The Joy of Dying: Understanding Near Death Experience

hello and welcome to beyond belief today we're going to be talking about near-death experiences are they just the hallucinations of a dying brain or are the evidence that our consciousness can actually survive the death of our bodies that question and more coming up next on beyond belief [Music] hi dr long when welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here i really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show thank you it's my pleasure and um i just wanted to open up by mentioning that um you know this is obviously a serious topic i mean you seem like a very upbeat um and uh fun kind of person which is it's interesting you explore these very serious and heavy topics um and so i'll start off with something you know a little bit heavy which is four years ago i lost my father unfortunately and um i ended up you know finding your your website and reading an enormous amount about your death experiences and i have to say that i found the accounts so compelling and in a certain way very comforting and um and i really appreciate the fact that you've made it available for so many people and it's so active and constantly updated and i really recommend that people check it out um but i wanted to ask you you're a radiation oncologist by profession that's correct that's correct um so i assume that you have experienced multiple times watching people not make it on the operating table and i assume also that people have shared their accounts with you firsthand i'm wondering if that's what generated your initial interest in this topic um and if there's any particular account that that you first experienced that uh that registered with you as significant sure yeah adam great question first of all i'm sorry to hear about your father but as you surmise many many years ago decades ago i was going through one of the leading medical journals in the world journal of the american medical association quite by accident in the title was the phrase near-death experience and i was puzzled nothing in my medical training had taught me anything about what that might mean i mean you're either dead or you're not and so goodness how could anyone not be interested in life after death or anything related to that so puzzled and intrigued i read the whole article and was immediately fascinated here was a physician a cardiologist describing patients who'd had cardiac arrest their heart stopped and yet at that time described very accurate observations of ongoing earthly events even while they were comatose and being resuscitated everything i knew medically said that's impossible so i read some of the references was intrigued it was several years later i had a college friend visiting me and over supper the wife of my college friend shared an absolutely dramatic first-person near-death experience she was under general anesthesia and coded her heart stopped because she had a lot of medical allergies her consciousness rose above her body she saw her frantic resuscitation efforts and described it in a way i knew medically is real it's not like hollywood crash carts don't magically appear there's a lot of panic and chaos when it's unexpected like that she went into a tunnel had a life review had a stunningly detailed near-death experience and everything i knew medically was that this could not possibly be explained by physical brain function and so i sort of bookmarked that but said i've got to learn more about this and then a couple more years after that intrigued by that information limited information i had i set up a website the near death experience research foundation with the goal to satisfy my curiosity are these experiences for real very quickly when we received the first few of what would ultimately be three thousand over three thousand five hundred near-death experiences that answer came vividly from the first source of information from the near death experiences themselves absolutely they are real and that began a voyage for this now lasted over 20 years continuing to learn about near-death experiences and share what i've learned with the world so when you say it's not medically possible just for the for the benefit of the listeners who may not know what that means um why couldn't it be the case that this is just the last you know dying gasps of the of the brain firing all of its neurons and some hallucination as as the brain is shutting down um as opposed to some transcendental experience that the the soul of this person is having well hallucinations are by definition medically unreal non-real memories or perceptions with near-death experiences as i mentioned in that example of the very first one i heard their consciousness rose above their body there's been a large number of studies of those observations of ongoing earthly events while physically they're unconscious or clinically dead with an absent heartbeat it's been studied in my research and others that what they observe while their physical body is unconscious is overwhelmingly accurate even down to the fine details in fact if that observations of consciousness leave the area of their physical body if they're making observations in that what we call out of body experience phenomena part of the near-death experience even if these observations of ongoing earthly events are far from their geographic geographically far from their physical body and way beyond any possible physical sensory awareness still the observations what they see in here when they go back to check them out later are almost invariably uh over 95 percent accurate in in my experience and of course let's not forget with the very first near-death experience i saw she was under general anesthesia under that rank and sleep it should be absolutely impossible adam for there to be any conscious awareness and then her heart stopped because of an allergic reaction well adam 10 to 20 seconds after your heart stops the eeg measure of brain electrical activity goes absolutely flat it should be absolutely impossible to have any conscious experience and yet both under general anesthesia and having the heart stopped it should be doubly