't until sometime later that i realized that was because i was scared to see what was there since that time dick has mastered the technique of maintaining a steady flow of theta brain waves i had a short conversation with my father who died when i was six years old in this state i saw him in the hospital on his last day and later on uh in still a different state of consciousness i began finding the souls of people who had died researchers at the monroe institute admit there is no way to scientifically verify the perceptions of their subjects in the hemisink chamber [Music] they report that many people do have similar experiences which leads them to this conclusion i know that my consciousness survives physical death most of the people who go through our programs will tell us that that's the most important thing they've learned that they now know they're more than a physical body that they no longer fear death and that may be the best that we can do is continue to offer the means by which individuals can experience this for themselves listen now thou art experiencing the radiance of the clear light of pure reality recognize it the tibetan book of the dead the tibetan book of the dead is an eighth century buddhist text that gives instructions to a dying person on how to cross over into the next world the first step describes the soul's encounter with a pure light of reality a white light today many americans with no knowledge of tibet are reporting a similar encounter i wanted to go on into the light i wanted to know what was in there and i wanted to understand the nature of the light i asked what is the nature of this light is it god and they responded to me that it was what happened when god respirated pam reynolds was on an operating table when she had that experience she had been diagnosed with an arterial aneurysm of the brain a life-threatening situation the only way to operate on her brain was to freeze it in effect stopping pam's life in order to save it in this procedure pam was taken into the operating room her body temperature was lowered to 60 degrees fahrenheit her heartbeat and respiration were stopped that is if you walked into the room and looked at her and evaluated her from a medical standpoint she would be declared clinically dead during this period pam says she experienced an amazing series of events i came out of my body i popped out the top of my head i looked down and i saw my body on the gurney and i knew that it was my body but i didn't really relate to it as being me or think it was me because obviously the me was looking at the body i i turned around and all at once i sensed a presence a presence i knew that i was not alone and i began to see a very small tiny pinpoint of light and as i noticed the light it began to pull me and as it pulled me the light began to get bigger i heard my grandmother's voice calling me and i went immediately to her i saw with her several other souls spirits some i recognized as being loved ones that i had lost in this lifetime and some i did not readily recognize but i knew that i was somehow connected to them they would not however allow me to go into the light i ask why why is this and i was told that if i progressed into that light they would be unable to connect this me with the body knee which was lying on the table ready to be returned to my family so and i wanted to go back i really did want to go back i started back down the tunnel accompanied by my uncle and i got back to the end of it and i didn't want to get back in the body because it uh it was so it was scary and i didn't want to get back in it so he pushed me and the sensation was like diving into a pool of ice water it hurt and the body i could feel the physical knee recoil like this jump [Music] pam's amazing journey raises some profound questions did your consciousness actually separate from her physical body or was it all an hallucination triggered by the trauma of the surgery neurosurgeon patrick rhoden believes there is a medical explanation for cases like pam's after trauma there a release of endorphins which is a natural morphine-like substance that's released in the brain and it is felt that this release causes a sense of well-being for these people some of the things that have also been reported such as seeing a bright light the area of the brain is responsible for vision also is at one of these endpoints of circulation and may actually have some type of seizure or epileptogenic uh in that area that may lead people to believe that they're walking down a dark corridor that's a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak though seizures might explain many cases pam's cardiologist feels her case is different pam had both the cerebral cortex and the brain stem monitored throughout her surgical procedure during which she had a near-death experience she had no seizure throughout the surgery so that's at least in this one case where we have a patient who is monitored with the eeg throughout seizures cannot explain pam's experience because pam didn't have a seizure insight into the phenomenon of the near-death experience may come from an unexpected place a u.s navy centrifuge since 1972 the navy has been trying to prevent plane crashes by training pilots to recognize the signs of an approaching blackout under high gravitational force before they pass out dr james winnery has tested over a thousand pilots in the centrifuge he's discovered a surprising correlation between episodes of unconsciousness and the near-death experience okay so i really get on it come on push it out now straight three two one three ugh good job tim real good job we shouldn't have taken you that far oh i forgot what i was doing man i was dreaming and everything there's a lot of different experiences that our pilots have some of them are a sense of floating a sense of being very calm and serene we've had individuals that have had dreams about going back and seeing their their families of being for instance looking over a lake with the sunset at the end of the lake being very peaceful the most common symptom that we see on centrifuges is this reduction of vision gray out tunnel vision blackout and that's because the eye is affected before the brain so that's one of the things that we see