What Happens When We Die? | Penny Sartori in conversation with Maitreyabandhu

so welcome to the nature of mind uh in the nature of mind we're exploring mind from all kinds of different perspectives we're looking at neuroscience we're looking at psychology and we're looking at buddhist thor and today we've invaded the home of dr penny satori we've turned up here in swansea on a sunday morning to ask her about near-death experiences penny was one of the first people in the uk to study near-death experiences she was a nurse for 21 years and worked in ittu for 17 years so she's got direct experience of people talking to her a lot about near-death experiences and of course we're really interested in what does that say about mind what does that say about consciousness so welcome but it seems weird to welcome you in your own your own lounge you're welcome welcome to my home yeah very nice to be able to come thank you very much for letting us barge into your life on sunday morning so i thought we'd just start with that experience you had as a nurse i don't know 21 something more years ago that started all this for you um say a little bit about that to start with they thought well that it was all happened on a night shift and i was looking after a man who was clearly dying and he had quite a prolonged and suffering death and i remember looking after him on this night shift he'd just come back from the operating theater and he was in terrible pain the nurse had handed over to me and it was routine to bed bath our patients in the in the night and so i just got everything ready prepared to give him a bed bath and i said oh we're gonna have a bed bath now and as i touched the electric bed to put the bed flatter the man nearly jumped out of bed in agony and at that point our eyes connected and i felt almost as if i'd swapped places with him and he was mouthed into me he couldn't talk because he had a tracheostomy and he was mouthed in the words leave me alone let me die just let me die in peace and it made me stop what i was doing and i thought my goodness i'm not helping this man at all so i called the doctor and he came and reviewed and gave him some extra medication he was always already on phenomenal amounts of morphine as it was um and so i thought right i need to bed bath him but if i do that i'm going to cause him more pain so i pulled the screens around and i sat with him and i just held his hand and when he'd settled i washed the parts of his body that i could reach with his permission and i kind of let him settle and but that had such a profound effect on me i couldn't stop thinking about it all night and the following day when i went home from work i couldn't sleep after my night shift and i phoned work about mid-morning to find out how he was doing and my colleague said oh he died about half an hour after you left and that sent me into like um a bit of a depression really and i think that was when my spirituality first began to emerge because i started to go within and um that depression i think although it was depression i was able to work through it it was awful i would never want to go back there again but um you know coming out the other end it made me see things very differently as well and so it made me interested in what happens when we die you know is it the end of everything are we annihilated or is there something more and i started reading all that i could about death and i looked at it from different perspectives as well and then i came across near-death experiences and i was quite blown away and i just thought wow these people are saying that death is nothing to be afraid of and i think initially because nursing is an evidence-based profession and very scientific i kind of thought he was probably some sort of hallucination but the more i read about them the more curious i became and i just thought well i'm working in intensive care this is the obvious place to do some research and from that point that's what happened i i was able to do some research and um it changed my life i'm going to we're going to come into this entrepreneur death experiences in a minute and talk more about your research but it's interesting because we have something in common that we you've been a nurse 21 years i was a nurse for about i can't remember how long i was in nurse from not very long about five years i was a staff nurse in neurology in walls grave in coventry and uh i thought i'd say a little bit about because i had a similar experience to you um your experience there reminded me of mine when i was training to be a nurse we had some a gentleman admitted again late at night he was sort of very you know very you know clearly dying and not speaking and so on and i don't i don't know what it was like in your day probably the same but i said i want to sit with him if he's dying and that the sister was saying that we haven't got and understandably we haven't got time you know we haven't never you've never got enough stars exactly you know that's so you can never do those things very easily but i i was new and kind of insisted and as i sat i never met the man before as i sat there he was sort of asleep as it were and suddenly he suddenly opened his eyes and just like you were saying looked at me very directly and it was as if it was if i it was if he communicated directly to me he seemed to say he seemed to suddenly wake up to the fact he was about to die and in the same moment wake up to the fact that he hadn't lived and then he burst into tears and he died wow um and it was it was that experience looking back on it there i was in coventry in in in my nurse training i think that's one of the experiences that drew me to buddhism but it's interesting because when i try to explain it to people people think it's a judgment i put on top of it you know that you know and made a moral judgment but it felt like that's what he told me yeah with his gaze and he didn't say anything it felt like a sort of directly i knew what he was a little bit like what you're saying whether that yeah absolutely that resonates with me yes definitely it was like more of an empathic experience really and that i could feel everything that he was going through and it made me question what i was doing as a nurse i thought what am i doing to this man i'm not being of any comfort to him and that's when i changed what i was doing to doing my tasks which i should have been doing and i sat with him instead and held his hand and that was the only thing that actually did settle him you know yeah it's so easy to know to sort of do what you're sort of told to do we just always make beds and have doing pain exactly and this man had been in intensive care for quite some weeks as well and so his whole life had been under the control of the routine of itu you know we turn them every two hours we suction their chests or roll an eye care you know it's all those different things that we're doing to them so they never get any proper rest and this man was in the last few hours of his life you know and it was a real privilege to be there with him as well because that was that was it for him you know and it's a shame that it ended in that way that it did for him as well and i think what he did for me then is it opened my eyes and so everyone i was looking at in intensive care all of those patients i thought this might be the last few hours of their life so i think it's really important that