- [Narrator] Imagine you're on the operating table,
you've been put into a state of deep sleep,
and you're having some kind of surgery.
All of a sudden, there's some strange,
singing bowl-like sounds.
You become aware of vibrations,
and suddenly you're up and about standing in the room,
looking around.
Everything seems brighter,
more vibrant and full of life.
You turn around to get a better look
and the next thing you know,
you see yourself right in front of you,
lying on the table.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world
of near-death experiences.
NDEs are one of the more curious phenomenon
of our life experiences here on Earth.
Much like psychedelics,
they take us out of the mundane world
and into something mystical.
People who have survived encounters nearing death
or even those who have technically died
and being revived,
seem to share similar lucid experiences
that seem to relate
with going beyond their physical body into another world,
a world of light.
The whole light at the end of the tunnel
and life flashing before your eyes,
actually originated from psychiatric research
on the subject,
way back in the 1970s.
But the truth is there's a tremendous mystery here,
one that today still hasn't been solved.
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Stories of strange and mystical experiences surrounding NDEs
are not anything new.
As far back as the sixth century A.D.,
people were fascinated
by similar stories in Pope Gregory's dialogues
of jesters and businessmen visiting the Christian hell
after having accidents.
Why hell and not heaven?
Hmm, maybe the jesters told bad jokes
or the businessmen made shady deals.
Now, I don't know.
Either way, individuals who come back from these early NDEs
report similar experiences
to what is being currently studied today,
such as meeting other dimensional beings
or lost loved ones,
along with a feeling of permanent transformation.
If people were writing about this kind of stuff,
even in the sixth century,
it seems that our interest in NDEs
has stayed pretty constant.
However, as usual,
the scientific community had largely written off the events
as hallucinations.
Until late last century,
one of the huge icebreakers for this shift in mindset
were the experiences of a woman named Barbara Harris
in 1975.
Nowadays, Barbara is a therapist,
specializing in the study of NDEs,
a successful author,
and was on the faculty of Rutgers University Institute
on alcohol and drug studies
for 12 years.
Now, Barbara certainly had more than her fair share
in terms of an experience;
having not one,
but two deep NDEs in a single week.
In a nutshell, she was born
with a bad case of scoliosis;
a crooked spine,
which she struggled with, throughout her life.
But in 1975, it became too much for her,
and she was admitted for surgery
to help correct it.
After a five hour operation,
she was left in a full body cast,
unable to move on her own.
Then two days after surgery,
her life support systems began to fail
as she found it difficult to breathe.
She lost consciousness as the support staff ran in
to help her.
I imagine this probably happened in slow-mo as well.
So that night, Barbara woke in the middle of the night,
standing in the hallway.
After worrying that nurses would be mad at her
for standing up,
yeah, standing,
she made her way back to her room
and noticed that she was actually floating level
with the speaker that she remembered
to be mounted on the ceiling.
She looked down
and saw herself lying on the circle bed.
And as she looked at the woman in the bed,
she was overcome with a profound knowing
that the person there wasn't the real her,
as if her soul was identifying her ego.
And in understanding this,
she was overcome with a deep sense of peace.
Then Barbara felt this connection
with her deceased grandmother,
and began to be transported away.
She became overwhelmed with a feeling
that what was happening to her was more real
than anything she had experienced in her life,
up until that point.
She actually said that she gave in to this belief.
And as she did,
she felt a great toxic energy released from her,
and simultaneously was beginning to relive every moment
that she had ever had with her grandmother
in the 19 years they shared on Earth.
Barbara emphasizes that she wasn't just remembering stuff,
she was reliving every moment of her life she spent
with her grandmother.
At a talk she gave in 2015,
she recalled spending dinner with her grandmother
when she was only three years old,
with stunning detail.
It's like they were sharing memories.
After this journey through her past,
she witnessed what she could only describe as a tunnel
and saw a light growing at the end.
She felt herself expanding
and moving towards a droning noise,
sounding kinda like a singing bowl.
Until suddenly, she was back in her physical body again.
Now, we won't go into all the details here,
but about a week later,
it happened again;
a complication with her bed left her unable to breathe
and she entered into another NDE.
Ironically, despite being an atheist her whole life,
Barbara's complete inability
to describe this energy she felt,
led her to later refer it
to simply as God.