most frequently is the tunnel vision and as the brain tries to explain all these things that are happening in five seconds or less i'm not so sure that it doesn't put into context this tunnel vision in terms of a bright light at the end of a tunnel is there a light loss i don't know where i am i don't know where the hell i am i thought i was at the grocery store i don't know which one but i was at the grocery store our experiments are on the very edge of what a near-death experience probably would be and so our symptoms correlating well with theirs makes me very strongly believe that individuals that have near-death experiences are very accurate in at least describing what's going on with them are near-death experiences merely tricks of a brain deprived of blood or are they actual insights into a realm in which consciousness can travel but the body cannot many feel that the near-death experience is a purely physical event all the components of the near-death experience the floating out of the body the passing through the tunnel the white light the passage through the white light onto the other side seeing other people that have died all those are replicable in laboratories uh with several methods one is the use of hallucinogenic drugs two sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation and three electromagnetic stimulation of the brain will produce all of those same characteristics after studying hundreds of near-death cases dr sabaam comes to a different conclusion i think the nde is a spiritual experience but i don't think it's a spiritual experience of the afterlife i think it's a spiritual experience of the dying process so during this process of dying the soul is in the process of leaving the physical body and i think that's what's going on with the near-death experience from the very beginning to the very end when i knew i was going to have to get back into the body it was so incredibly wonderful there was nothing to be afraid of at all nothing at all if that's the worst thing that ever happens to anyone that we die what a wonderful thing how wonderful [Music] grown-ups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them antoine de san exurey the little prince [Music] pediatrician dr melvin morse listens to children about 15 years ago he heard for the first time a child describe a near-death experience here at seattle's valley medical center he's been studying children's near-death experiences ever since [Music] when i first heard near-death experiences i assumed that they were some sort of fantasy of the mind some sort of uh hallucination caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain we did our own case control study of every survivor of cardiac arrest at seattle children's hospital over a 15-year period and our research showed that 23 out of 26 children who came to the brink of death had a near-death experience we learned that the so-called near-death experience is in fact the dying experience that when we die we suddenly have the ability to communicate with something that most people loosely call god dr morse has collected drawings from many of his patients depicting their near-death experiences this young boy described his near-death experience which happened to him at age three and he states that he went down a long tunnel we can see sort of this tunnel that turns into light and he said that he went to a heavenly realm he didn't call it a heavenly realm he just said i went to a land where i could run and double jump with god this young girl here nearly died of a diabetic coma and her experience has no religious elements in it whatsoever in her experience you can see that she's on a bed and she says that three figures came to her who were doctors dressed in white i said how do you know they were doctors she said because they were very tall and they had light bulbs in their bodies and they were all lit up with a white light she then told me that they pointed to a box at her bedside they said if she pressed the green button she could go with them but she would never see her parents our family again she pressed the red button and she returned to consciousness this young girl nearly died of fulminant bacterial meningitis at age five and she says that she floated up to heaven and she met god and this is god he looks more like santa claus and then she says that these figures in the corner are grandpas and grandmas and babies waiting to be born this young girl here nearly died of fulminant mononucleosis she presented to our office in cardiac arrest we had to put a needle into her heart to restart her heart she says that at the time that we put the needle into her heart she was somewhere and she saw her dead grandmother and here's her dead grandmother she's drawn a light around her dead grandmother she says i saw my grandmother and i was just so shocked to see her because she seemed so real and lifelike and yet she had died some years ago she then says and then i was back and i said to her what do you mean you are back and she goes that's what i've been trying to figure out did you swallow a radio for breakfast this morning are you sure yeah let me i better listen and see near-death experiences teach us about the last few minutes of living i have not had patients who died and then brought them back to life that that's not in my experience so what i've learned is that when you die you're awake you're conscious even though your brain is no longer working properly and you have the perception of another reality and that seems to be a loving reality that all knowledge is contained in but what happens after that is for religious philosophers at this point not for scientists as new emergency medical techniques allow physicians to save more lives the numbers of people reporting near-death experiences have increased dramatically a recent gallup poll found that 8 million americans claimed they'd had a near-death experience or nde internist dr barbara romer became interested in ndes when she discovered the number of patients who had trouble talking to their doctors about the experience i have had so many patients actually come to us from another physician changed to our office because when they tried to share this very personal very profound very spiritual experience with