impossible to have any experience or memory at all and yet by the scores people have reported near-death experiences under exactly those circumstances just like the first near-death experience i ever heard so would you say that this is i mean you're a scientist and you are presenting this from a scientific perspective is this scientifically provable or or is this more like uh testimony that you might hear in a court of law obviously no one you know there were maybe a handful of witnesses to the crime we're trying to forensically piece together what might have happened something in the past but there is no direct knowledge of actually what happened so how would you how would you respond to that question adam that's a great question in order for near-death experiences to be scientifically investigated they have to be the term is falsifiable in other words what is shared in the near-death experience has to prove that it's false that it's not due to some occurrence of memory of perceptions apart from the physical brain and you can easily falsify those by as we describe those out of body observations if they were false or unreal at a substantial percentage of the time then that would falsify those observations it would falsify near-death experiences in general but that's not what what's happening you can falsify them by having people and we have an example of that who's born totally blind who had a highly visual near-death experience now if you had somebody born totally blind for whom vision is unknown and unknowable and they have a near-death experience well you would be falsifiable if none of these people under such circumstances report vision and yet that's not we're observing we actually have a series of people either legally blind or severely impaired vision that have crystal clear vision described during their near-death experience even if it's outside of their whole prior life experience so these are just a couple examples of how you can falsify near-death experiences you can look for what occurs during it and say well that's false that's consistent with a hallucinatory unreal experience and we're not finding that at all okay so when i hear that and read about it and interact with this information that's my reaction is to feel you know compelled by it um and um it seems very hard to explain at very least but if this is the case is it why is it not appearing in science of peer review peer-reviewed journals and uh why isn't it this month's feature in nature and you know shouldn't this be a very big deal i mean shouldn't people be um you know wanting to research this more and more i mean this is seems like it would be one of the most exciting discoveries of all time from a scientific perspective i don't get the sense that that's happening just yet uh is that fair to say oh absolutely and that's a good point now first of all near death experience is actually mainstream in the scientific and medical literature there's been well over 200 publications in peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature including some of the leading medical and scientific journals in the world so it's there it's just and i agree with you not nearly there as much as it should be i think there's several barriers that keep people from investigating near-death experiences in a scholarly scientific manner first of all it's hard to access near-death experiencers um they're they're not apt to go find you know find a researcher and say hey i'm ready to share my experience so you really need to find large numbers of people that had a near-death experience and that that's a little bit difficult to do but i think even more importantly than that anything in the so-called paranormal even if it's not paranormal at all like near-death experiences uh good gosh a gallup survey published in 1981 estimated perhaps as many as five percent of americans had a near-death experience so they're not rare they happen to people of all walks of life physician scientists uh you name it they they they're a very broad-based experience so again i it's puzzling to me too why there isn't more research and interest in this and something which has such dramatic implications for consciousness for life after death and and literally meaning and purpose on earth what's really important that we hear over and over near death experiences so again i think it's just that scientific taboo that that keeps it from being studied more and of course one thing that drives scientific discoveries unfortunately is money and it's very difficult close to impossible actually to get a grant or federal funding if you will to study something like near-death experiences because of that taboo about its association with paranormal again which is really not these are normal experiences okay so i i noticed on your website that you have uh won an award recently for an essay that you wrote on this topic and congratulations on that um and uh i'd like to read a quote that i i found there i truncated it a little bit because it's a little it's a little long but i think that this is this it's a very good one but it's it's a compelling again account of uh someone's experience and it opens the door for me at least for a bunch of other questions so i just want to read it to you for a second if that's okay yeah this is um this is by a woman named joan who had a spinal and aesthetic first surgery on her ankle and something apparently went wrong and she died and she describes her experience of death as follows she says i went from being in my body to being in a place of absolute love i can only describe it like being in a swimming pool but even my body was filled with this loving i was one with this place but also apart from it it was still me but i was far more than me i was one with everything and it was all good i heard beautiful music but it wasn't our music the music itself was part of me but it was also much more than me i felt weightless and free absolutely free i was enfolded in this loving and it was part of it too there was not one single part of me of anything else that was not love individuals did not exist in the same way as we do here and then she says a few