#236 - Dr. Melvin Morse Part 2, Science of Near Death Experiences

0:00 Welcome once again to Round Trip Death, the podcast where we have discussions with people who have experienced death, seen the other side, and returned to talk about it. Today we're finishing up our discussion with Dr. Melvin Morse. If you haven't heard part one, it's episode number 235. If you're not familiar with Dr. Morse, let's just say that most people consider him the world's leading scientific authority on near-death experiences. In today's show, Dr. Morse really opens up about how he has been personally affected by the things he learned from his research.

0:43 Let's pick up right where we left off. Here's Dr. Morse. I know people on your show are having, many of them, wonder, was that experience that I have real? And it's further complicated, particularly as you mentioned in adults, because many of the aspects of them are parts of their own personal lives that are woven into the experience. And so it's hard to sort out what is sort of an invention of their mind, but not an invention of their mind, just making something up, an invention of their mind, struggling to understand the incomprehensible.

1:29 And it is hard for adults to sort all that out, but they have to start with the knowledge that what happened to them was real. And once they start with that bedrock certainty, then they can tease out the rest and go, oh yeah, you know, that part of it, that's from my own religious upbringing, and that part of it was my own preconception and what I expected the heaven to be like. Oh yes, and look, that part there, that was the real deal that came from heaven to me. But they're not going to be able to sort that out if they're constantly second guessing themselves.

2:14 And that's a normal thing as adults, because especially if somebody tells you you're crazy for trying to explain it and we may believe them. And so then we have to say, OK, what really happened? Was I dreaming? Was it the pain meds? What was it? Right? Right. So let's. Yeah, let's validate what people really experienced. Yeah. What does it mean to be crazy? Crazy is simply the dysfunction of your brain. It's you know, it's when you're not oriented to person place, you're you're misperceiving things here, taking ordinary experiences and twisting them in some way because of your own personal fears or your own psychology or your own biochemistry.

3:12 You know, I mean, psychiatric and mental health disorders are very complex, but they all involve dysfunction. The near death experience and spiritual experiences in general involve the proper function of easily a third of your brain. So by definition, you're not crazy for having them because at least a third of our brain is dedicated to having spiritual experiences. Now, I'm going to just brag about all the books I read, I guess. I wrote a book called Where God Lives.

3:53 I wrote that in 2004 in which we said that we have an area in our brain in the right temporal lobe, which is right above your ear. We call it the God's spot. And that connects your brain to the universe. You know, we're talking earlier about the informational universe. All right. Since that time, no neuroscientist has challenged what we wrote. And I published it in the medical literature as well. The only scientists that have challenged it have said, wait a minute, Morris was all wrong. It's not a God's spot.

4:34 It's a God brain. Mario Beauregard wrote a book called The Spiritual Brain in which he showed a third of the brain is dedicated to having spiritual experiences. And a guy named Nelson wrote an excellent book called The Spiritual Doorway to the Brain. Now, Nelson doesn't happen to believe in God. Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's an issue of faith. But his book clearly documents that we are hardwired to have spiritual experiences. So for some reason, some people say, oh, well, you're saying this is just in our brain as if that somehow discounts the experience.

5:22 This experience you and I are having right now, Eric, it's just in our brain. I can even tell you the areas of your brain, which are dedicated to having this experience. It feels awfully real to me. Yeah, we have a huge visual cortex that allows us to see things. Nobody doubts those are real. We've got a big auditory cortex that allows us to hear things. We have a frontal lobe that allows us to process all sorts of higher mental processing. Nobody doubts that's real. And we've got a big area of our brain which allows us to communicate with God.

6:04 Who's ever listening to this? Please just accept the word God the way kids use it. You know, when I understand that, unfortunately, God for many people has now gotten all twisted up with the dogma of various religions, etc. That's unfortunate. I'm not using that God in that sense. I'm not saying one person's God is the right God, another one's the wrong God. I'm just saying that just the way kids tell me that they saw God when they died, we have an area of our brain which allows us to perceive whatever this God is. And it is unfortunate that a lot of people seem to twist up something as simple and beautiful as God with a lot of their own preconceptions and dogmas.

