You're listening to the Paranormal UK Radio Network, the best in paranormal talk radio
in the UK and around the world. If you had a near death,
shared death or spiritually transformative experience, how much can you believe in the events
that happen to you, assuming that you tell the truth. How much can
other people believe in the stories you tell? Doctor Jan Holden is going to
give us the inside scoop on these questions. Welcome to the Afterlife Files,
where we investigate near death, shared death experiences and how they affect you.
Unlike podcasts that are just stories, we will give you the heads up on
what to look for in our conversation. Then after the interview stick around.
We'll help you make sense of those accounts so you can incorporate the insights into
your life. I think you'll find them. Once your most profound questions have
been answered, living life in the physical is filled with more peace and joy.
Here's your heads up. In addition to believability, Jane is going to
talk about mine versus brain. Can we verify what other people perceive during their
experience, our purpose in life? How do we live with what we know?
And how do we think about controversial issues. That's a really fun one.
You'll soon be clear that Jan has been a professional educator her entire life.
Afterwards, I summarize my notes and I needed to look up how to
spell erudite. She's that clear in her explanations. Here is Jan's bio.
After thirty one years on the University of North Texas Counseling Program faculty, Jan
Holden retired in two nineteen as Professor Emerita of Counseling. Beginning in nineteen eighty
eight with her doctoral dissertation, her primary research focus has been counseling implication of
near death and related experiences. In this research area, she has over fifty
referee journal publications, several chapter and book publications, including lead editorship editorship on
the two thousand and nine Handbook of Near Death Experience That would be this guy
right here. It's a great book, and over one hundred national and international
presentations. Among Jan's numerous recognitions is the two nineteen unt Eminent Faculty Award,
one of the university's highest honors. Since two thousand and eight, she has
served as an editor in chief of the International Association for Near Death Studies Scholarly
Journal, and Jan you get extra stars in heaven for doing that. Doctor
Holden serves currently as Ian's President. Her website is Janholden dot com. Here's
our interview. Hey there, Jan, Wow, it is great to have
you today. Hey Scott, I'm so happy to see you. This is
going to be a fun hour. So let's get right at it. How
did you get interested in near death experiences? Way back at the beginning?
Oh my goodness, you really want to hear the whole story. Well,
I when I was growing up, I was always interested in things that couldn't
be easily explained, like esp and things like that. So I read books
about that, and about like Edgar Casey, the sleeping prophet who would diagnose
people's medical conditions that he'd never even met, and you know, things like
that. And then when I was in college, I was home one summer
and my father had been reading a book called The Great Soul Trial. And
it's a non fiction book about a minor in Arizona who disappeared and when the
state opened his safe deposit box, presuming him dead, they found several hundred
thousand dollars. Now, this is around nineteen sixty, when several hundred thousand
dollars was more than it isn't today, and a handwritten note saying that he
wanted the money used for research on the survival of the human soul after death.
So the State of Arizona put a little ad in the paper in which
they had to do, and they thought nobody would see it in the whole
time, would just disappear and they would get to keep the money for the
state coffers. But to their surprise, over a hundred entities and organizations came
forward to claim the money from this will, And so the book is mostly
trans Oh, so the State of Arizona actually had to put on a trial
where they heard all these people come and testify how they would use the money,
and then a judge would decide who got the money. So there's a
little ironic follow up to this that I'll tell you about. Not everybody would
appreciate this, but I'm sure you will, so I can't wait. So
the book is mostly the transcripts of the trial, and included were the research
director of the American Society for Psychical Research, the research director of the Psychical
Research Foundation, testifying how they would use this money to do research on the
survival of the human soul after death. So it was just fascinating to me.
And so here's the ironic twist. The judge, the ASPR and the
PRF that I just mentioned, and the Baronneurological Institute in Phoenix were the three
big contenders for the money, and the judge, in his wisdom, gave
the money to the Baroneurological Institute that said that they were going to do research
on the survival of the human soul after death by dissecting brain like somehow that
was gonna make sense. But because they were the most like acceptable organization,
I think that that played into anyway, the ASPR and the PRF got together
filed a what do you call that an appeal? Thank you the Yeah.
So the ESPR and the PRF got together, fouled an appeal and won it,
and the money was actually used in what still today is some of the
best research and out of body experiences where they used and somebody who was adept
at having out of body experiences and going, you know, doing astral projection
to another room and reading a coded kind of thing and that sort of stuff.
