#328 - What We Learn From Studying 5,000 Near Death Experiences

0:00 I had intense fear and panic because we were obviously crashing. Out of my heart came the thought, oh god help, I'm going to die. From the time that they pronounced me dead was a good 45 minutes. It's determined that I was not breathing for 20 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realise that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. By which you went to the past far, in the afternoon, by half past seven I was dead, clinically dead, four minutes. And they were crying because I was dead and I was trying to tell them no, I'm not dead, I'm just fine, I'm okay.

0:45 I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. I started to feel like I was surrounded by all this warm, loving, beautiful, soothing, loving energy. I'm back with God again. I just felt this all in my two release, like, wow, I'm back. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. I'd come back home. It was a very strong feeling that I've come back home. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. And light is literally emitting from him. And I could feel that that tremendous amount of love was coming through him as well. They were brighter than everybody else. And I just knew who they were.

1:34 Welcome to the show, everybody, to round trip death. And we have on the line with us today Jeff Jansen back from North Carolina on the east coast of the United States. Good morning, Jeff. Good morning to you, Eric. I know it's afternoon for you. And for somebody in Malaysia, it's probably two in the morning or whatever. But anyway, we welcome people anywhere and everywhere. And we love having listeners all over the world. So thanks for tuning in, everybody. Jeff is somebody who, oh boy, I think you're going to love him today because he has studied about 5,000 near death experiences. So there is a wealth of knowledge that we're going to draw on today. But let's back up before we jump too far in. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit something about you?

2:22 Yeah, as you said, I live in North Carolina. I've got a lovely wife, a son, Ryan, 23, and daughter Jill, 21. Rescue Beagle here right by my side, Trey, and do consulting work. So all is good here in North Carolina. Okay. If anybody hears a Beagle in the middle, it's okay. We'll flow with it. And we love our little furry friends. What got you into near death experiences in the first place? Yeah, I mean, that's, it's a great question. And like most people, I was just kind of going along, you know, working and doing the family stuff. And then at 42 years of age, there were a couple of times that I thought I had heartburn and probably about four times over the course of maybe two weeks or so. And finally decided, okay, yeah, you better get this checked out because you haven't been feeling this before and went in and met with a nurse practitioner and told her my symptoms. And she said, you know, probably not, not much of a problem, but let's just go have you get a stress test just to make sure. So went over and got a stress test and the thing just was barely moving and had really no incline at all.

3:39 And I'm feeling now this same thing in my heart. And now I'm feeling pain rating down my left arm. And they're like, Mr. Jansen, you've got to step off. Here's a nitroglycerin tablet, you've got a severe blockage, and we are going to need to do possibly open heart surgery, at least a catheter deorization and figure out what you have going on here. So at 42 years of age, I had one of those life changing moments that, wow, my life is in danger and called the kids out of school. My wife came and you watch this video that says, you know, you're going to have a catheterization. There's a chance of death with this. And this is something that I'm thinking, okay, I'll worry about when I'm 62 or 72, somewhere down the road when, when, you know, these things typically happen for people. But for me, 42, I got the wake up call of, oh my goodness. And they found out I had a 99% blockage of my widowmaker artery. So that little 1% over the last two weeks that had kept me open, really saved my life. And it just got me really thinking about what would have happened had I not made it. And where would I have gone and what would have happened? And I had a Christian upbringing and the old heaven and hell stuff and purpose of life and all those questions really start hitting you and you start thinking about things that you honestly quite or at least I hadn't thought about for the previous 42 years in depth.

5:10 I am so glad you were at the doctors when that happened. Exactly. You were doing the right thing. I had somebody on the show last week. Well, it's my last week. These don't always come out in order. So her episode may be after years, maybe before, but her name is Debbie and she was having similar symptoms to you. And her neighbor said, take Tums. And then when it didn't go away, she said, take more. And when it didn't go away, she said, take more. Thank goodness she finally went, called an ambulance and went to the emergency room and was having a major heart attack too. Yeah. It was, it was very similar. I didn't really, I'd never had that feeling before and just kind of thought it was the heartburn thing and fortunately did go in. So for all your listeners out there, if you're getting some symptoms that you're thinking might be heartburn or something different, definitely get it checked out. Because, you know, I think you and your family will be glad you did. And nothing against Tums, but I don't think they're meant to cure heart attacks. No, they are not.