6:55 Okay. I did ask a question a while ago and that's okay. Before we get to that. I mean, when you ask me, is there a God? I'm not even a religious person. I was raised in an agnostic Jewish household. But when we die, we see God. So and that's a scientific fact. Okay. No, I don't know. I mean, but I understand that unfortunately, because I've had enough discussions with adults to know that once you start talking about God, they're all rolling around the floor, gouging each other's eyes out. And well, then my God says, isn't my God's that?

7:38 And this, that and the other. Well, that doesn't seem to be the God we see when we die. The God we see when we die is a light that has a lot of love in it. It has a lot of good things in it. And it teaches us something. It's teaching us that we're here to learn lessons of love. And that's it in a nutshell. And that's the word I hear the most. Yeah, love, love, indescribable, pure love. So maybe we need to redefine God. God is love. You know, maybe near-death experiencers have something to teach us about what God is.

8:19 Absolutely. How do we help those that have had near-death experiences? We've talked a little bit about how some of the things that we do kind of hurt them in a way and how we need to support them. But if you were, say, a parent of a child that had had one of these experiences, what can you do to help them? Listen. I think that listening non-judgmentally is crucial. I don't think there's, you know, it's as simple and as difficult as that. It's difficult. It's difficult to listen non-judgmentally. And it's difficult to listen without our own preconceptions.

9:02 I'll tell you a funny story. One of my patients had a near-death experience and she was then left with the perception that her grandmother was always with her. Her grandmother had passed and her grandmother was helping her with her homework. Okay. Why not? Yeah. I mean, these experiences are very real and very pragmatic. Another experience, a young man told me that his father had passed, still took him fishing, you know, was sort of there spiritually with him when they went fishing.

9:46 So finally she says to her grandmother's past, she says, so what is heaven like? And the grandmother tells her, you know, it's really pretty with flowers, you know, the kind of thing that you would tell a child that heaven is like. So she then told her mother this. Well, this conflicted with their church's belief of what heaven was like. This church was a fundamentalist Christian church and had a very different idea of heaven. And this led to then tremendous conflict because then the mother felt stuck in the middle.

10:29 She's trying to tell her religious leader what her daughter's telling her about heaven. And now the daughter is feeling, you know, she's feeling like she's done something wrong. You know, she's gotten all the adults in her life upset. And you know, now the pastor is coming and listening to her. So what did you hear heaven was like? And, you know, all this kind of stuff. When I heard the whole story, it sounded to me like the grandmother was just telling her what anybody would tell a seven-year-old child heaven was like. It wasn't some sort of religious, you know, definitive view of what was heaven.

11:15 It just was the sort of thing you might tell a child. And so it is harder to listen than you think. So what would you say to some sort of a religious leader like that pastor or whoever who a child or an adult comes to them and says, I had this kind of experience, but maybe it's not exactly in line with what you're teaching in your religion. What do you do? I'm not sure that it would be for me to speak to that religious leader. I just I don't because the things that I would say, remember, I'm a critical care physician.

11:58 I mean, really, I'm not too much about process. I'm pretty much about the bottom line. But I do know to me, I can just speak for myself. We got to be humble, really. And, you know, this idea that we know God better than someone who's died and actually been in contact, you know, to me, they're the gold standard. I mean, even if you really read the religious tracts and the Bible and the various religious writings, they only say you've got to get the ego out of there to understand God. It is our own ego that keeps us from understanding God.

12:42 Well, that's a great way to get rid of your ego is to have your brain die. You don't have much ego after that. And so I would think that that experience is the peer experience of whatever this God is. I think that's well said. And let's start with what you said prior to my question, which is just listen. Yeah, we don't have to take what they said and try to interpret it for them. Let's just listen. Absolutely. And leave it there. OK, getting back to something I asked seemed like ages ago now, 20 minutes or so ago, the transformation transformation.