So here's the ironic twist. Fast forward now probably thirty years and comes
Pam Reynolds, who will probably be talking about more later today, and she
for a long time was the poster child for vertical perception, which is the
that where the near death experiencer, based on the position and condition of their
physical body, they shouldn't know certain things, they shouldn't be able to perceive
things or no things that they do and are later shown to be accurate.
And in her case, they were doing this surgery on her brain to remove
an aneurysm that they had to first of course totally anesthetize her, then lower
her body temperature to about sixty degrees, which her that her heart then stopped
and they had her on a machine that took her blood out and kept it
viable while they and they drained the blood out of her brain so they could
go in and do this aneurism, fix this aneurism. And when they did,
they repair, they closed her up later back down, warmed her up,
started her heart and she was back well. She reported that during the
just as they were about to after they had done the incision into the back
of her head and they inserted they were I'm sorry, they were about to
do the incision in the back of her head, and they used what's called
a bone saw, and that the sound of that saw. She's a music
she was a musician, and it was like this high d and she said,
suddenly she was conscious, and she was like over the surgeon's left shoulder,
watching him as he was cutting into the bone of her skull. And
meanwhile there was a woman down at towards foot end of her body. And
the woman was saying, the vein is too small, and her surgeon up
at the head said try the other side, and so in fact, in
order to and she and Pam said, she thought to herself, what's that
woman doing down like in my like pelvic area when this is supposed to be
brain surgery. Well, she didn't realize that they used the ephemeral artery in
the groin to attach to the blood machine, and so she was trying to
get the hook up and the vein was too small, so she went to
the other side succeeded, and that's how they got the you know, circuit
kept her blood viable. So later when she regained consteousness, she reported this
and it turned out that you know, they keep really careful records, and
indeed, that is exactly what had happened. But the question is, how
can somebody who was totally anesthetized chilled down to sixty degrees. Now, her
heart hadn't stopped at this point yet, but they were draining the blood from
her head and cutting into her skull. And her eyes, of course,
were taped shut, as they always are when we're fully anesthetized, because our
eyes would dry out. But in her case, her ears were stuffed with
these little speakers that fed this loud banging noise into one ear and loud white
noise in the other ear. And they switched off because the loud banging noise,
if it just stayed in one ear, it would create caused deafness,
so they switched back and forth. But she's constantly got this sound bombarded in
her ears, and that's because they're monitoring her EG her brain waves to make
sure because the last thing to go is hearing. So when they got this
thing blasting in her ears and her EG goes flat, it's like she's not
Her brain isn't functioning anymore, it's not processing even this loud sound. And
it was these speakers were stepped in her ears, they filled her ears,
and then they put gauze and tape over them, so she couldn't hear anything
normally. And yet she recounted this conversation that was verified by operation records.
And she also said that she saw when she saw what he was holding that
the She said she had heard the term bone saw, but this didn't look
like anything she had thought was a bone saw. She said, it looked
like an electric toothbrush. And the person who researched this case, originally,
Michael Sabam, a cardiologist, had to send off to Fort Worth, Texas
to get a picture of this thing and and it and it turns out that
it looks exactly like an electric tooth pressure. It's more like a drill than
a us you know, we think of a sawe for her, you know.
So anyway, she became like the poster child for vertical perception. And
here's the ironic part where this pioneering surgical procedure, at the time it was
very pioneering, was done was the Baron Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the Zona,
the very place that had originally been, you know, given the kid's
will. Then it was taken from them, and then they ended up being
the site that provided at the time the best evidence for the survival of the
human soul after death. It's just like the universe has got to be laughing
at this. Yeah, so and so that was a case that really piqued
your attention. It did, and so so I was working. So I
read then then to fast forward that that book, The Great Soul Trial.
That was around nineteen seventy and then in nineteen eighty seventy eight I read Raymond
Moody's book Life After Life about near death experiences, and of course that captured
my attention. And then in about nineteen eighty five, I was starting work
on my doctoral dissertation at Northern Illinois University and counselor Education. And to make
a long story short, the idea that actually went through to the end was
on something related to near death experiences. And as you probably well know,
a lot of people when they do their doctoral dissertation, you have to do
it so intently and oh if to defend everything you do, and by the
end a lot of people are just sick of the topic and they never want
to touch it again. I was just the opposite. I was enthralled,
and so it really created I guess the foundation for my thirty plus years of
research on NDEs and then expanded into related topics, especially after death communication.
So I've really researched both of those things, but the my absolute favorite topic
is vertical perception for for reasons I'm sure we'll get into. Well, you
married your interest in m NDEs with counseling. Yeah, and so clearly you
were seeing people being affected by spiritually transformative experiences. That's right, Yeah,
definitely. Um, you know d's interface with counseling at a lot of different
levels. There's the level of clinicians actually working with people who've had NDEs.