6:17 Okay. Well, where did you take it from there? So you had so many thoughts on your mind. What kinds of questions did you have? Why don't you go ahead and name some of them? Yeah, exactly what you had said is, you know, what would have happened to me had I died and where would I have gone and did I live a life that, you know, would have sent me to, I'd been taught about heaven and hell and would I've gone to one of those or the other? So I had actually purchased Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life at a used bookstore and was just thinking, you know, someday I might be interested in reading that. Well, this was the day that, that had come and I started looking at his book. I started looking at Ken Ring's lessons from the light and it just sent me on this quest of, wow, okay, there's these people who have died and they did have quite an amazing experience and all the questions that I was grappling with and trying to look at. And yes, I had had a Christian religion background. So there were some answers to these, but not the in depth ones I was really looking for. But these people had had these near death experiences, really not only answered a lot of the questions I had about death in the afterlife, but they were giving me great ideas about how I could do a better job living the life I was living. So I almost felt like I had a second chance at life being 1% away from death. And I love the insights

7:53 that they had on loving and on forgiving and on being kind and just being a better person. And I don't think I was a horrible person, but there were a lot of things that I was looking at my own life. And I'm like, I don't know if my priorities are quite where they need to be, where I would want them to be as I look back on my 42 years. So before you started studying other people's near death experiences, and after you had your own, were there lessons that came to you directly? Um, I mean, just how fleeting life really is and how fragile life really is. And don't wait until you're older or don't wait for most of the people that I now learned from and work with. It's like death is dumped in their lap. And for me, death was dumped in my widowmaker artery. Unfortunately, I have two stints now to clean that out. But for a lot of us, we really don't think of these big life questions until often tragedy hits us or strikes someone close to us. And what I'd learned through that experience is I wish I had looked at these things earlier. But unfortunately, that's kind of the way human nature works. For a lot of us, we really don't consider these things until death is

9:24 dumped in our lap for ourselves or someone close to us. So how did it change the priorities in your personal life? Yeah, I mean, it changed my priorities a lot. I definitely was a type A hard charging business person and put a much greater focus on my family and investing time with them. How I treat homeless people is very, very different than it was before. Before, I'd probably just walk by them or thinking to my head, hey, get a job, you're lazy, everyone else is out here working. And now I will actually stop. A lot of times when I'm going to a major city, I'll make sure I have $5 and $10 bills in my wallet before I leave. And I will actually have a conversation with them and ask them their name and where they're from and how they're doing and share money with them generously. And there are a lot of times that we end up getting into a conversation and they'll say, hey, can I have a hug? And I easily give them a hug now. Whereas before I would have just walked on by. So I try to be a lot more kind and considerate and understand the old phrase that a lot of people are fighting battles that very few of us understand. And I try to go through life understanding that all of us are fighting some battles and a little bit of kindness and a little bit of compassion

10:57 go a long way. It's a beautiful message. All right, podcast is over for the day. Okay, no, we have a few more things we can talk about. So you have studied thousands of near death experiences and you have come up with 10 lessons life lessons from these. And there are a lot of similarities. There's also a ton of differences between each of these experiences. You want to run us through some of these 10 things and where people can learn even more about it if they want to. Yeah, I would be happy to. Yeah, you know, really after you look at thousands and thousands of NDE's, there tend to be some main themes or main messages that are repeated over and over again. And maybe not every NDE account has all 10 of these. But when you start looking across thousands of them, you start to see, okay, there are some main messages there.

11:58 And the first one, which will probably not be a surprise to any of your listeners is loving unconditionally, that we are loved unconditionally when we get to the other side or heaven or the afterlife or whatever you prefer to call it in these situations, that this love, you know, these NDE's just become emotional, that they cannot believe this amount of pure, powerful, totally accepting unconditional love is being just put through them no matter what kind of life they've lived. And they see that, okay, I'm loved unconditionally.

12:39 And part of my challenge or part of my goal during my time on earth is to see if I can even come close to that kind of powerful unconditional love that I felt there. So I know listening to your podcast that there's been a lot of your NDE's who've talked about, you know, part of our challenge here on life is to be able to see, can we, given the situations we face, the crazy people sometimes we face, can we still treat them with unconditional love and it's definitely a challenge and we're not going to do it most of the time. But Andy Petra who's an NDE or said in his NDE, he was asked, did you love more often than not?