their physician they were told that they had a loose thread in their fabric how's things dr romer has interviewed over 400 people about their near-death experiences and has discovered that for many it had a positive effect on their lives i take care of very ill patients many of them dying they have tremendous fear of death those people who didn't fear death were by and large the ones who had already died been resuscitated and had had a near-death experience she also discovered that not all of them had positive pulled toward the light experiences 18 of the people she interviewed reported going on a dark or hellish journey it is a real problem that people who have had a frightening experience or less than positive experience unfortunately assume that their account will be met with harsh judgment in other words they assume that the world at large will feel that if they had a less than positive experience a hellish experience they deserved it because i didn't see no light at the end of the tunnel i didn't hear no angels trumpets blowing i hope those struggling to understand their negative experiences dr romer began a monthly support group sponsored by the international association of near-death studies can you picture somebody being buried in a coffin underneath the ground can you picture being in a coffin and you're alive and are burying you that's the experience that i had experienced i had what could be described as a hellish experience i had gone into this deep dark pit that seemed to be like a cave or a place that was under the earth there were heaven and hell are human terms have nothing to do with the primal near-death experience these are just reflections of the human psyche so when they come from religions that have a deep belief in hell sometimes you'll hear hellish experiences and there were fires burning and there were people or beings coming down either side of the stairway and they were they seemed extremely unhappy i mean they were they were in agony they were miserable people from non-christian traditions report seeing buddha krishna and allah or simply a white light i felt that warm rush of light and just total love and i can remember just saying to myself that's it i'm gone and i was happy to go we learn many many things from sharing and studying these experiences perhaps the most important thing is that life is very very precious but death is not to be feared there is no such thing as death there is a slight struggle dying sucks being dead is not bad dreams are a great fount of wisdom just waiting to be tapped carl jung dreams have always fascinated humankind egyptian papyruses from 2000 bc are thought to be interpretations of dreams the ancient greeks believed that dreams were messages from the gods australian aborigines believe dreaming is for the passing on of knowledge from the dead to the living and that the dead never leave us they are too powerful too influential too crucial to our lives to depart in rural new jersey donna buchanan has come to believe that her dreams have opened a doorway to the world of the dead and a connection to her eldest son rory who died when he was 14. oh he was a wonderful boy he was a patient and loving child he was a good student an athletic boy in 1995 rory was riding his motorcycle through the woods near his home he was leading a group of friends down backwoods roads and didn't see a steel cable stretched between two trees the cable caught rory right across the neck he was thrown from his bike and died where he fell who was my best buddy he was my real good friend and i miss him dearly once he was gone i knew i had to know i had to find out i i i pleaded with the powers that be and with my child that if there's any possibility of you making contact with me please do three weeks after rory's funeral donna had a vivid dream she recalls seeing two young men in an old car pull into her driveway one got out and walked around the house to visit the horses in the buchanan's backyard the other appeared at her door i'm opening my front door and here comes rory up the front stairs his face was glowing i mean lit lit up and he looked at me like ah you know here i am i said oh come in oh hi hugged me when he hugged me it was i just felt him it was electrifying i felt his hands on me i i was elated i can smell him i can i can you know feel the heat from him in her dream donna asked rory about the other boy she had seen going to visit the horses you said oh that oh that's tim ruff tim roth like this i was like oh tim rush okay i don't know who that is so okay that's that's good didn't see that boy anymore the name stuck in my head although donna believes her dreams are a direct communication from her son analyst carol lieberman believes dreams connect us to our unconscious feelings a mother of a teenage boy who died by accident would most likely be plagued with guilt she would feel as though somehow she should have been protecting her son better perhaps she shouldn't have let him ride motorcycles having her son bring another boy back through the dream could be a way for her to prove to herself that my son does love me after all he wants to come back to me this name tim rush was reverberating in my head we called up friends kids do you know this boy never heard of him had no friend named tim you know just couldn't place him anyplace i mean we just couldn't couldn't place it a few days after her dream a friend brought donna a book about families trying to cope with the death of a child one of the chapters was about a teenager who died after heart surgery his name was nearly identical to the name given to her by rory in her dream his name was tim rush well i was i i i didn't know what to think i didn't know what to think i i just couldn't believe what i was reading could it be could this be the same boy donna tracked down a telephone number for the rush family and gave them a call i said yeah i know you might think that i'm out of my mind um that this sounds crazy but i have to tell you this and uh i proceeded to tell her the dream of you know what had happened to rory and that i had had this dream and that this boy and i described the boy she described timmy and i said wow i just thought that was there were too many coincidences yeah it was just it made