we're able to recognize that and you know to give that care and that appropriate care for patients at the end of their life as well before we get on to you know your research and near death i thought it'd be really good because we don't i don't think we talk enough about experiences you know like after death communication and near-death experiences because you talk again about an experience that you had as a nurse which really resonated with me whether perhaps you might tell that story of being having a handover from the night nurses um yeah well that's that's certainly when i was um a student nurse and i can remember it was my very first day on the ward as a student nurse and i was sitting there you know quite anxious and um so the the knightness was handing over and she said oh the man in section c bed six he'll be dead by the end of the night he's been talking to his dead mother since about three o'clock and i thought oh and i looked around thinking are they winding me up because it was my first day and everyone else carried on as if it was nothing out of the ordinary so i was really quite curious about this so after the handover i went out to this patient and he was just lying in bed at that point and then i was going back and forth throughout the morning you know i'd at the nursing duties in other areas of the ward but i'd go back and i did observe him quite clearly kind of communicating with someone i couldn't see and then it was about half past 11 in the morning and he kind of got energy from somewhere and it's as if he was trying to sit up and he had this lovely smile on his face and his arms went up like that and then he kind of just laid back down and as if he was going to sleep but he actually died at that point and so i thought wow that night nurse was right everything that she said has come true and yeah so that made me quite curious at that point as well you know but again i kind of just dismissed it that this was just some sort of hallucination at the end of life you know i wonder you say a bit because you've written a bit about end of life experiences and then you know there's a lot at the moment being said about neo-death experiences but not so much said about these kind of which i remember i remember people talking to people and you know and again we just it was just like that that's what doesn't really mean anything yeah absolutely it's very well known amongst nurses isn't it absolutely yes and i think if you talk to most nurses they could recall experiences where they've observed something similar but maybe not attached any meaning to it but it's something that does happen with patients and you know sometimes they can be in and out of consciousness as they approach the end of their life and sometimes you might see them gesturing they might talk or going on a journey packing a suitcase waiting for the train to arrive or waiting for their bus to arrive and you know at this at this point of life you see all of these sort of things working out for them um it's common for them to have conversations that we can't see um but it's it's something that is often observed but sometimes it's just kind of put down to delirium or something like that when sometimes it can be quite meaningful and i think something at the end of life that happens as well is that patients might get agitated at some point as well you might see them working through agitation and sometimes that may be mistaken for physical pain or sometimes it could be spiritual pain as well so there's things that they haven't worked through in their life you know maybe they've been estranged from a family member and you know they want to make amends and so those things can be playing on their minds as well you know and also as well they might things from their past might come back to them as well there's a lot been written on reminiscence in the elderly and certainly on people's deathbeds they tend to reminisce as well and go back and talk about things that might have happened in their past as well but it's it's it's a privilege to be around someone like that as well at the end of their life but i know when my grandfather was dying we nursed him at home and um the few days before he he was die he died he started seeing someone in the doorway and used to point and say look look who's there and my grandmother used to get really spooked by it and she used to run out and at the time i'd never heard of these experiences and i kind of dismissed it i didn't explore it any further but now in retrospect having done my research i'm really you know i missed an opportunity there to speak about this in depth with my grandfather as well because there's all sorts of phenomena that can happen near death on there you were saying about electrical it has electrical effects sometimes yeah sometimes you you might see um lights flickering things like that um when people die it's common for clocks to stop as well i i know someone has written to me um when they member family died at home and they had about 10 different clocks in the house and they all stopped at the same time and that was the wind-up clocks and digital clocks as well so i find that quite fascinating as well um some people describe maybe seeing a light leaving the body i've never seen it myself some people sense coldness around the bed again it's something i've not sensed but one of my colleagues i used to work with they used to sense it all the time and she was usually very accurate as well you know so it's yeah there's different phenomena that happen around the time of death and there's also a phenomenon of after death communications and that you write about yeah so it might be that you know people can kind of communicate in different ways maybe through dreams and things like that and there's another thing as well that really fascinates me and that's the empathic or shared death experience so this is where people who are at the bedside of the dying person can share in like a partial journey into the light of the person who's dying and i've got quite a few cases of that and i think the most vivid case that springs to mind is a man who um wrote to me when i was still studying for my phd at lampeter university and he was trying to make sense of something that happened when his wife had died and he said i really don't understand what happened um but he said we were in the hospital room with my wife she was taking her last breaths and he said i was holding one hand my daughter was stroking her forehead and my son was the other side of the bed and he said my daughter said oh look what's happening look mum's walking on a path and he said all of a sudden it was as if he was on a path next to his wife and they were walking towards this bright light on on the path and at the end of the bright light was like a group of people and out of those that group a very tall man stood and he came out and he had his arms extended like that and he could only go so far and then his wife continued without him and she embraced this man and he said i've never felt such intense love in all of my life and he said this all loving embrace and he said i felt it and my daughter felt it as well and he said and then all of a sudden we were back in the room and my wife had just taken their last breath and he said it's something i've never been able to understand because what should have been the saddest day of my life i had a big smile on my face