13:24 So I think that's part of our challenge is to try to be 51% loving versus the 49% maybe ego based or selfish kind of things. And over time, hopefully increase that percentage to 53% or 57% when we have situations, can we face them unconditionally loving? So all of these 10 lessons really boil down to probably unconditional love. That's the main one. If you just did that one, all the other nine would probably take care of themselves. But I wanted to start at least with that one, see if you have any comments and I can jump into any of the other one. That's a great point. If we tackle the love, everything else falls into place. I've had so many people try to explain what that love felt like and words fail them. Have you heard any great descriptions? You just use some good adjectives. What are some of the best descriptions or metaphors for what that love felt like?

14:29 Yeah, I think Tony Woody's one who he said that love, that unconditional love felt like every mother who had lived, is living and will live was cradling you and loving you all at the same time. So I mean, just one mother's love is powerful enough. But if you take all the mothers who ever lived, all the mothers now and all the mothers who will be and they're cradling you and they're loving you and that combination still probably isn't enough for it. That's a pretty powerful metaphor. Another one that I've heard is imagine basically our son and you are standing two feet away from it and just think of the intensity of the heat and the light and the radiation. And now if you were to substitute God's love or divine's love or source, whatever you prefer to call our divine, the deity, that is another example of how pure and powerful and unconditional this love is. And they say that doesn't even probably totally come close to it. So those are just two metaphors that have always stuck with me that try to get me to wrap this limited human brain around what kind of unconditional love we receive on the other side.

15:58 Those are great. Okay, let's talk about some of the other lessons in addition to love. Yeah. So another one is to live fearlessly that in this world, we've got lots of fears and obviously some are physical fears that we need to have some kind of fear for to keep our lives going. But most of the fears that we have in life are probably psychological ones, ones that we create and they keep us from doing the things that we came here to do and maybe living our lives purpose. And we kind of hold ourselves hostage a lot of times because we think, we're not good enough to do that or this person would never go out with me. So I'm never going to ask them out. So we live a lot of times these very safe, too safe human lives because we're afraid to break out of the fears that largely are just up in our own brain rather than actual physical fears out there. And so many NDEs, I think Anita Morjani is a really good one dying to be me. She thought that she realized in her NDE that most of these fears that she had lived with were self created and that she was asked to break through those. So one that goes right along with that is working purposely that NDEs are absolutely adamant. Every single one of us has a really essential purpose for our lives here. And most of us think, okay, well, I've got to be president

17:29 of a company or I've got to be the pastor at my church or the principal at my school. We think of these big earthly purposes. And sometimes a purpose might just be helping a friend through a difficult situation. We might think, oh, that's not a big deal. Hey, when we see that in our life review and we understand the powerful impact we had on that person's life and their psyche, we find out that that purpose was just as important as maybe being president of the United States. So what we think is important here on earth is very different than what the other side or heaven thinks is important. What's important for them is love and intention and caring and all those things here. It's the degrees and the big house and the titles and all those things. And on the other side, we're going to find out it's the really little things. And that's what we're asked to do is to live our purpose, to contribute to the world. At the same time, though, I think our soul is here for a purpose that we need to learn something and grow in some way and stretch ourselves.

18:41 For me, it's patience. I'm not a very patient person. And I think part of my opportunity coming here is to see if I can transform this type A human personality that I have and to try to understand the messages of end years and to be more patient with people in my family or with people that I'm working with. So we have both an external purpose that I think makes the world a better place, but we also have an internal purpose that helps our soul grow and evolve and get better to during our time here if we take advantage of it. Hey, you're on a roll. Keep going. Okay. Some other ones we'll definitely look at choose compassionately. One thing that you and I may be talking about here and the thing that fascinates me the most about near death experiences is the life review, the opportunity at the end of our life to go back and relive our life and see things not just from our perspective, but to see things from our spouse's perspective and our kids perspective and our coworkers perspective. It's basically we're going to see what kind of impact we had on the world and how we made other people feel. And to me, that's been probably the biggest aspect of a near death experience that is impacted the way I try to live. Notice I say try. I'm not always very successful at it, but I really try to see, okay, how would that person that