And I did a study. We'd been hearing horror stories about people who who
had had horrible disclosure experiences where they tell about their near death experience in their
counselor don't recognized that what they're talking about. They dismiss the importance of it,
They diagnose the person or the experiences being somehow pathological, or even demonize
the experiences somehow evil. But no actual research had been done. And I
did a study of near death experiencers experiences disclosing their NDEs, two healthcare professionals
and learned about what constituted really good experiences and really bad experiences, and now
I use that to train counselors about how not to harm near death experiencers and
other transpersonal experiencers. So there's that level, and then there's also counseling is
based in theory, and theory is based in philosophy. Near death experiences raise
the question of materialism versus idealism, materialism being the belief that everything is fundamentally
physical and that so, for example, our thoughts and all of that is
a manifestation somehow of all the electrochemical things going on in our brains, versus
idealism, which is that belief that consciousness and the brain are essentially separate though
closely related during physical existence, and that so consciousness precedes the physical brain and
survives the existence of the physical brain, and the brain actually serves as a
filter of consciousness, so that we actually have much greater consciousness than we usually
are aware of when we're in our physical bodies, because the brain filters out
the stuff that isn't necessary to get around to navigate this level of reality,
you know. So, Um, so there's so, as I said,
on a lot of different levels. Um, there's an interface between NDEs and
other spiritually transformative experiences and counseling. Yeah, and have you found that that
that view, the idealistic view? So am I saying that right, yes,
is now predominant in the world of counseling. Are we still in the
material and if only, we're definitely still in the material Materialism, philosophical materialism
still dominates science and medicine, and so that's one of the things that we're
in Ions. We're addressing, And in fact, I'm going to be doing
a special you know, I'm editor of the Journal of Near Death Studies,
and I'm going to be doing a special issue on whether IONS should actually take
a stand that the based on the evidence, the best model is idealism,
and that materialism is valid for the aspect of reality that it addresses, but
idealism is includes and extends beyond that and answers questions that materialism can't, questions
like vertical perception. Well, you get an extra star in heaven for not
only being president of IONS, but being the editor. And that's quite a
question to put out before the troops. It really is that, you know,
are we really going to say that you know that the cases sort of
kind of closed on whether it's materialism versus idealism. Yeah, And one of
the things about I'm going to be talking about something called reflective judgment theory,
which is the it's based in extensive research, and it's about how people think
about controversial issues. And they're essentially three phases that people go through in their
thinking pre reflect In the pre reflective phase, people don't really know that much
about it, but they listen to an authority and adapt that position kind of
vehemently without really knowing everything. And then in the next phase they start to
examine the phenomenon and they realize that there actually are several valid points of view
that have their merits, and that the one point of view they've been holding
is only one among many that are all have their merits, but they differ
from each other. Now, this is this is a step beyond prereflective.
It's you know, progress, but it's not the ultimate progress because here the
person is caught in a mire of relativism. It's like, well that this
is valid and that's valid, so there just is no answer. And then
in the final stage, the person actually way evaluates in ways all the evidence
from these different arguments and comes to realize that some arguments are stronger than others,
and comes to what is what I call a current best answer, and
that is and so when you say, you know, like the case is
essentially closed, it's like sort of, it's like, as of right now,
the best answer we have is idealism and um and but we're open to
continuing to consider new evidence and all that stuff. So it's it's there's a
strength in the position, but it isn't the vehemence of the pre reflective.
It's more the it's more circumspect um and saying, well, this is as
far as all the evidence is, this is the best answer we have so
far. So um Ian's has taken a m that's the International Association for Near
Death Studies has taken a neutral stance on like we we're neutral about you know,
topics like religion and things like that, and that neutrality has kind of
um pervaded everything, including taking a stance like this on a philosophical position.
And so what I'm going to be arguing what the in the special issue.
I'll be writing the lead article where I make the case that I think it's
time for ions to do this. And then I'm going to invite all kinds
of people, like a lot of the people you've been interviewing to respond and
U and I also am going to do a survey of IONS membership to find
out what their beliefs are and and then see if it maybe results in actually
IONS taking a position and posting it on our website and saying, you know,
we're where um, this is where we are. Well, certainly the
research backs you up in terms of the idealism, and peopleheartedly Yeah, so
UM as your first vote right here, right now, All right, let's
take a stand and you know we're gonna call it for idealism. Yeah.