because of what i'd experienced and i spoke to his daughter independently as well and she said i'll never fear death after having that experience with my mum as she was dying the son didn't have any of that experience but um the daughter and husband did and he said you know when when we were left the hospital i was um quite embarrassed because i had this smile on my face and i was thinking the staff might think what are they going to think so yeah and what what do you make i mean i mean a skeptic would say well they're just sort of hallucinating or you know empathic hallucinatory experiences but what do you what do you make of it i mean do you make something on because you've been studying it you know yeah well i think it's it's to do with our understanding of the mind and consciousness really because i think the the current scientific kind of understanding of consciousness is that the brain produces consciousness and then when the brain stops so does consciousness stop um and yeah that seems quite logical but then when you account for all of these experiences and you look at these experiences you know the people at the bedside their brains weren't dying they weren't starved of oxygen or anything like that but they had a very clear experience which influenced how they lived their life after that as well um and so for me having done this exp at this research the the best explanation for me is that consciousness is primary and consciousness is around us all the time but our brains if you like filter out that consciousness but there are times in our life when that filter action becomes more relaxed and so these experiences come into our everyday consciousness so i think that makes more sense for me because when someone's near death so it's an acute situation they might have had a car accident they might have had a cardiac arrest so there's a very acute interruption to the brain to the that and so that filter action within the brain is widening if you like and so you know rather than creating anything it's allowing something into our experience that's usually screened out and i think that just makes more sense to me you know yeah yes indeed so we will start to move towards you know all the studies you've done on near-death experience um before i you know i ask you to tell us a bit more about because there are all these common factors i think it'd be really good to you know have people get an awareness of but you know the other thing striking about your personal story is that you know you were one of the first people in the uk to study near-death experiences but also you did it on you in your own time didn't you you were working as a nurse it's not like you suddenly got all this funding and you gave up your job and you know you know um you know you were and you seemed really really committed to it there's a point in the book where you talk about you know how exhausted you were trying to do your your work and trying to do this yeah because you did a long a five-year study which yes yeah that's right a long study which is i think the first long study in the uk yes um so what made you so committed to it do you think i think that experience of looking after that man when it sent me into that depression it made me question everything and so instead of kind of seeking help i'm going to get antidepressants i went within and i think by going within and processing it it gave me a very different perspective and then i was able to really deeply engage with near-death experiences as soon as i read about them i could feel getting obsessed with them you know i really became obsessed with near-death experiences wherever i went i was trying to find books on near-death experiences and you know a friend of mine would say oh my auntie had one of those in you know years ago so i'd go and speak with the auntie and seek people out and then spend time engaging and learning and understanding and i was really really hooked with them in such a way like never before had i been so obsessed with anything and i think because i was able to engage with it at such a deep level as well i think you know it it's almost like i felt like i'd found my life purpose and so although it was a lot of hard work it was really enjoyable work as well so you know i just had this energy from somewhere and it was as if i was in that state of flow all the time and you know i was i was never bored of it so i'd go to work do my shift and everything and then i'd come home and i'd be my head in the books again you know and it it's just the way it was it was just a subject that really really fascinating and still does fascinate me you know all these years later is it striking to me because for me it makes it more your story makes it somehow more compelling because it's not like well it comes from your own experience i suppose buddhism is particularly concerned with that things need to be located in your own experience not sort of a theory that you're a little bit somehow it's grown out of your experience and yeah let's say it's not that you were given a large funding stream no no in fact to to do my phd i had to reduce my hours as a nurse then so instead of working full-time i had to reduce my hours to make sure i had the time to write up my work as well you know so yeah so let's start just talk about near that death experience which is you know which you've done this five year study on um i thought it'd be good just to hear some of the most the commonest shared experiences that people report have reported to you about near-death experiences well they vary really so they can start off with viewing the emergency situation from an out to body perspective where they look down on the emergency situation and they can see people around them what the medical personnel are doing and they might go through a dark tunnel towards a bright light and although that's a bright light it doesn't kind of hurt their eyes at all and sometimes they describe like a magnetic quality about this light where they're very drawn to it they might end up in the light and they find themselves in a beautiful garden with lush green grass vividly colored flowers they might meet deceased relatives or friends and very often the relatives or friends tell them it's not their time they shouldn't be there they might have a life review where they describe review in the whole of their life in a matter of seconds but they can see everything so they can see the significant things they've done insignificant things that they've done and it's just as if it all flashes before their eyes in a matter of seconds sometimes they might come to a barrier or a border a point of no return that could be a doorway could be a river or gate or something like that but they know that if they cross that barrier they won't come back to life and very often then after the experience sometimes they kind of revive in their bodies and think what's happened to me you know it's like whoa that's that's no other human experience that they can relate to you know it's way beyond anything else they've ever experienced and so sometimes they kind of keep it within they don't tell anyone they're afraid to tell anyone because they think that they're going to be labeled as crazy um so they very much keep it to themselves but sometimes you might find that they want to talk about it and that's the important thing how they responded to them so if they met with a dismissive