other things and she says we are interconnected as one there is no such thing as as death this experience has changed me so i would describe that quote as sort of typical of what i've i read in your essay and you probably have a dozen quotes or so um in there along the same lines so would you say that this is a typical experience that somebody has do they go come out of this saying life is about love interconnectedness um you know music which i particularly found interesting um is this a typical description or is this uh somehow different from the the average it it's good question adam it's a typical detailed near-death experience we have literally you know well that's one example and some would say anecdotal it's not we literally have hundreds of near-death experiences that bring up those concepts in a variety of different ways but all converging down exactly the way you just shared it right there adam you talk about love is that common in near-death experiences well the most recent version of our survey that we have on the website we ask directly have you did you during your near-death experience did you encounter any information regarding love and remarkably close to half of people checked yes and went on in the narrative response to describe that type of love exactly like you just shared adam uh unearthly profound all-encompassing uh something that is beyond anything that that we've ever experienced in our life any of us and yet over and over times literally hundreds if not over a thousands of times in near-death experiences i've heard that concept of love expressed and the fact that it is so unearthly that it is so all-encompassing beyond anything in their life experience frankly is one more line of evidence for the reality of near-death experiences same thing with a more difficult concept you brought up of unity connection oneness when your death experiencers describe that they're much more likely to use the stronger word unity than the weaker word connection and again in the most recent version of our survey we asked directly during your near-death experience did you encounter any information or awareness of a mystical connection unity or oneness and again right about 45 percent of people answered yes uh and with the narrative responses it was exactly as the near-death experience you shared in the afterlife in the near-death experience they become aware of a unity a oneness that we obviously are not aware of in our earthly life i've been it's been amazing to me literally over 20 years of researching near death experience how remarkably consistently that's described you know again here adam is one more example of something that is so outside of our normal earthly life experience and yet so overwhelmingly consistently described in near-death experiences that that's simply one more line of evidence that these near-death experiences are real they're bringing back consistent observations of something far outside of their earthly life and so you you have to go back to that basic scientific principle that's what real is consistently observed and love unity oneness overwhelmingly consistently observed in near-death experiences so i want i'd like to get into some of the theological aspects of this and you know some of the the spiritual ramifications but i want to just ask one follow-on question to that to what we just discussed in terms of love um you know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback you know there are there are serious people who are suggesting that you know there are ways of using it that are beneficial and if you go online and you observe someone having an ayahuasca experience or an lsd experience like they they use these terms also and they seem to be coming to us the same kind of realization that it's all it's all about love i experienced love in a real way for the first time i i see that the interconnectedness of the entire universe why do you suppose that is and would you describe this as a fundamental drive of humanity that that people in their day-to-day experiences what are they really looking for they're looking for things that are perhaps transcendental um so i ask you just to comment on that and then also it is the fact that it happens during psychedelic experience evidence to the other side saying no the the dying person is having a psychedelic kind of experience and whether we are not their brain is functioning in the way that we understand it's not spiritual it's psychological yeah that's a lot i understand but you can handle it that's an important question because you hear a lot about this day and age i think the basic lesson about these ayahuasca or other the most common drug mentioned is reproducing some aspect of near-death experience is what's called dmt i think the experiences that are described are a vivid reminder you need to be very cautious about trusting what you read on the internet not surprisingly dmt or ayahuasca experiences that have these seeming transcendental mystical dramatic positive things are much more likely to get clicks on youtube or on other areas on the internet where they're found i would encourage any viewer of this if you're curious about again the most commonly stated uh psychotropic that's brain acting medication that reproduces part of md nde near death experience which is dmt if you want to find out the truth about that you hop over on the internet to arrowwood erowid.org on that website you can find dmt experiences shared first person by people that actually have these experiences these aren't fluffed up these aren't biased by getting more clicks than others this is the truth and if you read any number of dmt experiences or other psychedelic experiences on that website shared by the people that had them with no predisposed idea that they want to get their face or their word or whatever out all you have to do is read 30 of them or heck even read 10 or 20 dmt experiences on arrowwood.org and then shoot over to my website indurf.org and compare that to 30 or heck even 10 or 20 near-death experiences shared first person again and you will see vividly that there is no relationship between those experiences dmts or