it just made me so happy and i had to be careful who i said this to and told the story because of course people some people may have been skeptical helena rush's son tim had been dead nearly four years and she says she rarely dreamed about him but shortly after donna's call helena had her own vivid dream that connected her son with rory i sing in the catholic church as a cantor and i it's a little bit jumbled but i vividly remember timmy being with me in the sacristy in the suit that he's buried in and he's standing there and he's got a smile on his face and i said oh tim you're here i said i said what are you doing i said whose metal is that because he was wearing around his neck with the suit a medal that would be like an olympic winner would wear with the ribbon and and the metal hanging i said whose metal is that and this is the part that to me i felt he was saying to me says oh mom you know whose this is so i told anna that and i was floored because 10 days before rory was killed he had skated nationals speed skating nationals as a speed skating champion rory had won many medals just like the one helena remembers her son wearing in the dream these dreams and subsequent ones have left donna and helena in no doubt that their sons are contacting them from the other side the two women have become close friends bonded by dreams of their sons the psychoanalytic way of interpreting this dream would be that the boy is connecting her to another mother who is grieving maybe he's trying to give her a message telling her something about herself now again you can interpret that as being uh someone in another world doing that or her having this psychological need out of guilt or out of a need to meet another mother who was suffering a similar loss we know that it's the most common spiritual and psychical experience that people have 75 percent of grieving parents will report seeing or otherwise perceiving their child who has died it's something that has been one of the best gifts as far as since timmy died i've had a few other encounters where i felt that he was trying to tell me he was there but this was certainly this this to me it can't be disputed after death communications are so random that it's difficult to study that in a scientific standpoint we did do a study of premonitions of death from a scientific standpoint and we found that 33 of the time if your child dies of sudden infant death you will have a vivid premonition of that event and the vivid premonition is of the same character as the after death communication or the near-death experience meaning that they had a you know they saw a lady in light that came to them and said your baby is to die the after death communication is just sort of that reversed the person in white comes to say i'm okay the skeptics have a right to think whatever they want but nothing nobody could change my mind i'm sure that my dad could contact me i'm sure we're still together and i'm sure there's there's life after death there has to be because everything i've got i've been through there's life after death vicky's father dr stephen kaplan died suddenly of a heart attack he was a published parapsychologist who talked to his children about his belief in an afterlife since his death vicky says she has had a number of encounters with him i deal with it the loss of my dad i once in a while i'd try to talk to him and try to communicate and at first nothing was happening until he started communicating and that's when i that's when i finally calmed down because he was there with me children have a high percentage of after death communications and for the simple reason that they don't filter reality the way we do adults probably have just as many after death communications but most adults dismiss trivialize ignore or think their after death communication was just some wacky dream whereas children just you know they're just experience it and report it just as it happens to them um one time i saw him walking up the block there was two cars and there was a big space in between and across i saw my dad standing there and i just stopped and i stared and by the time my mom got up she said what what i said dad you know i was so shocked she didn't see him my sister didn't see him i saw him standing right there when i see my dad it looks like there's kind of like white energy around him or something because there's white light surrounding him completely so it's he's kind of faded so i can't really see him because it's like white it's like he put a white sheet and started shaking it in front of him but it's more like a light feeling and uh when i'll look at him i could see he's usually wearing his outfit he died in with these orange shorts and stuff the adults think it's just childish you know just letting imagination run wild but it really isn't but it's hard to believe for anybody any age that such weird things could happen a recent poll showed that 40 percent of americans believe they have had a communication with someone who has died it is no more marvelous to be born twice than it is to be born once voltaire [Music] general george patton believed he was the reincarnation of a roman warrior other prominent americans including emily dickinson benjamin franklin and henry ford also believed in reincarnation many early christians embraced the idea of reincarnation until the second council of constantinople in 553 a.d when those believing in it were declared anathema and were excommunicated [Music] still an estimated two-thirds of the world's population believes that the soul leaves the body at the time of death and enters another body before it is born buddhists believe that in between lives the soul goes into an interim state called bardo for a period of self-reflection and planning before reincarnation today in countries with strong judeo-christian traditions as well as in most of the scientific community reincarnation is generally regarded as an unprovable mystical belief yet in the last decade researchers claimed to have found american children with apparent memories of previous incarnations actually there's a very narrow window in which children speak of these memories and it's between two and five usually by the age of seven these memories fade completely for example they'll