attitude oh yeah you're on too many drugs which is really common to say you know it can put them off sharing that experience and they'll never share it again for the rest of their life and of course that comes with problems then because they don't integrate that experience if they're unable to talk about it they can't process it and they can't integrate it into their life and so it can cause all sort of problems for them as well it can cause relationship problems because their values drastically change they're not the person they were before the experience so they can't relate to their spouse anymore their values are different it might be that they might have had high-powered jobs and really well-paid jobs but all of a sudden things like that don't have any meaning for them at all and so you might see career changes as well and maybe people will train as volunteers or or trained to become nurses as well or carers you know so you see all sorts of um different uh changes in their life after the experience as well yeah they're remarkable let's go through some of those because that you know that first experience about the outer body you know that seems very common doesn't it yeah literally seeing the the surgeon or whatever in your book you talk about things where that's been able to be verified to some degree um yeah well there was one man in my study patient 10 who actually did have the outer body experience and um afterwards when he regained consciousness he described everything that had happened he described the nurse cleaning his mouth with a pink sponge he described the physiotherapist poking her heads around her head around the screens to check he was okay he accurately described which doctor had examined him although prior to losing consciousness that doctor hadn't been on duty and what he described as very accurate and i know that because i was there this happened at the time when i was there looking after that patient so you know he was clearly when his he was deeply unconscious he was having a very conscious experience where he was able to recall everything that happened and only he was out of his body looking down from above so how do you explain that so you could see how one temptation is to simply just say well i haven't got a category to explain that so let's just dismiss it yeah but i also thought i'm struck by this so often there seems to be this journey you know it's a sort of cliche isn't it in modern in life you know good life is a journey and so on but it seems to be this journey to light doesn't it yeah that seems very common yes it is and that kind of journey can change as well you know it varies so whereas some people might just feel drawn towards that light and glide towards it um people for example i've got a couple of cases from the philippines and um there was one where a child had any um cardiac arrest due in childhood and this young girl remembers um being in darkness and then seeing a pinnacle of light at the end and she knew she had to get to the end of that light and she said she started moving towards it and they were like giant steps that were much bigger than she was and it was really quite difficult to get up to that light and she remembers it being a real struggle to get there and she got so far but she couldn't go any further and she revived in the hospital then and there's another one where um colleague from the philippines her grandmother had lost consciousness she was completely unconscious and during that time she recalls a journey where she was tr going up a very steep hill to get to the top of um to where the light was as well you know and that was an arduous journey as well difficult so that you know the journey itself can vary right from person to person and it so often seems to be the goal is so often associated with light yes is it ever associated with darkness do you know sometimes you know there are there is the other distressing kind of experiences which don't get discussed very often and i think that's a great shame because that is something that we also need to understand a bit better so there is more darkness associated with the distressing kind of experiences and sometimes you know with the distressing experiences people can describe feeling uh like demons pulling them down into that darkness as well and that can be a really traumatic experience for people you know they might see images of people being tortured as well they might see images of thunderstorms and lightning and they might smell burning and things like that so it's a re it can be a really traumatic experience and i know i've had a few people contact me for help in understanding layers and it's really difficult to research that kind of experience because first of all you've got the stigma and people are saying well i hear all about these near-death experiences they're so nice what about me why have i had this distressing is it something to do with my moral character am i not a good person and it's not you know it's nothing to do with the character of the person we don't know why people do and why they don't but when they recall the experience it can be associated with like post-traumatic stress as well so it's incredibly important that we do look at them and that we do understand them and provide be able to provide some sort of help for people as well they do seem to be more of the exception don't they is that right yeah there is if you depending on the kind of research that you look at and there's very minimal research out there it's up to about around about 14 of all near-death experiences are of the distress in nature do you have your own i mean we'll come back into the sort of the more common one but do you have your own kind of hunch about those more difficult experiences um i know it's kind of been suggested that it might be the failure to relinquish the ego so they're kind of clinging on to life and resisting the experience and when they kind of relax into the experience then it might turn into a more pleasant experience so there's an example of dr rajiv party now he's an anaesthetist in california and his near-death experience started off really quite distressing like that he saw images of people being tortured and um then he had this realization as gosh the way i've been living my life i haven't been living my life at all and when he had that realization it changed for him and it changed into a very pleasant experience then so it could be a kind of resistance to the experience possibly yeah yeah okay so let's carry on with them as it were more sort of not common not the right word but more typically um you know so one of the other things the other things that it really interests me is you know quite often there's this life review you know there's there's often another world isn't there that's very very beautiful yeah you know like a heaven world of some kind yes um we're hoping to interview even alexander and it talks about this remarkable heaven world really absolutely yeah and it that that seems quite confident but also um a life review i wonder whether you say a little bit about those two elements yeah so that's interesting because they kind of reflect no well i say we would reflect now in normal time but with the people who have the near-death experience sometimes they're unconscious for a matter of seconds and during that time they can literally see the whole of their life played out before their eyes