20:18 I'm in a conflict with? How would that person that I'm trying to influence? How are they seeing this situation and how am I making them feel? And that's what's really enlightening in this life review is you will get to see every situation in your life and see it from everyone else's perspective and understand their backstory and why they may have said what they said. And it all comes down to teaching you, hey, if you would choose love in that situation or choose compassionately is that lesson is you could see how that would be better for that person better for you better for the situation. And if you choose an unloving response or a selfish response, you see that not only impact on them. But as Mary Neil talks about in her life review, she saw things the ripple effect of the words she said or the action she took 16 25 30 times down the road. So we don't just see that first interaction that we have with somebody in that first domino fall in a certain way, but we see how they then have interactions with other people. And that creates a ripple effect. And we see not just that first domino, but we see like 25 30 35 dominoes down the road from one positive or negative interaction we had with someone. So that's one that has really stuck with me.

21:48 And if I know one thing you were going to ask about certain NDEs that have come up, I'm going to give you one, I'm going to give you two right now that just just hit me so hard. Go for it. One is Roland Webb. And he talks about when he was a five year old kid growing up, I believe it was in Washington, DC. And he had some other friends around and there was a beehive out there. And for whatever reason, Roland tells this other kid named Heidi, Hey, Heidi, go grab that stick and whack the beehive and we're going to run and see if we can outrun the bees. Well, for whatever reason, Heidi decides, grabs a stick, wax the bees. And of course, the bees are just livid. So the kids all go off running and Roland gets to the door first and he lets all the other kids in except for Heidi. And he shuts the door before Heidi can get in. And Roland said, I felt every bee sting that Heidi had. I felt the swelling, the itching, the burning. I saw his mom come out of the apartment and how scared and mad she was. I felt all of her feelings. And I saw his dad come out and I felt his rage and not only that, but I felt the rage of the bees too.

23:06 So that's one that whenever I have a little devious thought, I have a little buzz in my mind that says, you know, Roland felt every single bee sting that Heidi had because Roland was the person who shut the door and had Heidi feel that. So that's one that definitely sticks out for me. The other one, and this is a personal one. So this one comes from Marion Rome and she talks about she went back in her life review to a birthday party. And the kid that was there got this Superman outfit. And all the kids wanted to try on this Superman outfit. And there was a young boy named Oliver, who was a bit heavier set. And he's trying to put on this outfit and he gets into about his stomach and he can't zipper it over that.

24:01 And Marion remembers saying he's not Superman. He's super fat. And she then felt little Oliver when he went back home crying. And his parents are wondering, why are you crying? You just came from a birthday party. Shouldn't this have been fun? And Marion is feeling not only him crying and him sad and all of these feelings that her saying to him, he's super fat and how that rippled throughout his family and the rest of his life. And there was a kid that a lot of us growing up, we bullied and we made fun of. And I actually sent a copy of my book to this kid that I went to grade school with. And I said, this apology is 40 years overdue, but I want to let you know that how we treated you was not right. And it took me 40 years and Marion Rome's story to really get me to reflect, you know, I own this. I did not treat this kid well. And I want to let you know this 40 years later that I screwed up and I'm taking ownership for it. So those are just two life review ones that just hit me hard and spurred on action. And that's what I think, you know, why all your listeners listen to these and certainly why I've studied 5,000 of these

25:32 is that basically you think differently and you act differently. Hopefully now, because you understand what you do in the world just doesn't stick with you, but has a ripple effect on your family and on your coworkers and on your neighbors. And it doesn't just stay there, but they then have a ripple effect too. So you can see why I'm really fascinated by this life review, how much it teaches us about what really matters and just a little ounce of love and compassion and forgiveness goes a long, long way. Yeah. As long as we're talking life reviews, I have a question about that. Because I've had other people tell me the same thing, but they've also told me most of them that they experienced that without feeling guilt. So it was like, yeah, I felt the bee stings that this girl got. And so I learned something from it to become a better person. But I wasn't overloaded with guilt. In your opinion, how does that work?

26:40 Yeah, it's a great question. And I think from what I've heard, and this is from Karen Thomas. She's one of our Indieers locally here in North Carolina. And I just did an IONS talk last week and Karen was there. And she was talking about this as well, that the life review is designed to teach you, not torture you. And most of us, when we think of our life review, I know there's incidents, like I said, with this kid that we bullied, we're thinking, okay, we're going to feel all these bad feelings. And you do feel them. You get the understanding of the impact you have on others. And from the human level, there is remorse, and there is regret, but you're also looking at it, I believe, from a higher spiritual level. And you're looking at it more objectively. And hmm, what did I learn from this situation?