say when i was big before or do you remember when i was big before or do you remember when i died before and most parents in the west completely dismissed these remarks thinking that oh they're just fantasizing this must be just child nonsense babble but in fact the children are talking about real experiences that they had in the past [Music] every day carol bowman sits down at her computer to check for new cases of reincarnation her website children's past lives encourages parents to send her statements made by their young children that seem to be evidence of a past life [Music] memory became interested in the idea of reincarnation because of her son chase who was terrified by loud noises when he was five chase ran from a fireworks display and sobbed uncontrollably for hours he had not been traumatized by anything that we could discern and when we asked him about his fear he described himself as an adult soldier in the middle of a battle and he gave us a lot of detail about his uniform the weapon he was using he described how he was shot in the right wrist during this battle and the amazing thing to me was that after he described this not only did his phobia of loud noises go away but he had had a chronic eczema on that spot on his wrist since he was a baby and it completely vanished after he had talked about it and i had taken him to several doctors because of the severity of the eczema and it had not responded to medical treatment chase is now 17 and a drummer in a band his eczema never returned he's apparently no longer afraid of loud noises the experience prompted carol to learn more about reincarnation she has been documenting cases and writing about it for over 10 years one of her research sources is reincarnation and biology the most comprehensive study of reincarnation ever published the study by dr ian stevenson professor of psychiatry at the university of virginia documents hundreds of cases in which physical scars coincide with apparent reincarnation memories an example from the study is this autopsy drawing showing the bullet pattern on the chest of maharam singh who was killed with a shotgun in a village in india [Music] two weeks after his death a boy was born in the same town from the age of three this boy described in detail his previous life as the murdered man today at age 16 he still has a raised birthmark that dr stevenson suggests echoes the pattern of a shotgun blast an artist's drawing shows the bullet's trajectory that killed samil hayek in turkey the day after hayek's death one of his distant relatives gave birth to a baby boy [Music] today that boy is 32 years old his name is samil farisi a hairless birthmark on his scalp corresponds to the bullet hole on hayek's skull as does the birthmark on his neck beginning at the age of two farisi began telling his parents vivid details of his life as his dead relative samil hayek these are the hands of a young girl who at age five told her parents she remembered being murdered in a previous life stevenson's researchers found that this girl's father had a friend who was stabbed to death and whose fingers were cut off in the attack just before the little girl was born stevenson and his researchers have documented nearly 2600 cases of apparent reincarnation over the past 30 years critics of stevenson's work take issue with his research methods they argue that many of his cases can be explained by coincidence and dismiss the interpretation of the data as biased nonetheless the two-volume report published in 1997 has caused many skeptics to reconsider their views i started looking at the alternative explanations and they seem to be embarrassingly weak they're either out homes or they don't look at the cases or they give hypotheses that really don't fit the data in the cases i came slowly to believe that this really is the best available explanation for the data and the data keeps coming in and in children are not the only ones to have apparent reincarnation memories it happens to adults as well not as often but when it does it can be a disruptive discovery you know who do you talk to do you go to your boss your your rabbi your priest or whatever you know who you just discuss this with so a lot of times you feel very lonely jeffrey keane lived 40 years without giving reincarnation a second thought but he now feels it is the only way to explain the powerfully coincidental set of events that have befallen him throughout his life any piece of this individually you could just shrug off but all of them when you put them all together reincarnation period jeff's story begins with the bloodiest battle of the civil war on september 17 1862 in a sunken road near antietam creek pennsylvania an all-day battle left 23 000 men dead or wounded the sunken road soon became known as the bloody lane in may 1990 jeff visited the bloody lane for the first time as he approached the site of the battle he began feeling ill i couldn't breathe i started crying i was wondering if i was having a heart attack but i didn't have any have any pain i felt angry sad i can't tell you if i stayed in that road five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes i just know that when i got up out of the road that i felt like i'd run a marathon if you take the saddest you've ever been and then magnify that by about a thousand times that that gets close to it jeff kept the experience to himself what was i going to say to my wife i went down on the road i went to little bananas and i'm back and i'm fine now you know why worry her and see how i couldn't explain it to myself i couldn't explain it to her a year and a half later jeff and his wife went to a halloween party there was a palm reader at the party and as a lark jeff had her look at his hand she told jeff that in a past life he had been badly wounded on that battlefield in antietam she said you were hovering over your body and you yelled no you're very angry and then for some reason i didn't know at the time i said to her not yet and she said yes like not yet jeff left the party confused by his encounter with the psychic he didn't particularly believe in reincarnation or psychics for that matter but he was also puzzled about why he had blurted out not yet at home he picked up a civil war magazine that he'd