and so it can be really significant things but sometimes things that they have attached no significance to previously and sometimes when they review in their life as well it can be quite uncomfortable for them so they're looking at things that they've done and they think oh gosh i wish i hadn't done that you know there might be elements of their life that they're ashamed of and they wish that they hadn't and sometimes they can be accompanied by a being of light and that being of light that's with them it's not judging them at all that being of light is like a source of comfort and sometimes they'll kind of envelop them with love as they watch in their life review and there are cases in the literature where the being of light is kind of forwarded over a part of their life as well so that they didn't have to face it and yeah so it's it's a very interesting aspect that life review but when the people come back to life after having that life review it kind of guides and influences the way they live their life as a result in the future after having that review it's more than just a set of images it's a real review yeah they're literally living it and sometimes they can find themselves in the shoes of someone they've interacted with so if they've been violent with someone they can feel like what it's like to be on the receiving end of that violence as well and sometimes you know the simplest little gesture like holding open a door for someone or smiling at someone they can see the ripple effects of that as well so yeah it's a fascinating aspect really see for me that's very interesting because you know but one of the things buddhism would want to say is that your actions matter and there's a there's such a movement in the world to think your actions somehow don't matter you know um but you know buddhism always emphasizes that your actions matter so yes it's almost as if in that life review you're really seeing the effects of your actions and yeah you know not not judged from outside but the intrinsic effect of your actions yeah that's right and and it's not a case of just watching images they're actually there reliving it you know they're feeling it as well you know but they're feeling it from a different perspective as well so they you know they're wise to what they've done and that's why they might feel shame or embarrassed by their behavior [Music] and what what you know then the other element that i'm struck by is you know often there seems to be you that you're you're not you're here too early or you need to go back and often there's a meeting of you know dead relatives and so on um that appear in a very benign form um you know is that that that is is that a sort of quite typical experience it is yeah so what you've if you look at the cases in the literature a lot of them are kind of like embracing with their embracing their loved ones and really feel happy to be there with them um but very often they gently tell them no it's not your time you have to go back and but what i found in my research in the hospital is that the relatives are actually quite angry and they were like what are you doing here get back there you know they were sort of that attitude with them you know and one man in particular he said i was there in this tunnel and he said i met up with a group of friends of mine who were all dead and they were really angry they were shouting at me that i was there he said i don't know what i'd done he said i don't know why i'm here so i found that quite fascinating there was another lady and she met her mother and her mother was like you get back down there for those children and so yeah you know it was like not this lovely you have to go back they were shouting at them and quite angry what do you make of that i don't know really yeah is that just typical of wealth near-death experiences i don't i don't know it's funny as well because you know you know buddhism believes in rebirth so the idea is that you know somehow that consciousness is reborn but i suppose there's a possibility that there's that there's a there's a kind of timeless place um yeah well that's it because when they're in this near death state time doesn't exist so you know they could if everything that they will recall in it would take years of experience in real time but of course they're experiencing it all sometimes in a matter of seconds so you know there is no time in that realm where they are it's it's like time doesn't exist you know what they could be there think that they're there for five minutes or they could think that they're there for five years they really doesn't have any time doesn't have any bearing on it at all yes indeed i want to go back now as well to what you were saying about you know that so you you've got these kind of common experiences um well comfortable in that realm but then people come back and as you say one that one of the one of the points you make strongly in the book is that the importance of people actually listening to that and not dismissing it yeah um what you know what because you know that the common dismissal is oh these are just hallucinations all right like you said they're just more drugs what what do you make of that is there anything in you know why are they are they could they be trying to take a sort of skeptical view yeah um because it's important isn't it we're not trying to just believe or disbelieve we're trying to sort of think can't we um and one of the things i've really appreciated about your book because you're clearly just trying to think about it yeah you don't have conclusions very much no not at all you know there's still more work to be done you know and i was quite naive i think when i started doing my research i thought at the end of my five years when i had a conversation with dr peter fenig who was one of my supervisors he said where are you going to be at the end of five years now then when you finish this and i thought yeah i'm going to have all the answers and how naive was that you know it just opened up so many more questions for me that can't be answered so there's a lot more research that certainly needs to be done um but of course you know i was skeptical could i prove that they were hallucinations as well and so what i did as well is i also listed and documented cases of patients who'd clearly been hallucinating as well and then i compared the two experiences and i found that there were differences so the people who had had the hallucinations when i followed up and interviewed them later they could rationalize that they'd been hallucinating and they were quite embarrassed by their behavior as well and they thought oh gosh yeah and mortified what i did and all of those things and when i investigated what they were saying and i spoke with the nurses who had been looking after them very often it was related to conversations going on in the background noises in the background the tactile stimulations of things that we would do into the patients as well whereas when i looked at the patients who'd had the near-death experience it couldn't be attributed to what was going on in the background and they were adamant that this was an absolutely real experience and you know a few of them said unless you've had this experience for yourself you can't possibly understand it and they were just absolutely adamant it was real and of course you know that man who did have the outer body experience and