13:25 How do these how do these change people? Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm laughing. I'm laughing because that's OK. Let's have a good time here. This this journey has been so astonishing for me and nothing really. It's all been counterintuitive for me. So I we studied adults who had near death experiences as children. And we again, systematically studied them. We compared them to six control groups. We're compulsive. We control. We compared them to adults who just were very religious.

14:08 We compared them to adults who had no religious beliefs. We compared them to adults who had serious life threatening events but didn't have a near death experience, you know, on and on like that. And we learned what the great secret of life is by doing this. And the secret of life is to be nice, to be kind. That's what we learned. And then just stop right there. That's enough. That's what we learned. People having near death experiences, they're more likely to be in helping professions in our control group.

14:51 They on personality studies, they definitely are nicer. They have almost no fear of death. We gave them all sorts of, you know, death, you know, death, anxiety, questionnaires. A little girl said it to me best. She said, well, I'm not afraid of dying anymore because I think I know a little bit about it now. But they give more money to charity. We looked at their tax returns. But by and large, they're just nice people. They spend more time with their family. They spend more time alone and contemplation.

15:32 And when we ask them, what did you learn from your experience? And I did these studies, by the way, I was a lot younger and more cynical and more closer to the sort of arrogant of the critical care doc. So I asked this one guy, I said to him, so, you know, what do you think your near death experience has meant to you? And he said, it told me that I have a very special job to do in this life. And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, great. You know, he's like, he's here to cure cancer. You know, he thinks he's like some special person or, you know, it's given him some sort of, I don't know, Messiah complex or something.

16:20 So I said to him, OK, I'll bite. What's your special job? You know, what's your special purpose? And luckily, he didn't take offense at my tone. And he looks at me and he goes, I already told you what my job was. I run a small construction company. And he said, those num nuts that I work with, they could never get a job if it weren't for me. He hired all his high school friends and he had a small little remodeling company. And so that was the meaning of his near death experience. That's what he thought his life was all about, was to run a small remodeling construction company and hire all his high school friends.

17:08 So what I learned from that is it's the small things in life. It's the ordinary, everyday aspects of life that are important. And when I talk with adults who have near death experiences, I'm sure you've heard the same thing. There's one woman I interviewed, she was the head of a large pharmaceutical company, and she'd done all sorts of wonderful things with her life. So she has her near death experience and her life review. And she learns that she was kind to a handicapped child when she was in summer camp. When she was in high school.

17:51 That was like the highlight of her life. And I've listened up to that. I really have. I just, you know, that the meaning of our lives is to be kind to each other, to be loving to each other, that the ordinary things that we do in life are probably the most important things. And, you know, for an overachiever like myself, you know, proud, you know, my book's a best seller, and, you know, I graduated with honors and all that kind of stuff. This was really a big wake up call for me to learn that none of that stuff matters. Taking care of my mom in the last year of her life.

18:32 That's probably one of the most important things I've ever done with my life. Have any of the children that you interviewed and that you studied, did any of them have life reviews like some adults do? No. And that doesn't really surprise me. The closest one child told me she had had a lot of surgery and had leukemia with numerous relapses. And she had this experience of just thinking, oh my God, you know, I went through all that and now I'm just going to die. I'm not sure that's the life review that adults have.

19:13 But even though they don't have a life review, they have a clear sense that this life is about learning lessons of love and learning to love each other. And perhaps even more important, learning to accept the love that other people have for us. I mean, even the youngest children, you know, children in age three, age five, it's not really coming to me how they express it. But you just get that sense from them that they understand that this world is about love. All right, doctor, I'm going to get a little bit more personal with you if you don't mind.

19:57 Yes. I can tell that this topic really, really means a lot to you deep down, deep down since getting involved with it. How has it changed you personally? Well, let me rather than me, I think there's two major ways it's changed me. One, it's made me pay a lot more attention to other people's feelings and frankly, unloving ways that I've been.

20:45 My failures of love, my failures of being able to love other people. And you know, thinking that what was important in my life was writing a paper or, you know, being the smartest person on the faculty or the smartest person in the room. So that's for sure is that in learning to accept the love that people have for me, I think that that's probably where it starts with me is understanding that other people love me.