psychiatric experiences may on very uncommon to rare occasions reproduce some elements of near-death experience and i believe that but i think they are very uncommon to rare certainly if you read any number of first-person dmt experiences compared to near-death experiences you can vividly see from your set by yourself that they are dramatically different experiences overall okay okay and therefore you would say the answer is no the uh near-death experiences don't really have anything to do with uh with uh a hallucination like we said originally and nothing to do with a um a psychedelic aspect of the brain that's getting triggered in the last moments absolutely and furthermore if you read as i have these uh psychedelic induced experiences first person shared experiences you will see exactly what i've seen you don't see any of those types of elements or characteristics of a near-death experience that helps us to understand its reality you almost never see what we call vertical perception in near-death experiences that out-of-body observations what they see in here of ongoing earthly events being real that's very uncommon you almost never have someone who's on a psychotropic medication or drug experience if they're severely visually impaired you almost never have them having clear vision of course you never have people other other sort of things that we've done with research with near-death experiences to validate the reality certainly they're not clinically dead like people that have a near-death experience they're not unconscious like people that have near-death experiences and still have lucid experiences they don't have typically the other characteristics of near-death experiences a trip to an unearthly realm where they encounter deceased loved ones a life review they may have that sense of overwhelming love that's fairly common but i would submit it with near-death experiences it's far more common and far more unearthly again there's really no substitute adam to just read a large number of both types of experiences and decide for yourself okay i've never done that so um that that's that's in the plan going forward right um going back to the government adam i had to break in but actually on our website we have actually issued a challenge to the world we because a common belief that dmt experiences reproduce some aspect of near-death experiences we have posted on our website the dmt challenge in other words we encourage people to read a group of dmt experiences and a group of near-death experiences and if anybody believes that these experiences are the same please email us back that's been up for gosh i don't know six nine months and so far absolutely zero people have emailed us and expressed the belief that they think that after re reading first person experiences of both types uh that they're related okay i'll check that out um let's let's go back to the concept that we mentioned of unity and um i can't help but be struck by the fact that when i read about the hallmarks of the near-death experience it it certainly smacks of a monotheistic vision of what the afterlife is especially the experience of a god or some type of powerful supernatural force um and the love as you mentioned and and and many other aspects you know in terms of the lack of fear um you know the the meeting of previously deceased relatives there's there's so many aspects of it would you say that it is more geared in your understanding towards a monotheistic worldview or are there people who report two or more gods are there people who report um seeing specific deities what can you tell us about that sure great question now certainly monotheism for viewers that means one god and that means you know as opposed to polytheism which means uh multiple gods well in near-death experiences virtually every time people describe a god or a you know an ultimate spiritual being they're using it in the singular they seem to encounter one so near death experience evidence does point to there being a monotheistic belief in other words one god now that's not hugely surprising because don't forget in near-death experiences they're typically especially when they're aware of god or they're in that unearthly if you will heavenly realm they're they have that sense of unity and oneness so given that sense of oneness it's not surprising that there are described multiple discarnate separate gods just because what oneness that concept seems to to be overriding um certainly it's consistent with monotheism in in that sense it's it's very rare that we have people describe what you will multiple gods another important point is that when we have the narrative area where people describe an awareness or encounter of god by the way around 45 percent of people that completed the most recent version of the survey 834 near death experiencers to be specific that that high percentage of people were either aware of or actually encountered god or the way a word to question a supreme being in the narrative box it follows many many people will say language the effect of what i encountered was beyond an earthly term god is an earthly term this is far beyond any earthly term possible earthly terms are limiting god is the best term and yet what i encountered is far beyond a description by a single word or words in the english language so be aware that a lot of near-death experiencers uh describe that this this being they encountered is again god is the best word and yet it transcends english and literally any language on the planet in terms of how overwhelming majestic uh this this entity was there are multiple um religions even monotheistic ones that describe a place of punishment or judgments um whether it's temporary or permanent in some cases and what i don't find in near-death experience accounts is anything remotely like that and i'm wondering a if if you have heard anything along those lines b would you say that that is evidence against those concepts with even within monopoly monotheism um and is there any other way of explaining it uh where you could preserve both concepts sure another great question a very common question um encountering or being aware