So when back to you, you were talking about the um when people are
having to disclose what happened to them, Um, you there's a um there,
there's some perception that they had, and of course it's really just their
perception because rarely, very rarely is it a share things. So you know,
how how do you deal with that from a research perspective, From a
philosophical perspective, Yeah, well, in fact, you've touched on exactly why
verritical perception is so near and dear to my heart, because you know,
near death experiencers come back with messages about meaning and purpose in life and kind
of the purpose of human existence on earth. And and they're they're very potentially
influential messages, like, as you know, the most important thing is love,
and we're here to advance in our capacity to love and also to acquire
knowledge. Those are the two themes that come out, but definitely love first
and then learning. And but if if people are to take this message,
and that message has the potential to influence everything from moment to moment personal decisions
to global policy decisions. You know, the moment to moment personal decision is
if somebody you know flips me the bird while I'm driving because I accidentally cut
them off, how do I respond in thought and attitude and um and even
more so if I'm actually interacting with the person, you know, how do
I respond when I'm feeling challenged in some way and choosing the path of love
rather than you know, absence of love? At the global level? Um,
you know, how do I decide whether I'm going to invade another kind
of tree? You know? Is this the most loving thing to do?
And so? Um. So, in order for this potentially very powerful message
to pervade society, we have to get passed or not passed, but beyond
the idea that near death experiences are just subjective experiences that are people's you know,
personal happenings, and yeah, exactly anecdotes. And so that's why,
um, where these cases where people have again perceived things or come to know
things that based on everything for them physically and what they should know and so
forth, they shouldn't be able to perceive these things. They shouldn't know these
things, and yet they're shown to be accurate. And for my chapter on
vertical perception in the Handbook of Near Death Experiences, which is that's really nice.
It's right over your right shoulder there, I did a study where I
just gleaned the published literature for cases of vertical perception and then I analyzed them
in terms of how evidential they were. So there are some cases where a
person says, you know, I saw something during my NDE and when I
regained consciousness it turned out to be accurate. It wasn't anything that I could
have seen during with normal physical abilities. Well that's interesting, but it's not
really evidential. At the other extreme, our things are cases, and we
call them cases rather than anecdotes because in the book the Self does Not Die,
which I would love for you to put on your shelf. Find you
behind you. Yeah, the the authors have actually gone back into these published
cases to them. In most cases it was the physician who was attending the
person who had the NDE who verified that what they perceived was accurate. So
like, for example, this is from a case from the Self does Not
Die. A woman is in surgery. She unexpectedly flatlines, her heart stops,
her breathing stops. She's temporarily dead. And what we know from people
like Kim ven Lamalis that after twenty seconds after the heart stops, there's no
more detectable brain activity. So but yet this is when she said that she
was up above well, so let me let me tell the story as it
actually happened. So she was flatlined for a few minutes, and then they
finally got her heart going again. They finished the surgery, and of course
this whole time she's completely anesthetized, with her eyes teep shed and all that
stuff, you know, has no physical memory of any of this. They
take her to post ops, she regains consciousness, Her surgeon comes to check
on her well being and she says, I know I died during the surgery.
And he's like, what, and she says, yeah, I um.
I was up above the ceiling looking through the ceiling, and I could
see like, you did this, and then this person did this, and
then this guy came in with this machine and he dropped it off and then
he left. So that was the only time nette guy ever was and she
could describe him. And the physician's like. The surgeon is like, oh
my gosh, you know, and he said, you're right, you're right,
You're right, and he's amazed, which he shouldn't have been, because
if he knew anything, he would know that this is not uncommon. But
this isn't the really good part of this story, he says. She says,
like, I said, I was above the ceiling and I was looking
through and I could also see into the adjacent operating room, and there they
were amputating a man's leg and when they finished, they put the amputated leg
in a yellow plastic bag to dispose of it. So the surgeon says,
and I saw him interviewed online and the interview is unfortunately gone now, but
he said, I have no idea what's going on in the other operating rooms.