bought at antietam a year and a half before but says he had never opened i opened it up to the portion on the sunken road and it had a picture pretty much of the place where i'd entered the road and where i'd made the left turn skimmed down the page and i caught this true word quote just popped right out at me and said not yet so now the hair stands up on the back of my neck that's the same thing i said to the palm reader jeff read about the battle and discovered that the phrase not yet had been the command of a 30 year old confederate officer named john b gordon i figured there was probably some material on him somewhere in the library and i went and checked and then who's who from 1903 i found that he had written a book and that he had been a senator from georgia he'd been the governor of georgia as a prominent soldier and politician gordon was often photographed so then i looked at the the face of the picture the bone structure and everything and i described it as a face that i know very well i shave every morning as jeff studied the photos of general gordon he noticed more similarities when he was wounded in antietam he was shot the bullet entered just below his left eye and and the exit wound blew his the right side of his face apart almost severed his jugular and in the picture you can still see he was always photographed from the from the right side after the war because of the big rent under his left eye but his face is like almost like a patchwork quilt and i noticed a suture line that ran from his ear across mid cheek and then down toward his his chin and looking in the mirror when i was shaving one time i noticed that i had the same mark it's subtle but it but it's obviously there jeff also recalled earlier incidents in his life that would now make sense if he were actually the reincarnation of john gordon on one occasion long before he had heard of gordon keane had to be rushed to the hospital with a searing pain in his cheek and neck doctors found no medical cause for the pain but it occurred on jeff's 30th birthday the same age that john gordon was when he was shot through the cheek and neck coincidence or was jeff somehow reliving the physical pain experienced by john gordon another odd event occurred 10 years earlier when jeff was 20 and going for one of his first horseback rides he says anybody here an experienced rider so i said i am i put my hand back down and my brain's saying now why did you do that they brought out this big grey horse and i got on it and it was like we're old friends or something i pull on the reins slightly the horse backs up i squeeze with my knees the horse goes forward i stop squeezing it stops i turn my toe in to the right it would turn right in place to the right do the same thing to the left i had the horse dancing coincidence or could gordon's horse riding skills have been passed on through reincarnation jeff's unexplained skills physical pain facial scars and near identical looks have convinced him that he has some direct connection to general gordon his only explanation is reincarnation keena is a former air force medic and is now a highly decorated assistant fire chief in westport connecticut it was several years before he even mentioned his ideas about reincarnation to his close friends [Music] those beliefs about reincarnation do not fit with anything i was ever taught growing up at first we kidded about it and you know saying all general gordon's here and stuff like that the way he is his actions his words the way he what he treats people and it's in a way it's out of another time and it's that's what adds to the plausibility of the story it started to be believable i believe it's very possible jeff keane is one of a growing number of americans who believe they are living proof of reincarnation but it seems to be difficult for researchers to find corroborating evidence in western cultures in the hindu and buddhist countries of southeast asia reincarnation memories are often vivid involving specific names and locations in the u.s the memories tend to be more general with fewer details of proper names researchers say that culture plays a strong role in these apparent memories of another life 35 of americans believe in ghosts 12 percent claim to have seen one the gallup poll the typical setting for a ghost story is a dark and stormy night this classic literary association may actually have a physical explanation hauntings seem to be more prevalent in areas that have a lot of atmospheric electrical activity and thunderstorms people report the feeling of an electric charge or the smell of ozone or the sensation of hair standing on end which is again a staple of the fictional haunted house story and all these things are electrical phenomena [Music] ghostly apparitions have convinced some of the existence of an afterlife now researchers are trying to document and understand this haunting phenomena temperature here in the hall is 79 degrees fahrenheit dr andrew nichols has investigated over 500 haunted houses in fiction the ghosts are almost always seeking to harm the living but in reality ghosts tend to be pretty mundane things actually most ghostly experiences are repetitive are certainly non-threatening the only time people are harmed by ghosts as when they fall downstairs trying to run away from the apparition as a parapsychologist and investigator for the psychical research foundation nichols accepts the existence of hauntings emfs here on the stairwell 0.1 milligauss he and his organization say they are trying to understand the mechanism that causes the haunting phenomena there's been an estimate of at least a million haunted houses in the united states so i do think that they're much more common than most people believe and 0.1 at the top of the stairs [Music] dr nichols is investigating a 120 year old house in archer florida its current owners report a wide range of haunting phenomena different areas of the house are 10 to 12 degrees colder they're like tunnels of air that come down and it's a cold spot you can walk through it and there's also some other things they'll be tapping on your shoulder to get your attention there's a heavy weight of somebody putting a hand on your shoulder to get your attention that happens in the dining room