recorded everything that he said was a very accurate description of what actually happened as well you know and also on it's funny this word hallucinations because it makes you think you know what they are because we actually don't really know what hallucinations are either because we don't know what the mind is um but art hallucinations are usually more chaotic and yeah they're not usually so sort of they're not unified aren't they yeah so this they can be very random and very bizarre as well so you know whereas the near-death experience tended to follow that pattern you know that that's um journey into the light meeting with the deceased relatives and things so there was randomness versus a pattern as well so very different experiences and then what you know from your research what did you discover about because lots of people must have told nurses and doctors they've had this experience and as you say people that they don't doubt they've had an experience do they don't doubt something and they seem to often know that they died you know they don't seem to say they don't present with oh i had all these dreams or um what happens when they're not believed because they must quite often be not believed yeah well if they're not believed you know they kind of get dismissed and say oh yeah you're on a lot of strong drugs it was all due to the drugs but that's not helpful to the people who are going through that because they need to process it they need to talk about it and if it's dismissed they just think oh right i am crazy and they're afraid to talk about it but they know that something really important has happened to them and you know they don't know how to make sense of it and i remember a good few years ago there was a lady who was in her 90s and she wrote to me at the university at lampeter and she said i've read a newspaper article about your work and i'd really like to thank you because i had that experience when i was 14 years of age i told my mother about it and she told me i must never speak about it and she said i've never spoken about it until this point and she described this wonderful experience that she had and she was never able to express it or get a deeper understanding of it which is such a great shame [Music] and of course one of the reasons why i mean it's difficult because i'm not there therefore suggesting one believes either you know from my point of view i i just want to be open to things you know like you i said i don't know what they mean um nobody really knows but dismissing something isn't that that's not right either you know because you don't know so you can't dismiss things if you don't know exactly yeah that's you know but i can't remember where i was going with that um but um what was like i completely lost my dragon but if if let me just remember where i'm gonna go with that but so yeah i'm not i'm not saying that you know one but they want one should be open to them um [Music] i suppose what happens if it's oh that's where i was going you know if presumably the base of it that has been being dismissed is because of a materialist world view yeah that you know i grew up i come from a small town in warwickshire in the midlands um you know the basic idea is you know i exist in a world that exists my my my consciousness is like you say a byproduct of my brain and you know when i died that would be the end of that that'd be ended there was no me before there's no me afterwards but in what interests me there is that materialist view of things which is so difficult even to really realize it's a view isn't it it feels like most people don't think of it as a view or they think of it as well that's just the case it's inductively the case it's just a fact yeah but what strikes me is that with that view all it's almost all you can do is dismiss it yeah that's right yeah and it's just that you know we've never explored the possibility that mind is primary you know we've not not explored that aspect and we've just taken for granted that the brain produces consciousness and that's it and it's been taken for granted and it work you know it it works fairly well but of course when you get to these anomalous experiences then it completely dismisses something which is very valid to patients as well you know it's a deeply subjective experience that totally influences how they live their life afterwards but if you look at you know you think about pain that's very subjective as well you know you can't dismiss to patients that they've got pain they're feeling it not me i would not dream of dismissing the fact that they have pain you know so i think it's so important that we pay attention to these subjective experiences they're very real to the people who are having them because if you've got this materialist view because one of the things that buddhism is saying is that your your view creates your experience so if you think that you know that basic view the brain brain creates consciousness then then that will you'll get you'll get evidence to confirm that view yeah you get sort of bias really so i want you to just come around a bit more to to the i one of the things that opens out for me there is i wonder you know nearly all religious traditions have taught there's some kind of afterlife they teach them and i want to come back in a minute to the cultural differences that you write about because i think that's another important strand i'd like to explore with you but um you know one of the things that you know nearly all religious traditions are there is some kind of afterlife it makes you wonder i see what you think of this but it makes you wonder whether um that might have come from people's near-death experiences it might have been that way around you yeah that's right because if you look at all of the the um founders of the world's uh faith traditions and things they seem to have had a kind of near-death experience as well so it could well be that the near-death experience is the basis of these um religious beliefs as well because there's so much in common isn't there you know that this heaven-like world that the the figure of love that you talk about um again and again these descriptions of light um these descriptions of rising up and so on um yeah absolutely it feels very religious which makes you wonder whether that's one of the reasons why people haven't wanted to go there because people are a bit nervous of religion and you know sometimes a good reason but it might be that it's from near-death experiences right yeah that could be the basis of religions as well yeah yeah which is quite similar absolutely but i want to yeah talk a bit about what cultural differences have you seen so one of the things you talk about in the book is that how like everyone seems to have them children it's not just university educated people for instance it's very you know everyday people children adults all different cultures yeah i wonder where you might say a little bit about that so um with children they might be more likely to see pets because they've encountered less people who have died as well when they're children and sometimes they might see relatives who are still living as well with children um but yeah and they might see kind of more kind of rainbowy type experience sort of things there um different cultures so for example in india when someone dies rather than having a life review what they tend to report is a scene