of hellish realms if you will or that hell is a broad word but but hell like realms that that have frightening uh unearthly hellish imagery are rare and near-death experiences and i've studied over 3500 of them that's how many have been shared with our website posted back and yet when i look carefully with a fairly high bar of evidentiality to be sure we're talking about near-death experiences and not some other thing like you know i won't go into detail but intensive care unit delirium is a common confounder for other researchers so with a very strict bar of evidentiality that this really is a near-death experience that occurred during the near-death experiences i've only been able to find a little over 20 near-death experiences that described or encountered hellish realm of that approximately 20 experiences about half of them simply became aware of a hellish realm in other words they were passing through an unearthly if you will heavenly realm and there was a very discreet segregated separate area that they were aware of was hell and they were either knew that as they were going by or they were told that by whatever spiritual being was with them so that's that's part of it and i think that observation is significant it suggests that that hellish realm is segregated apart from divided off from that rest of heavenly realms when people say there's no hell that can exist in heavenly realms they're literally correct based on those near death experience observations now the other half of the people are actually impacted by and a part of enter into that hellish realm which are remarkably frightening so without going into a lot of graphic detail that's hell now my conclusion after reading a lot of these is first of all a lot of people in the hellish realm have the ability to say you know please rescue me and we'll we'll call out to to god or uh you know just ask to be removed and the great majority of the time they're then immediately taken out of that hellish realm and i think that's significant my best guess is to how hellish realms exist when as we discussed earlier love seems to be fundamental in the afterlife and the entire universe is very simple and that is in the afterlife there's going to be the rare mercifully rare uh spiritual entity that is so unable to let go of their evil their resentment their anger their destructive tendencies toward other spiritual beings that they are and in the afterlife i might add generally your belief is you're known for who you are and everything and all you are immediately by all other beings so you can imagine how rough it would be for somebody to be that malevolent and be immediately known by all the beings in heaven so my impression is that they literally have the ability to choose to be among other beings by themselves in a separate realm because paradoxically that's their heaven that's where they're the most comfortable that's where an environment that is most consistent with their beliefs and values so i believe and this is also an expression of what a very important concept near death experiences that being the supremacy of free will so i think just as we have free will on earth and that's described a lot near death experiences is a part of the wisdom i think even in the afterlife you have the free will choice to make one or i would suspect a series of bad decisions and find yourself in that hellish realm but i also believe that consistent with free will even these malevolent beings there have the choice to leave that uh let go of that environment and and return to their heavenly hosts i i'm not aware of any adam of any near-death experience researcher that believes that based on near-death experience wisdom that there's a permanent involuntary health and i think that that helps explain how it can be consistent with an overwhelmingly loving god okay i mean that sounds all very familiar to me in terms of you know my my understanding of the spiritual dimension um and so there's something uh validating about hearing it from this perspective and um and fascinating um so do you think that these accounts it's given their brevity and it almost seems like these folks are like dipping their toe into this experience enough to have a report to bring back and in some cases an exchange of information which seems inexplicable um but two questions like would you say that it's accurate they didn't really go fully in like there's often what's described as like a bridge or or some barrier you have to go past in order to like really be there um is yeah so like would you say that these people like went up into the you know the the mud room of the hereafter but never fully you know made it in into the mansion so to speak uh i i love that analogy of the mud room and that's interesting adam you're i you you are understanding i think some deeper wisdom and near-death experiences what i understand about near-death experiences that's absolutely correct i think a a loving co-created experience with near-death experiences you can't be hearing seeing perceiving things that are so outside of any earthly existence that you've had that it would be confusing that it wouldn't uh you wouldn't understand from you wouldn't learn from it so it has to be you know you have to to have what the equivalent is a vision there uh which and communication which by the way in near-death experiences is essentially always telepathic it's not earthly but at least there's you know communication analogous to to earth in that sense uh and that perception so i'm and you're right there's often described a bridge or a chasm and it's not at all uncommon in near-death experiences what lies beyond that bridge beyond that chasm seems to be an overwhelmingly brighter light they tend to feel an even more powerful sense of love emanating there they tend to have that feeling of gosh i'd like to go there so i think near death experiences are to some extent allegorical of an even greater reality which is even greater more majestic uh more awesome beyond anything that we possibly can imagine from our prior earthly lives and censors so i think this is all all of this near near-death experience and this consistent