while you're eating one of the other things is the footsteps on the in the hallway every so often you'll hear the footsteps and there's 18 of them and you can hear it each separate step going up and then nothing the images people see usually it's a lady in white and most often they'll see her in the upstairs area the casickis bought their home eight years ago at the time the realtor told them he thought it was haunted i was really surprised i didn't know whether that was real or or he's just pulling our leg or something according to the former owners in the midst of their home improvements they began experiencing strange events and as they laid in bed it sounded like somebody was downstairs prying the boards off the wall all the woodwork off so they came downstairs and put on the lights there was nobody here they went back upstairs and went to bed and the noise continued outside the house like somebody was tearing the siding off the house then one night the ghost of a little girl reportedly circled the bed of the owners terrified they left the next day the casicki's home wasn't always known as a haunted house prior to the family that abandoned it the gordon family lived here for over 40 years prior to that it was inhabited by the woods family pictured here in 1909. charles and cora woods raised their two children here three other children died in infancy their graves are just a few blocks from the house linda feels it is the spirits of the woods family that haunt her house [Music] i feel it's a family because there's too many mischievous things there's too many giggles and hands being held in the hallway and children that appear and it just there's too many childish things that happen the only people who lived here who had children and had a family we're the woods family it only makes sense it has to be cora and charles and their children it's pretty good you can see the original color here the yellow linda and bob are restoring the house to its original style down to the color of the paint they feel that they are living harmoniously with the spirits of the house and are more amused than frightened by the haunting phenomena the kasiki house is considered a classic haunting because it has a multi-generational history of phenomena something that modifies that particular location modifies the space of that particular location that enables people to experience these these unexplained events while they're there this house fits dr nichols theory that hauntings occur in places with high geomagnetic levels often caused by underground water are high electromagnetic levels caused by electrical power lines but most scientists are skeptical about the assumptions made by those studying ghosts one of the problems is simply this you take a science that people use but really don't understand like electromagnetism and then you can take it to another phenomena out of body experience ghosts apparitions whatever which you also don't understand and then you make the natural connection natural or maybe supposition that somehow these are connected that we need to find something we can measure a temperature gradient a cold air current uh this electricity because my the hair in the back of my neck was raising and we try to tie those two things together it may be that there is some tie between the two but it may also be that they are completely unrelated these are my students from from my parapsychology class and what i'd like to do is to have them go through your house one at a time they'll be making dr nichols investigations involved bringing his classes here from gainesville college along with professional psychics from the area to test their perceptions of the house any impressions that you get of paranormal phenomena in any room make an x in the exact location on the floor plan where you now none of these folks are aware of where the casicki's have marked their floor plans so when they walk through the house they're marking areas where they sense a presence or where they may see an apparition or hear a sound and they mark the characteristics that they attribute to that particular ghost because what i want to find out is are these places where the casickis have experienced paranormal phenomena and the places where the sensitives and student sensitives have also experienced phenomena are these the same places and if they are do they correspond also with the areas within the house of unusually high electromagnetic fields if all the maps agree what will it mean nichols theory is that we leave electromagnetic imprints wherever we go we generate electromagnetic fields by our thought processes and our biological activity and many of these houses are constructed of materials which would be easily magnetized such as brick for example which contains ferric salts and silica the same thing you find in recording tape so it's possible that these imprints are scanned directly into the physical structure of the house and that the person whose brain is especially sensitive to these fields it's possible that then their brain can act as a vcr and decode this recorded material the following week nichols tabulated the results of the student mapping of the house and added it to his growing database of hauntings over a hundred students so far have toured the house in the last five years from my classes and of those at least 60 percent have been able to pick up on one or more of the areas identified by the casickies there's no question in my mind that people do experience haunting phenomena that hauntings are a genuine environmental and psychophysiological anomaly when people ask me do you believe in haunted houses i say it depends on what you think a haunted house is if going by my definition a haunted house being a place where you're more likely to experience paranormal phenomena repeatedly then i would say yes haunted houses definitely exist if you're asking are haunted houses places where spirits of the dead roam the answer is we don't know most of the time i think not but sometimes possibly dr nichols studies into the haunting phenomena have given him a unique view on the nature of consciousness it's my belief that consciousness itself is non-local it is not localized within the brain the brain is a receiver very much like a