Surviving Death

At the moment of death.

are we actually just dead or is something else going on?

There's no one on the planet who doesn't have a vested interest

in the question, does life go on after death?

Whatever this consciousness is that we have in this life...

it was also there in another life before.

He said, "Mom, I think I need to tell you somethin'.

I think I used to be somebody else."

How many people here have had a near-death experience?

Lotta dead people here today. Welcome.

We had to rethink everything that we believed about death and dying.

There have always been ghosts in history.

We continue to report them and see them.

To the spirits of the mansion, help us connect more deeply to your world.

Is there a child on the other side connected to you?

Yes.

There are things that science can't test.

It doesn't mean they don't happen.

Literally, I can feel him and I know that he is there with me right now.

I could feel my spirit sort of peeling away from my body.

How good would it be to know there is life after death?

["Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum playing]

As a physician, I know that most people don't think about death really

until they're forced to.

But 20 years ago, I was not only physically dead,

I had been dead for a while.

And that experience radically changed

everything about what I am and who I am.

In 1999, I arranged to go to Chile and kayak.

And I was looking forward

to this section of river that's well known for its waterfalls.

We put on the river and we went over the first couple of drops.

This river has a very high flow.

So we decided to run this smaller part of the first major waterfall.

And so I pulled out in the current.

There was another kayaker who had sort of bobbled her way past.

And her boat was lodged sideways at the entrance.

So I was forced over to the main part of the waterfall.

I mean, I-- I knew it was not gonna be good!

My boat became pinned and I was completely submerged under ten feet of water.

I was not breathing.

My torso was absolutely plastered to the front deck of the boat.

I could feel my bones breaking.

I thought I should be screaming,

but I wasn't.

I felt... uh, no pain, no fear, no panic.

I felt more alive than I've ever felt.

I could feel my spirit sort of peeling away from my body,

and my spirit was then released up to the heavens.

I was immediately greeted by a group of somethings.

I don't know what to call them. People, spirits, beings.

I didn't recognize any of them.

But they had been important in my life story somehow.

Like a grandparent who died before I was born.

They were so overjoyed to welcome me and greet me and love me.

These beings started taking me down this pathway.

The pathway was very thickly covered with hundreds of thousands of flowers,

and the aromas of flowers.

It was exploding with every color of the universe.

There was an absolute shift of time and dimension.

I experienced all of eternity in every second,

and every second expanded into all of eternity.

The pathway went to this great domed structure.

I believe I was in heaven.

God's world, whatever you wanna call it.

I had an overwhelming sense of being home.

At the same time, I could look back at the river,

where my body was still submerged under water.

You okay?

The group of kayakers kept trying to get to me,

but they were never able to do it.

And after maybe 15 minutes, they had given up rescue.

They had really shifted over into a body recovery mode.

One of the guys saw my life jacket pop up downstream

and thought that maybe my husband would want it.

As he got that, he felt my body hit his leg.

So he reached underwater and was able to grab my wrist.

My body was bloated and purple and I had fixed eyes.

There's absolutely no doubt...

in my own mind that I was physically dead.

But I watched from the entrance to the domed structure

as they started CPR, and I could still hear them.

One of the guys kept calling to me to come back and take a breath.

You know, "Please come back. I know you're still here."

I had been without oxygen for 30 minutes,

and the statistical likelihood of my survival should have been zero.

I did not want to go back down to my body.

I had a very, very physical sensation of being held and comforted

and reassured that everything was fine.

But the beings told me that it wasn't my time,

that I had more work to do on Earth,

and that I had to go back to my body.

When I opened my eyes, the guys that resuscitated me

were stunned.

I was in terrible shape.

I mean, I had just drowned.

But I also had, uh...

multiple broken bones and torn ligaments in my legs.

And I was...

on the side of a river in the middle of nowhere.

The guys who resuscitated me put my body on top of a boat

and then began to try to get me up the hillside.

We emerged onto a dirt road.

They thought maybe someone would run and get a tractor, a horse or something.

But when we emerged onto the dirt road,

exactly there was an ambulance, which

in 1999, in southern Chile, didn't exist.

It was inexplicable.

It took a number of hours, but my friends got me to the hospital.

My husband was actually told that...

I probably would not survive the night.

But I did.

I was in the hospital for more than a month.

I had... several operations.

Then many, many months of rehab before I could walk again.

And statistically, I had zero likelihood

of surviving without significant brain damage.

But I never actually had any brain damage.

My kids might say something differently, but...

I...

made a complete recovery.

As a physician, I'm not really in a crowd of people

who want to talk about things like near death experiences.

People in science often think you can't possibly believe in anything supernatural.

When I went off to medical school,

I would have defined death as...

death, meaning physical death.

But my near-death experience,

and then what happened to my son ten years later,

changed my definition of death significantly.

I don't believe that...

we... know everything.

A near death experience, sometimes called an NDE,

is a profound experience that many people have

when they come close to death.

Probably between ten and 20% of people whose hearts actually stop

will report these dramatic near-death experiences.

Here at the Division of Perceptual Studies,

we study the possibility that something about humans

may survive bodily death.

The general mainstream, materialist view of reality

is that physical matter is all there is.

So when the physical brain stops working, then the consciousness ends.

So the idea that there might be

this consciousness piece that could continue on

conflicts with a pretty basic principle.

But the question of what happens after we die

is something that has intrigued humans for as long as we've been around.

We've been doing this research for almost 50 years now.

We study mediums,

people who think they can communicate with the deceased.

We've studied deathbed visions that happen to people as they die.

We've studied reincarnation

and a variety of other spontaneously occurring experiences

on the border between life and death,

such as near-death experiences.

- -

If you look back in history,

there have been what we now call near death experiences

since prehistoric times.

But the first collection of near-death experiences

was put together in 1892 by Albert Heim,

a geologist in Switzerland.

While climbing in the Alps, he had fallen...

and had a beautiful experience as he was falling down the mountain.

He described time expanding as he went faster and faster.

And he was so struck by this experience

that he started asking other mountain climbers,

and quickly collected 30 other cases like his

of people who had falls from great heights who had blissful experiences.

And then in the 1960s and '70s,

resuscitation medicine really got started.

External chest compression is the best rescue technique

for artificial circulation.

Which means we were bringing people back

from the brink of death in larger and larger numbers.

Many people came back and reported these blissful experiences

in which they left their bodies and traveled to some other realm.

Patients say they become aware of what's described as a tunnel...

a passageway, a portal.

And they go into this tunnel...

and when they come out,

they come out into a very brilliant, warm, loving and accepting light.

In 1975, Raymond Moody wrote his book Life After Life,

which caused many people, myself included,

to take near death experiences more seriously.

When Raymond Moody's book came out,

I thought that near death experiences were rubbish.

Had to be.

And they occurred in the United States, in California and that's the end of it.

Would it ever cross to England?

No. We're far too sensible to have experiences like this.

But I'm a neuropsychiatrist,

and, one day, this guy walked into my consulting room.

He'd just had a cardiac catheter go wrong,

left his body, watched the resuscitation process,

and had a full near-death experience.

And so there I was, confronted. Did I believe or did I not?

Well, I thought that before I could draw any conclusions,

that I ought to study them.