Of the hospital. I don't pay attention. But he said, now
we were, you know, a couple hours after the surgery, So he
said, I left her. I went to the hospital records and found that,
in fact, while I was operating on her, they were amputating a
man's leg in the next operating room. And he said, because that is
a specialized operating room for amputation. I don't do amputation. I've never been
in it. But at this time that I was looking up the records,
it happened to be empty. So I went and I poked my head inside,
and there I saw the yellow plastic bags that they used to dispose of
amputated body parts. Now, how would a patient who is temporarily dead know
something that even her own surgeon doesn't know? And so this is where it's
a case where she perceived things that were not in any way part of what
she expected, that were physically impossible for her to know sure, and then
were later verified by records and a surgeon's testimony. So so these cases indicate
that near death experiences are not just subjective experiences. And in the in the
chapter that I wrote for the handbook, I found that the vast majority of
these cases are completely accurate, and only in a minority of cases were there
either minor errors or there was one case that was completely erroneous and out of
something like one hundred and three cases or something like that. And now critics
might say, well, maybe when if somebody says, as you know,
I saw this blah blah blah, and then the surgeon goes and checks and
it's wrong, they're not going to publish that. But there's a statistician named
Jessica Utts who has done an analysis, and for that to be the case,
there would have to be a few hundred erroneous cases that had not been
reported. And in all the times that I've talked about this phenomenon and so
forth, and talked with even physicians and that sort of thing, you would
think if there had been cases of erroneous perception that they would pipe up then
and say, oh, yeah, well I did have such a case.
Never has that happened. So the evidence again strongly indicates that by and large,
much very much the majority, a huge majority of people's perceptions during NDEs
are accurate, and that of things that can be checked. And I should
probably say too that these perceptions occur both in the material domain and the transmaterial
domain. So the case that I told you about was perceiving the material domain.
But there are cases from the trans material domain where people have during their
NDE encountered deceased loved ones, but they didn't know in physical life that the
person had died. And another case from the self does not die of boy
is in the hospital and he is close to death and unconscious and all that
stuff. And I don't think in his case he flatlined. But you don't
have to it, doesn't you know. It's it's a little more evidential if
you were act if your brain was actually not functioning. But in this case,
he regained consciousness. His parents were there, you know, holding vigil
overnight. He regained consciousness, and he said, I, you know,
like went to heaven and I saw, you know, Grandma so and so
and Grandpa so and so, and I also saw my sister and um,
and you know, they welcomed me but told me that I had to go
back. And so the parents are like, oh, uh huh, you
know, that's a nice sweetheart. Um. They get home after spending the
whole night in the hospital of the boys now out of danger, so they
can go home and like take a shower and get some sleep. And there
This was back in the days of um answering machines, and their answering machine
is full of all these messages from their daughter's college where she's off studying,
trying to get a hold of them. They call back and find out that
that the previous night, um just a few hours prior to when the boy
regained consciousness, their daughter died in a car accident. Oh my, so
she was dead at the time that he had the experience. He was more
right than anything they knew in the physical world at the time. So that's
what I mean when I say the perceptions can be of the material world,
but they can also be in the transmaterial domain, you know, that's beyond
the material world. Yeah. So was that a case of after death communication?
Yes? And yes, uhuh, And some of these experiences overlap because
it was it was a near death experience. It had all the earmarks of
a near death experience. And as you know, in near death experiences,
people often do have after death communication with loved ones who have gone before them.
And so so yeah, it was an NDE that included an ADC,
a vertical ADC. Yeah, and I was going to change topics here sore
before I leave vertical experiences. Anything else you want to nail down for so
that we're we get where you're coming from. Well. Yeah. Another aspect
of this topic is that several, probably eight different studies have been done where
the researcher tried to capture vertical perception under controlled conditions in the hospital. I
did the first such study in one of my aborted dissertation attempts. By the
way back in the mid nineteen eighties, UM I was working with. I'm
part of that club, so we'd Yeah, I think anybody who's done it,
it's rare to for your first idea to go through. Let's say that
as encouragement to people who think, you know that if they're in this process,
that there's something wrong with them, because there isn't. There isn't.
I don't know. But I was working with a chaplain named Lee Joston at
UM a hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, and we um I had an
artist produce these agents squares that were actually U matting for M for pictures,
and there was a red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and
purple, and then randomly the artist would like on a red one, there
would be the number eight in each corner and then like a triangle in the
middle, and then another red one would have the numbers three with a circle
in the middle, and then a blue one would have the number A with
the infinity signed in the middle. So they were all mixed up in terms
of the color, the number, and the symbol. But there were We
used eight six colors, six numbers and six symbols. And I had janitors
installed, you know those things that go against the wall that you put a
bookshelf on that arm and that metal arm thing, and they installed them in
the corners of the rooms of the hospital where cardiac arrest was most likely to
occur. And when they were onstall day, after things were quiet, I
took my box of these squares which were loaded in the box face down,
and I would pick up a square and go up a step stool and put
the square up there so that I didn't know what was you know, on
which one. And the idea was that if somebody had a near death experience,
if they went into cardiac arrest, it had an NDE. They're up
at the ceiling, and most people report that their consciousness is at a ceiling
corner. So I had these, you know, in the corners, then
right under their nose so to speak. You know, they don't still have
a nose, but would be this thing that hopefully would be in their line
of sight. They would see it, and then when they're resuscitated, they
would tell us what they saw, and then we could go up and if
they said, you know, it was a red square with the numbers eight
and a triangle in the middle, we could go up there and verify that
that's what was at that location where they claimed their consciousness was. And then
you know, the chances would be one in six times six times six that
they could have just guessed that even if they knew that there was a colored
numbered, you know, which they wouldn't even have known. So so all
of the subsequent studies have been a variation on this. In one the researcher
used you know one of those electronic signs that has a running phrase yeah.