television set it has specific parts of the brain which are designed to receive specific types of information memories sounds visual imagery and so forth but that those images those sounds those memories are not generated within the brain but rather exist in some non-local database and the brain simply functions as a receiver like a satellite dish to receive that information if the brain works as a receiver is it a transmitter as well science requires an almost complete openness to all ideas on the other hand it requires the most rigorous and uncompromising skepticism carl sagan the search for an answer to what happens beyond death must ultimately address the nature of consciousness the problem with that is no one can find it we can't measure consciousness directly with all of our instrumentation our pet scans our mris our eegs brain mapping we can't measure consciousness we don't know what consciousness is though the seed of consciousness has yet to be found some recent laboratory tests suggest that it's not the brain in a study at the university of california san francisco medical school electrodes were attached to the brain and finger of a subject and the finger was pricked the test showed that the impulse to move the finger began first in the finger and half a second later registered in the brain conclusion brain activity did not cause the finger to move so in other words we have a basic mystery here which may indicate that what the brain is doing is really after the fact it might be it's sort of like this i've got a little driver up in my head and he's a kid but this kid thinks he's in control of the show meanwhile something called consciousness is moving this body around saying let's go over here and the mind then says oh i'm going to turn this way oh i'm in control i'm steering the body but if the brain isn't running things where is consciousness a study at princeton university is providing some provocative suggestions for the last 20 years in the department of engineering scientists have been studying psychokinesis the ability to affect the physical world with one's mind subjects are assigned to observe a machine that has a predictable repeating program some concentrate on the height of a squirting fountain others focus on the movement of a pendulum or the progress of an electronic random event generator or even the movement of a programmed toy the subject is then instructed to concentrate on changing the movement of the object we find over a huge body of experimental data 20 years of experimentation hundreds of human operators working with the machines then indeed this is possible and that these these aberrations these anomalies as we call them are reproducible that they although quite small are statistically replicable critics of dr john's groundbreaking study are quick to dispute the validity of his data no pendulum is perfect no random number generator is perfect these things all get tweaked and by various anomalies in the environment something in the environment could be causing it every atom in our brain is subject to the same conservation of energy law as as every atom and every planet and every star and entire universe there's no free lunch and the fact is we don't have a lot of energy in our brains we couldn't light a light bulb with it if you don't have enough energy in your brain even to light a light bulb it's hard to believe then that you have enough energy to do more complicated tasks like moving objects at a distance [Music] but dr john claims that the weak voltage of the brain doesn't prevent his subjects from affecting the machines even over long distances we have established that the same operators can move down the hall or across the city or across the world and when the experiment is run remotely produces very similar signatures we can look at the data and say that's operator 27 calling in from brisbane australia the inescapable inference from our experimental results is that consciousness can access other parts of space and other parts of time than those in which it is physically immersed that the consciousness is not restricted simply to the human physiology but that it can expand itself into other worlds and other times beyond bodily death [Music] the princeton study is leading the way in the scientific examination of consciousness and into the mystery of life after death i would like to do a study of how near-death experiences affect the human immune system i would like to see studies of how near-death experiences might alter our dna there's some fairly strong theoretical evidence that our our dna can actually be altered by an encounter with a spiritual reality if those tiny studies were done we could then start to build with those studies we could say aha there is a biological fingerprint to interacting with god i guess if we know that life after death does exist then what's the point of us trying to save all these people from these horrible diseases that we're trying to cure on a daily basis why not let everyone pass on to that that place where that beautiful light exists where peacefulness exists things of that nature if that's the case then that's definitely going to change the way we practice medicine for the next millennium whatever the challenges posed by a better understanding of consciousness researchers continue to push the limits of science in search of the truth the believers have their proof the rest will have to weigh the evidence or wait for their own adventure death our soul our spirit our higher consciousness does not die when you're dead you're dead that's all there is this life is it whether you believe in an afterlife or not doesn't make a bit of difference because there it is it appears to be that whatever is out there is also in here and that the in here and the out there may be more deeply connected than we can possibly even imagine being that we all sit on a very flat earth trying to realize its roundness ah [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] oh

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,223,142

Rating: 4.6029086 out of 5

Keywords: Death, Life, Ghost, Spirits, Haunted, Haunting, Haunt, Medium, Psychic, Dead

Id: wg0ACQBtRiM

Length: 91min 14sec (5474 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018