21:30 And once I could understand that, it's a lot easier than for me to start to understand other people and how I've hurt them. And even to the point where I learned a meditative technique called Tanglin in which you actually meditate on the suffering that other people have because I've come to understand that this is what's important in life is being kind. And so it's changed going to the supermarket for me. It's changed. You know, well, actually, I was inspired by a child.

22:14 She was a teenager and I asked her, I said, you know, what does it mean to you? And that's what she said to me. She said, I don't mind standing in line at the supermarket anymore because I know there's only something there that's important. Maybe somebody there needs a smile. Maybe somebody there, you know, maybe I can make a difference to someone I'm standing next to in line just by. So it's helped me a lot. The second thing that it's done is it's really helped me to forgive myself, to understand that when we die, we're going to get a big hug from God and we're going to get an attaboy and we're going to get a sense of you did your best.

23:07 I mean, even Nazi prison guards that have had near-death experiences report that. And this is not just something for myself, but I work a lot with the ex-incarcerated, prisoners are struggling with their own spiritual issues and the knowledge that when we die, you're not punished for your sins, but your sins are put in perspective as that they're part of why we're here, that they had something important to teach us, that, you know, that whatever it was, that whatever we're struggling with was a lesson.

23:56 Maybe we failed the lesson. Maybe, you know, maybe we totally screwed it up. And certainly I have. But on the other hand, seeing it in that context, I think it helps because once you get crippled by a sense of that you're worthless or shame or guilt, then that in itself prevents you from forgiving others and forgiving yourself and making restitution. Whereas when you know that what awaits us is a hug and you did your best, to me that makes all the difference in whatever it is that I'm struggling with.

24:47 So those are the two ways it helps me. It's helped me to be kinder, to pay attention to how I affect others. And it's helped me to, that sounds like a weird thing, you know, to forgive yourself. But oddly enough, forgiving yourself is an important part of moving forward and making restitution and improving yourself. You know, I'll expand on that just a little bit.

25:30 I'll share with you a story from a good friend of mine. He unfortunately got drunk one night and ran over an elderly woman and killed her. And after years struggling with this, served time in prison, of course, he got to the point where he forgave himself. So I said to him, well, so that's kind of easy, isn't it? So you just decide to forgive yourself for, you know, getting drunk and running somebody over. And I said, well, what would you tell?

26:12 What would you tell that, you know, that that woman's son? Would you just say to him, oh, I just forgave myself? And he said, actually, I would do that. He said, you know, that I realized that what I did was part of my spiritual journey. And I would explain that to that woman's son. And I would tell him, you know, it's part of your spiritual journey to how you want to react to me, whether you can forgive me, whether you don't. You know, that's your spiritual journey. But he said, but don't think that this is something that's easy. He said, I wasn't able to forgive myself until I took the barrel of the gun out of my mouth, you know, meaning that he was going to kill himself and that, you know, but it's true that he couldn't then move forward.

27:06 Once he forgave himself, then he could start doing the hard work of figuring out how he can be a better person. And I've had that experience as well. I didn't understand the near-death experience until I had my own problems with I was convicted of crime. I don't want to go into all the details of that. It's a bit of a complex case. But what I do want to say is that I never understood anything about near-death experiences until I had my experience of the life experience of really having to confront my own behavior and really have to look at what kind of person am I?

28:00 Have I done the things and behaved in ways that I am proud of? Prior to that, the near-death experience was an intellectual exercise for me. It was something that I really did as a fellow. I wanted to publish papers. That's the academic, you know, I wanted to write books. You know, as I told you, I wasn't interested in making money off the books, but I certainly saw it as an ego exercise. And none of this stuff ever touched me personally when I had my own struggles.

28:44 You know, that's when I really learned what the near-death experience is all about. This knowledge that we're here to learn lessons of love and to know that that is, in my opinion, a scientific fact in the year 2022. I don't see that as a philosophical statement. Well, then that then brings you directly to what lessons of love am I learning? And am I learning them appropriately? And what am I doing to, you know, or am I failing in my lessons of love?