where they meet chitra gupta the man with the book and it's a book of deeds of their life and he looks at the deeds and that decides their fate from that point onwards so it's if you like it's a form of judgment um and so you've got that aspect you've got then maybe um difficulties and get into the light with different cultures as well so you know it might be um like in the philippines and other places it's an arduous journey to get to the light whereas in the west it might be much easier it's they drift into the light so there are different cultural elements there really according to where they're from of course different cultural elements doesn't mean that the experience is unreal it just could mean that it's filtered through a particular yeah cultural shape absolutely you know you write about um uh a buddhist practitioner who experienced you know being welcomed back by amitabha into a purely amitabh but you know the avatar was a buddha of the west and you know and that is what the amitabha sutras say that you are welcomed back you know um there's a tibetan llama a ringgold rinpoche who had a near-death experience that exactly what tibetan you know texts say about what happens when you die it followed exactly that right yes um but yeah so it seemed it does seem to change culturally doesn't it yeah yeah absolutely and then of course the other thing i i wanted to talk about because one of the things you write about strong and you've written a whole other book on is the effect that these experiences have yeah they they can have such a profound effect on someone you know and um i think we don't see that you know people tend not to see that aspect of it as well but it really does transform the way in which people live their life and what they do as a result of it as well you know so you know it can give them that big kind of boost of energy to turn their life into something else you know so for example gigi strailer who is the founder of nde uk she contacted me because she was searching for answers about her experience she'd had a cardiac arrest in hospital had been successfully resuscitated and had had this experience where she felt that she was part of the experience where she was in the void it took her many years to process this and she was on a quest to find out more so she explored it from different religions perspective she had lots of therapy to try and understand it and she realized that there is a need to support people who have gone through these experiences and so you know she has set up nde uk she's put in all this work to do that her own funded it herself and everything all because she wants to do good and help others as well who have been in similar positions to who and so that's what you find is that people really change after the experience and they become more altruistic more loving and compassionate towards other people and so very often they're not center of their own little world anymore they see it from the bigger picture and they want to do good in the world you know so it's very different then yeah but it can also be quite disruptive oh it can yeah it can really you know cause havoc in people's lives you know there's a high divorce rate because people just don't recognize their partners anymore you know um again big career changes as well so it does have many many different effects and people might lose a lot of friends as well because they're friends although they might want to try and help to understand they they don't know how they can help they don't know how they can understand it and so they kind of seek out other people or like-minded people who they can talk to you know and so friends kind of fall by the wayside as well [Music] the big changes aren't there oh absolutely yeah and you know there was one man who had had a big long career in the nhs and after his near-death experience he just didn't feel aligned to his job anymore and he used to get very angry and frustrated at the things he was seeing and so you know he had to get out of that as well so yeah lots of changes there and the other thing that you know that's quite often mentioned is that i mean what one of the striking things about near-death experiences is the vividness to which it stays with the person and the sense of be it being more real not less real and that this life seems less real by comparison yeah definitely and what what a lot of people describe is that that experience is etched into their mind for the rest of their life and so you know they can just close their eyes instantly they're back in that experience there's one lady um who i used to see quite regularly and when i used to meet up with her she'd close her eyes and she said yeah i'm back here again and she'd you know she'd have all these tears streaming down her face as well because it can evoke such emotion as well you know the experiences really do evoke that deep emotion and so i've spoken well i've tried to a few men actually who i've tried to interview and they've contacted me and said i'd really like to talk about my experience and i've met with them and they've been been unable to express it because they're so overcome with emotion that they're they're in tears before me and they can't get talk about it so it you know it's a really really intense and deep experience for them i mean i've not thought of that though but have you noticed any difference across gender you know about her no not really it affects them all pretty much the same yes yeah then the other the final area i want to look at which is because there is it starts i mean you know i want to sort of you know what i'm struck by but by your work is your willingness to be open and not to i think answers are sort of trivial compared to what questions you know um what we need is better questions yeah um answers so often are a bit packed aren't they we're not in a place for answers but i really like your openness to things but one of the things i that really draws one up short is one starts to edge into the miraculous at times you know where you know for instance even alexander who you know we've mentioned he shouldn't really be alive you know in terms of science and you you've got a story that i was struck by which shouldn't be out to have happened that man i don't know yeah again with patient 10 this is the man who had the outer body experience further to that he went upwards into a room uh like a pink room where he met his dead father and his dead mother-in-law and he didn't he'd never really met his mother-in-law before but recognized it from photos and he was very happy where he was and he saw also saw a man who he described could have been jesus but he's not sure if it was because it's not what he would expect jesus to look like because his hair was long and scruffy and needed a comb in and i think it was jesus and he said his eyes were piercing and he was drawn to look at his eyes and he was happy where he was he wanted to stay there but the jesus type figure said no it's not your time you have to go back and he said he kind of drifted backwards watched the image fade in front of his eyes and then he was back in his body in immediate pain now when i followed up on an interview with him he misinterpreted one of the questions that i'd asked and i said to him is there anything that you could do while out of the body that you can't normally do and by that what i meant is that some people will think about a