And in another special on Tuesday, yeah right, exactly exactly, and she
used nonsense phrases like the lollypops are in bloom and you know that would hopefully
stick with people. And then in another study that I did with Bruce Grayson
in the cardiac catheterization lab where they have to up the person's heart twice in
the process of putting in a pacemaker, And we had a computer literally duct
taped to the top of a monitor that was up above eye level, and
before a procedure, Bruce would go in and turn on the computer and it
would take about thirty seconds to boot up, by which time he would be
you know, back on the floor and out of the room, and it
would randomly select an animation and show it for twenty seconds and then say the
time is now blah blah blah. Because one another one of the questions is
do NDEs actually occur at the time that people perceive them to occur, you
know, like while they're in the middle of being brain dead and that sort
of thing. Yeah, So the bottom line for all these studies is that
none of them so far has succeeded in capturing a case they Many of them
have yielded more cases of vertical perception that appear in the self does not die,
but they just didn't occur under the circumstances controlled circumstances, and so we
you know, they're on the most skeptical way to interpret that is to say,
well, this is all just fiction and that's why you're not getting anything.
But the more informed viewpoint that comes from a lot of advice from near
death experiencers is that, well, first of all, we know that,
first of all, vertical perception itself is rare, and so the chance of
capturing this even doing a multihospital study, you know, like Pim Bevan Lammel
did and oh I'm blanking his name. No, he's from England and he's
done the studies most recently. I'll think of his name in a minute.
Anyway, for um, I lost the point that I was getting to.
Oh yeah, so yeah, in all these cases. Oh so the least
the more informed perception is that that vertical perception is rare to begin with,
and most of the time when people are out of their bodies, they're not
looking at things like, you know, a colored square with numbers and symbols
on it. They're focused on the physical body and stuff that's going on around
the physical body, and um, and so the circumstances are against us for
being able to capture this under controlled circumstances. So um, so we're still
you know, toying with ideas about how to do how to do this research
and be able to um continue to try to capture it under controlled circumstances,
which would be you know, even more evidential than all the cases that we've
collected. Yeah, Peter Fannik Fanny Chance. No, but you're getting closer.
He's worked with Peter um and I'm seeing his face. He's a actually
a lung specialist. Um Ah, this is just maddening when I can't think
of somebody's name. Um, I'm trying. I'm using the go through the
Samparnia. Oh yeah, yeah, Samparnia. Thank you, Okay, switching
subjects. Yeah, tell us about IONS and the work that IONS does and
who comes to IONS conferences and you know, feel us a down a little
bit because this is a really influential organization. Yeah, it is. It's
it's amazing because most of the people who work for IONS are volunteers, and
the fact that we do the stuff we do with this huge volunteer network is
just sort of awesome to me. But the mission of IONS is to enhance
global understanding of near deathics experiences and related experiences through research, education, and
support. So the research part I've talked a little bit about We published the
journal and which provides a venue for people to be able to publish work on
NDEs and related experiences that they might not be able to publish in other venues.
Though at the time that the journal was started, that was a much
bigger problem than it is now. Now you find articles on NDEs all you
know, everywhere, UM in in you know, academic journals, UM.
And then and we also UM support researchers who are doing research on NDEs by
giving them access to our Near Death Experienced Database. UM. So that's a
little bit about the research part. And we published the Self does Not Die,
and a new edition of that is coming out next early next year.