29:28 Thank you so much for opening up, being vulnerable. I appreciate it. What's next for you? I think at this point, I'm trying to understand how I can best share with people that science does in fact validate the near-death experience and spiritual experiences in general. And so people can see how this has applications for grieving, for grief of resolution. And then I have a particular interest in working with recidivism prevention, working with the ex-incarcerated and bringing heroin addiction.

30:14 I think that there's a spiritual aspect to that that we can learn from, you know, apply the lessons of the near-death experience in a practical way to some of the problems that our society is facing. Okay. Dr. Morris, you killed it. That's a good thing. Thank you. I appreciate it so much. All righty. I mean, I'm going to ask you if you have any last thoughts. First tell me on a scale of one to ten, how much fear do you have of death? I don't have any fear of death. I have a tremendous fear of not being there for my wife has a number of serious medical problems and I want to be here for her.

31:05 She might be facing a lung transplant and I want to be here for her. So I fear that part of it, but I don't fear death. There's nothing to fear about death. I don't want to die. But the process of dying is joyous and spiritual. And we had talked earlier about this issue of, well, that the messages of the near-death experience can be inspiring and that they say wonderful things, etc. I'm not sure that's true, Eric. The near-death experience to me says that we're here to learn lessons of love.

31:47 And those lessons of love, by and large, are pretty painful at times and can involve a lot of suffering. And I don't think, you know, and then you have to learn, you have to live it. I don't, you know, it's not a Facebook, you know, bumper sticker slogan. You know, you have to actually make mistakes, fail at those lessons and understand what you did wrong and being willing to look at them. And I didn't understand until I actually had to face my own challenges.

32:27 And every single person here that's listening to this, you know, you're, it's, there's a song that I often listen to that says, what if your blessings come with tears? What if, you know, what if it's raindrops? You know, we pray for blessings, but what if it's actually painful experiences of loss and suffering? It's hard to study near-death experiences without coming to that conclusion that there's a reason for the various things.

33:13 Well, they say it. I understand why there's war. I understand why there are serial killers. I understand, you know, and the reason they're saying that is that even in those horrific types of experiences are lessons of love to be learned. So it's not for sissies, you know, learning your lessons of love. Jesus' life is not for sissies. And I do believe there's a message of hope in all that. Okay. Alrighty. Okay. I see as long as we define the message of hope that at the end of the day, we're going to get that hug from God.

33:59 That's beyond dispute. We're going to get an atta boy or an atta girl or, you know, we're going to get that hug of unconditional love and unconditional love. Think what that means here. People don't think of that. I think enough. I hear people say all the time, but wait a minute. How can a murderer, you know, go to heaven? How can a murderer have, you know, this dying experience? Unconditional love, nonjudgmental. That means you're not being judged. The judgment comes because you judge yourself.

34:40 And that's far more harsh and yet far more spiritually nurturing and leads to greater spiritual development than this, I think, distorted idea of a judgmental God. The nonjudgmental God, I think, is more terrifying in many ways. But I believe all loving still. Absolutely. Yes. Can you think of any one really beautiful thing that a child said to you as they were describing their experience or drawing their experience? Oh, my gosh, there's so many.

35:22 Oh, you've got to have a couple of favorites. Well, my favorite is I'll tell you about both of my favorites, I guess. One young lady told me that she saw a light that told her who she was and where she was to go. And she drew a rainbow. But I just my favorite one is the young girl that said to me, I saw a light and it had a lot of good things in it.

36:03 I just love that one. That's great. All right. Dr. Melvin Morse, thank you so very much again. You're so welcome. Thank you for an outstanding interview. I learned a lot from this. You got a lot out of me that doesn't usually I usually don't think about. So I appreciate it. Thank you. If you have an opinion you would like to share about his research or if you've had a near death experience of your own, send an email to Eric at roundtripdeath.com. While you're at it, please share this podcast with a friend and head on over to roundtripdeath.com to sign up for email notifications when new shows are released.

36:47 Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.