view of an afterlife is profoundly good news for all of humanity and yet i think that there's probably even more above and beyond that that exceeds even what we can conceptualize and understand based on our earthly background um do you have any speculation as to how it is that religions of the world hundreds if not thousands of years ago were writing and speaking about these matters without the benefit of resuscitation science um uh you know which has really grown as i understand in the last you know number of decades um how how is it can you can you speculate on how they knew any of this yeah i looking at the uh ancient religions and the writing they had i don't think i mean there's some different scholar scholarly views about that but i i just don't see the kind of concepts that we see in modern study of near-death experiences that love that unity uh that that god that afterlife that there's no judgment no fear i just don't see that even in the ancient writings so i i don't think the ancient religious writers were really influenced much if any by near-death experiences i mean we're talking thousands of years ago when far less people were resuscitated and of course let's not forget even if you had a near-death experience thousands of years ago and they almost certainly did very few people could write and you're not going to write down something that is radically different from what the prevailing consensus is of thinking at that point in time thousands of years ago so that would have probably been considered such an outlier that people would be very reluctant to share it and far less likely to write it down and far less likely for that to be part of the limited writing from thousands of years ago that made it here to to for review in this day and age so i think uh i think that's probably why that's my view on it but certainly there's other people with different views okay maybe maybe i'll email you afterwards but um my i think there's a lot at least in at least in the judaic tradition there's there's a lot that really covers these ideas i mean just the the there's a a meditation called the shema which is recited twice daily and that is it's it's about the oneness of of god and the oneness of existence um and after that declaration the very next words are via which means you will love um and well it's it's for me for my from my personal experience it's just it's interesting because as i read your work i like can almost check boxes you know of yes yes i've seen this yes i've seen this and it's in and i feel a great sense of validation in it you know um and i just find it an interesting idea to explore that somehow some of these ideas were captured a long long time before the science existed um but you know i'm extremely interested in what you could email me about that so please do and and look forward to that because that's a big deal uh you know i'm still you know very interested in other religious beliefs and how they relate to near-death experience so what you just shared there is very very important and significant i look forward to what you you can email me okay good we'll do that so um i have time for a few more questions and i i personally could have this conversation for quite a long time more um but let's let's narrow it down for a second i'm just looking at my questions to pick the the best ones um what's the biggest challenge to the whole concept of the near death experience like when when someone challenges you some skeptics get uh on your site uh how would you say what's the best question that they have yeah that's good uh i've debated and discussed a lot with skeptics over the years and interestingly there's been with regard to near-death experiences over 20 different skeptical explanations brought up over the years now the reason there's so many is that no one or several of these skeptical explanations make sense even to the skeptics themselves so it's i feel like when i deal with skeptic arguments of near death experience over the last 20 years i've been doing this it's like hitting a moving target and we've gone through things you know a psychotropic drug called ketamine we went through uh magnetic brain stimulation at another point in time we went through uh you know people questioning our you know these p are these experiences really happening that was dropped after a while uh we've gone through i mean just an array it seems like time by time there's been sort of a different most commonly held skeptic argument up until dmt or psychotropic drugs which is the most popular recent one occurring in the last few years i think one of the more if you want to had to pick a skeptic argument there was a a major skeptic that published the concept that near-death experiences were fragments of memory from entering into unconsciousness or returning from unconsciousness and that's certainly a reasonable hypothesis however it explains nothing that you observe during a near-death experiences these out-of-body observations aren't occurring when they're entering into unconsciousness or recovering they're occurring boom while they're observing their body fully unconscious or clinically dead typically down below them so it doesn't seem to be that way with a cardiac arrest or heart attack if you will you're typically amnesic meaning you don't have any memories for a good one to several hours prior to the cardiac arrest and afterwards so that almost single-handedly refutes that these are fragments of memory that are real and that doesn't explain anything else you observe during near-death experiences the overwhelming consistent flow of those elements uh tunnel meeting deceased relatives a life review which is by the way extremely accurate even if they review events in their typically early life toddler life that they'd forgotten about when they checked with their parents almost invariably what they saw in their life review was absolutely accurate to the finest detail even if they forgot about it doesn't explain the blind including blind from birth having visual near-death experiences uh and it dark sure doesn't explain why near-death experiences are consistent worldwide regardless of the