And so those are some of the research thing. Education. We do the
conference and we have information on our website and so forth. We do a
symposium and I'll explain a little bit about the conference and symposium. I'll come
back to that. And then for support, we have local groups. We
now have about fifty across the United States. We used to have like seventy
five or something, but the pandemic really you know, yeah, made a
mess of that. So we're getting back and people who've had near death experiences
or who have personal or professional interest in such experiences or related experiences, can
come to what usually our monthly meetings and where they're might be a featured speaker
or the people might circle up and talk about their own experiences and things like
that. And then IONS also has is go IONSUM support groups or sharing groups
online, Ions sharing groups online and UM and that is an online forum where
we have speakers, and we have support groups of virtual support groups for people,
especially people who don't have a local group near them, they can join
a virtual group and UM. And so that's that's like the support and we
have a lot of material on our website too to support people who are going
to you know, talk about this to their physician or mental health professional or
spiritual religious professional and like UM suggestions about how to be discerning and who you
just close to and how to just close in ways that are likely to engender
a more helpful rather than harmful response and things like that. So all of
that is the support part. So back to the education. UM are two
big UM efforts are our annual conference, which we tend to always hold on
Labor Day, so that's the very end of August, beginning of September and
there we have this this is a little bit more UM for the general public
muh. And we we do have researchers UM, but we also have like
healers and health professionals and just experiencers. We have usually one experiencers panel every
day of the conference, which is usually a four day conference. And so
up until up through twenty nineteen, we were meeting in person, of course,
and then the pandemic in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, our conference
was virtual. So like if your listeners wanted to go back and get the
presentations from those two virtual conferences, they could do that viagogo, dot IENs
dot org. And and this year we're again resuming in person. We're actually
doing hybrid. It'll be in person in Salt Lake City, and anybody has
invited anyone who has interest in these subjects. You can be an experiencer.
But most of the people are not near death experiencers. I would say that
a lot of the people who attend have had transpersonal experiences of some kind,
you know, after death communication, out of body experiences, past life memories,
precognition, things like that, but not even not everybody has had such
experiences, but anybody who's interested can come and people say, like I had
at my counseling program at the University of North Texas that I was in for
over thirty years, a big specialization of there's this play therapy, which is
working with children ages two to ten, eight to ten in a particular modality
of counseling where the child goes into the playroom a playroom and plays for forty
five minutes while the counselor just is present with them and learns things about the
child, reveals things about themselves. And so the year that I ENS had
our conference in Honolulu, a few of my students came over and were helping
with the conference, and they were all play therapists, and they commented something
that I've heard other people a lot of other people say, but they said
it specifically about this, which I thought was really telling. That they said,
you know, you would think that people who are play therapists, who
are dedicated to children's well being, their mental health and all that, that
the conferences would have this feeling of cohesion and inspiration and collegiality and things like
that, but they don't. They said, here, we have this feeling.
It's so unique. Everybody is like together and connected, and there's this
like spiritual vibe that kind of pervades the conference and it's like qualitatively unique and
so um so that's the advantage of coming in person. But that and I
will um second that because I've often thought that we all i mean, people
have expressed it to me at conferences that this is their home when they either
they've had an experience or they're curious about them, or a loved one had
an experience, this was home for them that they felt free to talk about
things, and and everybody is so willing to share that it does create that
sense of community that you beautifully mentioned. So yeah, double bumbs up on
going to conferences. Yeah, yeah, and especially you've done such a great
job of co hosting several of our in person conferences, so you've been great.
Where are your kilts? It's all about the guilty, Yeah, absolutely.
And you also run a symposium. What's that about? Right? So
the symposium happens in the spring, sometimes the very early spring, and and
it is a more focused it's a one day, usually one day. The
last one we did actually was two days or three days, but usually it's
a one day, focused online event focused on a particular topic. So our
first one was about disclosing near death experiences in healthcare environments, and it was
for healthcare professionals to help them not harm but actually help people who they you
know, their clients and patients who've had NDEs and related experiences. The second
one last year twenty one was or I'm Sorry. Twenty twenty two was on
this the question of the relationship between mind and brain, this question of materialism
versus idealism that we touched on earlier, and the one coming up for twenty
twenty three is going to be on the role of near death experiences and related
experiences in grief and grief counseling. So it will be for people who are
grieving, who are counselors, who work with clients who are grieving, which
is like who who doesn't, and and actually any healthcare professional whether mental health,
physical health like doctors and nurses, or spiritual religious health healthcare professionals like
chaplains and clergy, and the role that these experiences play in in helping people
with grief. So we'll be talking about end ease and grief after death communication,
grief and out of body experiences and grief and maybe maybe some other things
like past life memories and that sort of thing. Um, hearing from people
who have actually experienced the role that the experience played in their grief process,
but then also looking at research, you know, kind of the bigger picture
of what we know about the effect and grief. So um, yeah,
so that's going to be the twenty twenty three Boy, that sounds like fun.