She often still says that it wasn't an old man
with a long, white beard,
and it took me a long time
to use the word, God.
She describes that she experienced her past
at breakneck speed.
And with all of this information coming to her
about her life,
it allowed her to transform her experiences of herself
and her life from self-judgment into love.
As she understood more and more of her life
through the lens of love,
a mantra appeared in her head.
No wonder she was the way that she was.
She understood completely now the impact,
her mother's drug addiction
and her father's absence had on her childhood,
and how it had shaped her into
who she was today, so strongly.
She understood deeply how her own mother's pain
and neglect from her childhood shaped her into someone
who didn't know how to love.
The full story is moving and profound,
and we'll link her writings in the description below.
Now, there is one more interesting thing here.
Before she returned to her body,
she found herself behind the nurse's station
where they were talking about her.
She overheard them talk about the nurse on duty
who had to be sent home after feeling responsible
for Barbara's incident.
She also caught that they were planning on lying to her
about how long she would have to spend in a body cast
so that she would be even more stressed out.
So naturally, when she returned to her body,
she explained that she was in the halls
during the conversation.
And they of course, didn't believe her.
Amused and slightly irritated,
she told them to call the nurse
and let her know that she was okay,
and not to lie to her about
how long she would be in the body cast.
The nurses were, "Well..."
How would you react to something like that?
Now, you might be wondering why we spent so long,
going on about just one woman's case,
especially since NDEs are surprisingly common.
But the truth is Barbara Harris' experiences invigorated
public interest in the subject of NDEs.
All of a sudden, people started becoming more interested
in the stories of others
who underwent these experiences too.
What really intrigued people,
aside from the prospect of a life after death,
was the similar themes present in all of the accounts.
Leaving one's unconscious body,
entering a beautiful, eternal, glowing light,
or a relaxed darkness,
seemed to be common aspects of the experiences.
People commonly described the presence
of an all-loving being or consciousness,
giving them insights into their own lives.
Now, of course, this is humanity we're talking about,
and scientists are often rigidly skeptical.
So formal research,
still continually denying the entire idea,
finally got the funding required nearly 20 years
after Barbara's experiences,
to produce collaborative research on the phenomenon
and make scientific insights.
They couldn't ignore the sheer number of claims,
without at least looking into it a little bit.
So they hired this guy named Hap
who kidnapped some people and killed them,
and then revived them over and over in a secret basement
and recorded their experiences.
Wait, hold on.
Our hidden spirituality of the OA episode script
must have gotten mixed in here.
Whoopsie!
Rather, this initial wave of research
that wasn't illegal,
was shared in a "Psychology Today" article entitled,
"Bright Lights, Big Mystery."
And as always, you can find links to this in the sources
of this video.
From this wave of research,
it was discovered that 95% of the world's cultures
have made mention of an NDE in some form.
A crazy number to think about.
Further, nearly 17% of critically ill patients
across nine countries
are reported to have undergone an NDE.
So, NDEs aren't extremely rare.
In fact, they're quite common.
I suppose, however,
that it's also quite paradigm shattering,
for if we globally took this seriously,
atheism might disappear entirely
and the fields of science would never be the same.
One contributor to that research, Dr. Melvin Morse,
examined thousands of reports of NDEs
to try and learn more about them.
What's curious about Dr. Morse's research is that,
despite having no way
of proving anything happened from people's reports,
the reports he studied were so similar
that he was able to paint a picture
of what a typical NDE might look like.
From independent reports,
Morse found that full-blown NDEs share
the nine following features.
One, a sense of being dead;
the sudden awareness that one has had a fatal accident
or not survived an operation.
Two, peace and painlessness;
a feeling that the ties
that bind one to the world have been cut.
Three, an out of body experience;
the sensation of peering down upon one's own body,
and perhaps seeing the doctors and nurses trying
to resuscitate them.
Four, tunnel experience;
the sense of moving up
or through a narrow passageway.
Five, encountering beings of light
or glowing ones at the end of the tunnel.
Six, the presence of a godlike or omnipotent figure,
or force of some kind.
Seven, life review;
being shown one's life
by the being of light.
Eight, reluctance to return.
The feeling of being so comfortable and surrounded
by the light,
often described as pure love.