individual's background belief or lack of belief uh that all the overwhelming consistency that we see so again while that's the best that's another sort of popular scholarly argument it absolutely doesn't hold water when you look at the totality of evidence for the reality of your death experience that's pretty thorough um pretty convincing to me um but two more questions and then we're unfortunately out of time for today but um what what's the most compelling account that you've heard it could be recent could be from a long time ago but if you just had to outline something that was stood out for you what would it be sure uh good question adam many years ago i interviewed vicki vicki was born blind from birth to her vision was unknown and unknowable for someone born totally blind you literally cannot explain vision in terms of the remaining five senses i know i tried with vicky it's impossible so vicky was involved in a bad car accident which he was in her early 20s and to respond to the obvious question no she was not driving she was a singer and unfortunately an inebriated patron was trying to get her home didn't make it and crashed but the first time vicki saw her body she had that out of body experience during her near-death experience she was above her body her initial emotion reaction was not wondering on excitement but fear she was frightened because she'd never had visual perceptions and literally didn't know who was laying on the gurney in the emergency room below her and it was only after she correlated her sense of long hair and interestingly a ring that her father had given her that she then recognized that was her down below vicki went on to have a stunningly detailed near-death experience she described what many near-death experiencers described among other elements some of which we've talked about today but she had described what's called 360 degree vision she was simultaneously and immediately aware of visual uh ongoing events in front of her behind her up down right left so technically it's spherical vision as opposed to the two-dimensional term 360-degree vision and there's absolutely no way that she could have had that type of near-death experience stunning visual awareness to her who envisioned is totally unknowable in fact when i interviewed her i said well you do know that the rest of us on earth have what's called a pie shaped visual field because the location of our eyes and the skull and she laughed and literally didn't believe it because don't forget in her entire life experience vision was spherical 360 degrees and she literally couldn't believe literally or understand why vision should be limited to a pie shaped visual field so that really in in my relatively early days of research stuck out to saying there's absolutely no way that that could be any other explanation other than a real event exactly as she described it a vision in somebody highly visual experience and somebody in whom vision is unknown and unknowable um so that that was that that really struck me vividly that's wild and fascinating again um okay my last question is many people in the accounts that i've read in your in your book and and on your website describe themselves as having a a transformed relationship with death yeah um i'm curious for yourself you know i i don't believe you've had a near-death experience yourself no i haven't okay has your interaction with all this material at this point transformed your feelings about death either when contemplating your own or when god forbid something happens in your life has it changed you in that sense yeah it has absolutely changed me dramatically the evidence is so overwhelming that there's an afterlife a wonderful afterlife and it's for all of us you me and every viewer here so to see the evidence for that so overwhelmingly has absolutely transcend transformed my view of my concern about my personal death i may fear the dying process but i absolutely don't fear what lies beyond death because of the overwhelming evidence that there is a real afterlife near-death experiencers say in that afterlife if you will that heavenly realm they over and over describe that as being their real home and i think that's significant so and we actually ask that as a survey question how their near-death experiences fear of death has changed as a result of their experience and not surprisingly a very dramatic reduction in fear of death a very dramatic increased belief in an afterlife no surprise they're drawing from their own personal experience it's all also helped me as a radiation oncology physician to work more courageously with people that are facing that life-threatening event of cancer in their life uh i certainly work some many of our patients die but ultimately uh that's made me more courageous and more loving more compassionate because i know i haven't failed nobody's failed if they die they're going to go on living in that afterlife so vividly described in thousands of near-death experiences they'll be together again with their loved ones and that is a profound message of hope and reassurance not only to me but to everybody who's ever been concerned about their own mortality or the mortality of those that they love great answer and a fascinating conversation as i knew it would be and i really would like to thank you for your time and for being here today i'd like to encourage anybody who sees this to check out the books of dr jeffrey long and his website which we're going to post and links to it um and i i hope that you will continue to do the great work that you're doing it's um it's having a very positive impact so thank you so much well thank you so much great questions great interview really appreciate it enjoy being here okay so thank you and once again thank you for joining beyond belief please take a moment to subscribe to our channel and stay abreast of all the exciting stuff that we have going on it's been a pleasure and we'll see you next time thank you you

Channel: AishJewish

Views: 397,899

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Id: SBSi7VFCqi8

Length: 45min 55sec (2755 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022