Oh can't wait. This is great And people can get information about the
conference and the symposiums at the website yep i ens dot org i a n
DS dot org. And it's a great website. It's huge. I mean,
there's all kinds of things in there. So yeah, once you start
poking around, it's like a rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, for sure
it is. And we're wrapping this up, jan So any last little commercial
that you want to give about something anything. I can't think of anything I've
mentioned. We've talked about the conference, the symposium, the upcoming revised issue
of the Self does Not Die the Journal of Near Death Studies. Maybe I
will say that anybody who's interested the Journal of Near Death Studies, all of
our articles from the past thirty plus years are available. The full article is
available online for free. So if you go to the IONS website, go
to the research tab, go down to Journal of Near Death Studies, and
then to past issues. When you click on that, you'll see the issues
by volume number, and you just click on a volume, it opens up
all of the articles that were published in that volume. And at the end
of each citation is a DOI, a digital object identifier which is like an
ID for an article, and you click on it and it brings up the
article in full. So thirty plus years of research available for free online.
And yeah, and IONS has a newsletter, Yes, that's right. It's
actually evolved into a magazine called Vital Signs. It's published quarterly so and it
includes like there will usually be an NDE and just all kinds of information about
things that are happening in Ions. And we also another that's a perk.
You get it for free if you're an Ion's member. And another perk,
which is one of my favorites, is the monthly NDE. And that's where
you know that you're just tooling through your email and suddenly appears the monthly NDE.
And I don't know about you, but after all these years of all
the research, I've done all the nd ears, I've heard and talked to
and studied and everything. When I see that, I almost always drop everything
and read it because it's another It's an account that one of our volunteers and
takes from our archives. It has some particular interest, and it's the it's
the actual account right there. And so I read another account of an Ndean
and I'm inspired all over again. Every month. Well, Jan you have
inspired us. So thank you for taking the time to be with us today
here at the Afterlife Files. And gosh, best wishes as you lead the
organization I ends into its future. And personally, of course, yes,
I have a wonderful semi retirement, well said. Thank you so much Scott
for having me. It's just been, like you said, a ton of
fun. Wasn't that wonderful. There's a couple of concepts that could be experienced.
It upon just be clear these are my viewpoints, but that's why you
watch the Afterlife Files to gain perspective by using more than one lens with which
to view this rich information. First, it feels like we should take a
stand on materialism versus idealism. All the research I've done, the interviews,
I've conducted, the research I've read all point to the model of consciousness best
explained by idealism. It's my vote for it being our current best answer.
Thank you Jan Holden for giving us an introduction to reflective judgment theory. I
appreciate that you can check out this model for yourself by reading the many research
oriented books on NDEs and by searching the database of stories at ians dot org.
That's i a NDS or enderf dot org NDE RF. Second, I
found her discussion of ridical experiences. Remember, those are the things that can
be observed during an INDE or an SDE to be really helpful. I appreciate
why research would be frustrated with their controlled experiments failing, and I can think
of a lot better things to do to her during my INDE rather than recognize
and remember some colored cards in the upper corner of the hospital room that just
wouldn't rank as important considering what else is going on. Third, Jan opened
this interview with an amazing story about Pam Reynolds. I did a quick search
of YouTube and there are plenty of good videos describing her amazing experience. Check
them out. Fourth, I did my doctoral research on how people change their
leadership style based on what inde ears found out when they left the world of
duality and entered into the universe of unity. I thought you did a nice
job explaining how people make decisions moment to moment all the way to global decisions.
It requires that experiencers check in with the truth of their perceptions and how
that squares with the purpose of the universe. The jan reports to love and
to advance our capacity to love. I do hope that videos such as this
can give you some insight on what near death and shared death experiencers discover about
the afterlife, the nature of consciousness, and how to live your life more
fully. I have six albums that you can use to start your exploration of
the trans material universe on your own, and if you're ready to jump all
in. The best way to experience the other side is to participate in our
five and a half day retreat. There are links below that will take you
to the information on the different elements of our inde courses and the skill set
that you'll learn. Our courses used by Neurobeat and Gamma Synchrony technology so that
you can attain and sustain expanded states of consciousness easily and safely. That means
our courses are perfect for both the depth meditators and newbies. Everyone will benefit.
Okay, so how will you make decisions based on what you've heard today?
I trust you will make an effort to run down the three steps of
reflective judgment theory process to get to the current best answer. If you're watching
on YouTube, like, subscribe and comment. You can find The Afterlife Files
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Buy now, see you next time, and thank you for joining us here
at the Afterlife Files.