Speaker 1: Tell me what you loved was like before you died.
Growing up, I was always interested in phenomena that were
difficult to explain, and I grew up in the more
liberal branch of the Lutheran Church, so I was raised
in religion. And then in nineteen seventy eight I read
Moody's book and it really captured my imagination, especially the
phenomenon of verritical perception, where when people are in this
near death experience and they experienced their consciousness functioning apart
from their body, and they perceive things in the material
world or the trans material world that involve information that
they couldn't have known from any normal means, but then
as confirmed as accurate. And then in the mid nineteen eighties,
I was finishing my doctoral degree in counselor education and
had to do a dissertation. I ended up doing it
on something related to near death experiences. Doctor Mary Neil.
I love when she says, you know, I'm not an
imaginative person, so I could not have made this up.
Because she's a physician. You know, physicians are among the
most trusted profession and so to hear a physician talk
about the kinds of things she experienced and learning that
her son Willie was going to die before his eighteenth
birthday and when he was only I think five at
the time of her nd A lot of aspects that
she experienced just very convincing. And also that her NDE
occurred when her body was underwater, and they now have
figured out that she was underwater for just a little
over thirty minutes, so she was dead dead. And then
to have this vivid experience that had these vertical components
like Willy's passing and so forth. What I found is
the same as true of near death experiences. There are
certain features that are odd general features that you find
across cultures and throughout history, but they manifest in a
way that is reflective of the culture of the experiencer.
And then beyond the cultural level, there's another one, more
surface structure level, which is personal and so even within
the same culture. So the example I use is one
of these universal features is there's movement through space, and
in the West, it's very common for people at some
point in their NDE to talk about moving rapidly through
a tunnel or some kind of enclosure something like that,
and that tends to be it's not only in the West,
but it's much more commonly reported in Western NDEs. So
that's a cultural manifestation of movement. Now, just to take
a minute to there's an example from a Maori woman
Indigenous New Zealander, and in her end, she flew rapidly
over au Taioa, which is the name of the indigenous
name for New Zealand, to the leaping off place of souls.
So she flew over and she talks about seeing all
the rivers and things that she saw. So she didn't
go through a tunnel, but she moved rapidly through space.
So back to the Western NDEs. Moving through a tunnel
seems to be a predominantly Western cultural expression of that
universal theme of rapid movement through space. But if you
hear three different people talk about the tunnel, you will
not hear the same thing. And so there's a little
boy who was five years old and he said, then
I went really fast through a big noodle that was
his reference point. A trucker said, then I went then
I zoomed through a giant tailpipe. And then another person
who said, you know, I went through this thing that
had light and or it was dark and there was
light at the end, and everybody just describes the tunnel differently.
About half of people are given a choice to come back,
and when they decide to come back, it's virtually always
because of a love connection on earth that they still
need to do something for that person or fulfill something.
And then the other half of people either are forced
to come back against their will. People become less materialistic,
more concerned about others, and lose their fear of death
because they now know that their consciousness is going to
continue after their bodies demise and other kind of psychological changes.
And then the first s stands for spiritual. People become
more spiritual, usually less religious, but as we just said,
not always, and become often like people will say, I
just read one and one thing after another. I just
you know, had this hunger to immerse myself in spiritual
books and movies and things like that. And also people
develop what in some religious contexts are called spiritual gifts,
so they developed the ability to see the future, and
also things that are questionable in some in some religions,
like the ability to communicate with deceased entities, you know,
people like a medium or or after death communication, which
is after death is the direct communication with the person
who for personal reasons. So that's back at the spiritual
where people develop like precognition, telepathy. A lot of nd
ears after I don't know if I should say a lot,
but certainly a good number after their NDE there, it's
like their boundaries between themselves and others and the world
have kind of weakened and withinny of the veil, and
a lot of endears can't go to parties because just
being in a room with everybody with all their stuff
that they get affected by and sometimes have to spend
some time withdrawing socially in order to build up their boundaries,
their psychic boundaries again and be able to manage social interaction.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show. So it can be
you know, a lot of us think, oh, wouldn't it
be wonderful to see the future or know what people
are thinking. Oh, it's you know, we're given these boundaries,
I think for reasons that enable us to function in
this world. One of the things I like to clarify
about vertical perception is that it can be perception of
the material world like the you know, the surgeon, or
it can be perception of the trans material world. People
have met deceased loved ones who were not yet known
in the physical world to have died. I'm going to
be using the words pleasurable and distressing, because even distressing
experiences usually eventually bring about positive after effects, and conversely,
pleasurable experiences can be very disruptive to people's lives and
be quote unquote negative at least in the short term.
So pleasurable experiences, as you said, dominated by feelings of peace, joy, love,
and those sorts of things. Distressing experiences dominated by feelings
such as terror, horror, isolation, that sort of thing. And
there's been research about distressing NDEs, so I can speak
to the results of the research, and we know that
there are at least three types of distressing NDEs. The
most common, most commonly reported. Isn't that bad in the
sense that it has the same features as a pleasurable NDE,
But for some reason the person is seems to be
resisting and that's creating negativity. Like they're moving rapidly through
a tunnel, but they don't want to be moving rapidly
through a tunnel. They're like digging in their heels and
it's making the experience unpleasant. Distance seems to be a
factor in many many of those cases, and we also
know that in some cases the person decides to just
like relax and let it happen, and when it does,
then it turns completely pleasurable. So when they let go
of the resistance, it's good. So that's what's most commonly reported.
Next most common are experiences of being absolutely alone forever.
So it's an experience of absolute eternal isolation where there
is complete clarity and consciousness of being absolutely alone forever,
and it is a particular kind of hell because there's
you know, there is nothing and no hope of anything.
The first distressing and dee I ever heard from directly
from a person was of this type, and it was
in a support an I in support group and in
one of them, I'm out in space. You know, I'm
not connected to my body anymore. I'm out in space
and there's a darkness over here. And I said to
my therapist Julie, I'm suspended outside of darkness. So I
was just hanging there and that was fine, But at
some point I moved into the darkness. As I moved
deeper and deeper. I said to Julie repeatedly, I'm losing
my sense of myself. I'm losing And then at one
point I said, I'm not me anymore. Now that it
doesn't really make sense, except experientially it made perfect sense.
I was not me anymore. I actually tried to remember
how I got here, and I could not remember who
I was, and I had no concept of jan or
that identity at all. And I said to Julie, I'm
one with the darkness. That is nothing, slash everything. I
was in this darkness that was the pregnant void, the
source of everything before it manifests into phenomena. And it
was an experience of absolute peace, a very crystal clear awareness.
There was nobody, nobody because nothing had manifested yet, so
and I was still a center of consciousness. And also
I have to say and also immediately I have to say,
and part of everything. So it's not like I was
just this just me an it was I wasn't me.
I wasn't me anymore. So that for me was God.
That's all that is. It's the everything before it manifests
into anything. Having a sense of what my purpose is
here and fulfilling it so you know, feeling a combination
of being guided and making choices that seemed to fulfill
a higher purpose.