And nine, personality transformation;
a psychological change involving the loss
of the fear of death,
greater sense of spirituality,
and a sense of connectedness with the earth,
and a greater zest for life.
This was painting an interesting picture for scientists.
But there was still some skepticism
and some questions.
Was the cultural significance of an NDE shaping
what experiences people were having?
How do we know that people are actually having NDE,
and not just exaggerating a dream
or other disassociate of experience?
Is being near death actually necessary
to undergo what is being reported as an NDE?
If being near death wasn't necessary
to undergo the phenomenon,
then patients should report them,
even when they were never in mortal danger.
So a researcher named Dr. Stevenson located
the medical records of 40 patients
who reported an NDE,
and found that more than half of them were never actually
close to dying.
This was starting to support the idea
that the fear of death was sparking
a purely psychological response.
But Stevenson wasn't satisfied.
And so, we found a group of 58 people
who reported NDEs.
And like last time,
30 of whom would not actually be near death.
He interviewed them and discovered something
that they couldn't ignore.
A significantly greater number of patients
who were actually near death,
reported elements of the core experience,
including the bright light,
than those who are not.
It seems that truly being near death is necessary
to encounter the established phenomenon.
Ironically, the scientists attempts
to show the experience purely as an experience of the mind,
they ended up showing the opposite.
At this point, someone probably got a raise
or was fired.
By this point, science had failed to do
what it's so often excels at;
simplifying the world
and squashing questions.
And in that failure,
lies so much wonder and curiosity
that has paradigm, shattering consequences
for us all.
Think about it.
If this experience is universal across almost all
of the cultures of the world,
it breaks down religious ideas like,
"My heaven or God is the only one,"
revealing a more unified understanding
of what is quite possibly the afterlife,
shared by all.
But it's more than just the culture shock.
Recall Barbara Harris' story from earlier.
At one point, she was transported to the physical world,
but outside of her body,
and heard information that was otherwise secret to her,
bewildering the nurses with her knowledge when she awoke.
This is so far out there,
and Barbara's story is not an isolated event.
Back in 2008,
something known as the awareness
during resuscitation program, Aware for Short,
followed 2000 heart attack patients across the globe
and studied the amount of NDEs
that occurred among survivors.
Some of these survivors reported the out of body awareness.
And for one of them,
the awareness was confirmed to be accurate
by hospital staff.
A similar study in 2001 looked at
similar patients' experiences,
with the researcher stating that it didn't appear consistent
with hallucinatory or illusory experiences,
as the recollections were compatible
with real and verifiable,
rather than imagined events.
In a nutshell,
somehow these people are aware of the world around them,
even sometimes past the range of their physical body,
despite showing all of the signs
of being clinically dead.
Now, we're way past our time limit here.
But this stuff is just so interesting
that before we wrap things up,
there's one more important thing I have
to share with you.
Despite the recent studies seemingly acknowledging
these kinds of experiences,
helping to affirm their existence,
ancient Buddhist texts refer to the ability
to enter a near death experience without physical threat
to the body.
And the method for this ability is,
as you might have guessed, meditation.
Of course, in learning of this,
people at the journal of "Mindfulness" went
on a three year study
with monks from different Buddhist schools
and monitored them during meditations.
Amazingly, the monks were seemingly able
to plan ahead of time when,
and even how the NDE would manifest.
Along with this,
researchers confirmed that meditation-induced NDEs produce
the same long term mystical enhancements in a person's life.
As always, if you wanna read these studies,
you'll find links to them in our sources below.
So, what do you think is really going on?
Even today, mainstream science tends to believe
that an NDE is simply a psychological phenomenon,
one where the brain is reliving its memories.
It's a convenient explanation,
but one that does not explain the commonness
of descriptive experiences
or the knowledge of events
that are so far removed from someone going
through the experience.
It also conveniently ignores the verifiable experiences
by the monks.
Truly, I feel the day that we as a society accept NDEs
is the day that we make leaps forward in our understanding
of life, death,
and the nature of consciousness.
But in the meantime,
if you are someone who wants
to make leaps forward in your own journey,
consider checking out the seven day transformation,
nearly guaranteed to help you radically transform your life
in only one week.
You'll find links below,
and I hope to see you there.
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