location and they might find themselves there so you know yeah and that fascinated me so that's what the kind of thing i was getting at uh but he just said oh no look i can open my hand and i didn't realize the significance at first and he said no he said my hand is normally like this so the man has cerebral palsy so he's 60 years of age at the time of his experience so for 60 years of his life his hand had been in that position and he said no i can do that now i can open it out and when i discussed this with the physios and the doctor they said there's no way that should be physically possible because your tendons are going to be in that contracted position in order to open it out you'd have to have those tendons released well no such operation was done there i checked on his notes he hadn't had any hand physio or anything like that and so he's gone from being like that to going like that so how do you explain that you know and you know we can't explain it but we can't explain it away either no it's happened so to me if we had an understanding of that how many other people are out there with similar ailments and injuries and you know maybe if we understood that we'd come up with a mechanism that doesn't require surgery could save the nhs millions in the long run good but it is it moves us into a little bit like miraculous sort of healing doesn't it because you know i remember nursing people with that and you know it is impossible you you know i remember trying you know you try and massage the hand and all that sort of thing remember that you know yeah you you can't without surgery just do that yeah um absolutely it's literally impossible to think you know and as you say as you say you can't then say but it didn't happen because it did you know yeah and there are the cases out there you know there's david bennett who had um cancer of the bones i think he was and uh you know he was literally on his deathbed and he had a near-death experience and he has recovered he's really going strong now he features a a chapter in in the book the transformative power of near-death experiences uh there's also the case of anita mojani as well who again she was on her deathbed in in hong kong in hospital and they'd called her family in and her brother was traveling to hong kong on an airplane because she wasn't expected to survive but she had this near-death experience and completely changed her perception of everything and her understanding of her life and you know she recovered from from that as well so you know it's just really fascinating and it's something that we we don't understand but you know when you come across cases of remarkable healings rather than people be interested and curious and let's find out more they're kind of pushed to one side you know they're like an embarrassment yeah that's it because it goes against everything that we know and understand but imagine if we had people who were more curious out there and we explored those in more depth you know we could revolutionize our health care as well you know so i want to start the drawing i mean i'd love to talk to you more about it i mean i do think it's an important conversation because we were just talking earlier with this there's so much well i don't know who am i to say but it's so easy to have a negative view of life isn't it to think that there's no meaning that you know we're we're just born and we die and what was the point of that and you're seeing that more and more in young people are you that people just feel it's meaningless and you know there seems to me a possibility in this discussion to evoke that life has some sort of intrinsic meaning i don't know whether that's yours oh yeah absolutely look look around us look at the images that we see on social media and on the television it's all about going out there spending money on superficial things i don't mean anything and having this great life and people there with big smiles all this makeup looking wonderful with this you know family around them and all this and that and life's not like that is it you know it's the image that's been sold to us by the media and i think people now are starting to kind of wake up a bit as well you know we've seen a lot of people with mental health problems as well and is it just that all of a sudden people are questioning everything that is being sold to us by the media are we is life more meaningful is there something about it and i think if people are able to go within and start to think of life in a different way it could really change the the way that they live their life as well you know because i think a lot of us are not really living our lives we're existing we're not living life you know life isn't about these long working hours and things life is about enjoying your family being outside and you know being with nature and i think we've we've kind of lost our way as a society really and i think maybe you know people are starting to wake up a bit let's hope that they are i hope that they are indeed so let's i want you to finish with a little bit of a sort of personal question and you've spent so long exploring this and as i said right at the start you know you're just doing that because it your own personal you know kind of are you saying obsession yeah um fascination um what what do you think it's done for you has it done you know because you know you you you've been talking to all these people who have had near-death experiences and death proximate experiences um what do you think it's done for you as it were if that's the right question oh it's done loads for me it's completely made me re-evaluate my life whereas before i think my life was very much about going shopping buying things all the time going out eating out going you know having nice things to do but meaningless and superficial things you know i think what it's done for me is give me meaning in my life made me face my own mortality because i'm not going to be alive forever so not in this body as penny satori anyway you know so you know it's made me appreciate the things that i do have in life the things that don't cost money you know simple things you know spending time with my son and you know being going down to the beach and you know walks in nature things like that so it's made me very much live more for the present whereas before i was always kind of looking at my watch what time is it now what are we doing you know and looking projecting into the future now i think it's very important to be more in the now and um you know it's made me interested in spiritual practice as well so you know i try to do a bit of meditation as well and you know really kind of take care of myself as well so i think it's made me less superficial and um enjoy my life more that's a very very good result absolutely and you know you've you've helped us all explore something that we you know hasn't been explored right until rental and even now there's still a lot more to explore isn't there oh yeah there is there's so many unanswered questions out there you know i've literally just scratched the surface there's so much more out there and i hope other people are inspired to do their own research as well that's great that's a great place to finish thank you very much

Channel: Adhisthana

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Id: RgzPChH0y2w

Length: 61min 49sec (3709 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022