27:40 So I think it's kind of a multi level thing where yes, you do feel the human aspects of it, but then you're also looking at it from a higher level thing. And how can I learn from that situation and grow from it so that I can be a more compassionate soul in those situations. So it seems like it's a combination of things in terms of how you're looking at it both human level and spiritual level. Good explanation. Okay, let's go ahead and push through the rest of your list here quickly. Okay. Yeah, so we have accept non judge mentally, what we'll find is that end years are basically saying, okay, there's not one specific religion that gets in or there's not only certain one way that everyone is accepted non judge mentally in what they do. So that's our fifth one.

28:36 And again, that goes right with love. It does. Pure love is not judgmental makes sense. Exactly. Unconditional love and judgment are absolutely diametrically opposed opposites. Right. So that makes sense with that. We have learned continuously that there are going to be hardships that we're going to experience in life. We're going to lose pets, we're going to lose loved ones close to us. We're going to have divorce and debt and all the other crazy things that happen in life. But those are opportunities to learn both what we can do and to learn how our response to those situations is really critical in that one. So that's our sixth one. Seventh one is going to make sense serve selflessly that we're here to give and help and use our gifts and talents. Each of us have certain gifts and talents going back to our work purposely that can help other people. And hopefully we do that when we are provided with those opportunities each and every week. Our eighth one is appreciate regularly that there are lots of things that we can appreciate with our relationships with other people, nature going on all around us, that there are a lot of good things in this world, sunsets, chocolate chip cookies, you know, pets, all those things that are here and take time to appreciate those. Number nine is to forgive fully. A lot of times we will resent certain

30:10 people that may have hurt us emotionally or may have hurt us financially. And we're asked to and you talk about loving unconditionally, we're asked to love the people who have not been nice to us who probably been maybe some of the quote in our mind, worst people ever to us, but we're asked to forgive them. It doesn't mean we forget everything that they do, but we try to extend a bit of love. And again, going back to the life review, a lot of times we find out that whatever mean thing that person did to us was a lot of times they were struggling with something in their own right. And the old phrase, hurt people, hurt people, we find out that they hurt us because they didn't really understand how to process a pain that they had in their own life. A lot of end of years we'll see maybe if they had abusive parents, they'll see in their life review the kind of difficult life their own parent had. And they'll start to say, I think it was Barbara Harris Whitfield who said, no wonder my mom treated me the way that she did. She had that kind of growing up in her own life. And then last but not least is number 10, trusting completely. End of years say, yes, we know this world is crazy. Yes, we know there are wars and children who pass away just after a few days and unfairness and strife and injustices. But somehow when

31:41 we get to the other side, we're going to see that in the grand scheme of things, it somehow makes sense. We're not going to understand it here mentally because we have these limited human minds and human egos. But when we get to the other side, they tell us trust completely, it's all in the grand scheme of things going to be okay. And we're all going to be loved unconditionally like all those mothers who've ever had been who are now and will be our loving us when we get there. And that is so hard. That is so hard to do in this world to trust completely because you're opening yourself up to be hurt, to be taken advantage of. I think unless we're around everyone, everybody that is loving unconditionally, I don't know how we can trust completely.

32:38 Yeah. And I'll go back to Howard Storm here. A lot of you are familiar with Howard Storm. You've probably either seen, people may have seen his videos on his great book, My Descent into Death. You know, Howard says, you know, there are times that we have to incarcerate people and there are times that we do need to have restraining orders from people and there are times we need to step away from them. So it's not like, okay, yeah, you know, just be mean to me and everything's going to be okay. We do need to understand that we have to separate ourselves from people. But what he is saying, and I think what the ND ears are saying is when we get to the other side, the things that we have no clue about here are the things that we struggle with so mightily here and that there's no easy answers for here. There will be answers over there. And the analogy that I like to give is let's say there's just some mathematical or physics genius and they've got three chalk boards and there's this huge equation that's taking up all these things and signs and symbols.

33:42 I've never seen any before, but yet there's maybe a 12 year old kid who's a genius and at the end of this board, there is some answer to this just complex equation. And that's the way I kind of look at it is I don't understand a lot of things that are happening around me. I don't understand a lot of these signs or symbols or situations, but I do believe that there's someone there's a source that does have an answer for all these and and I'm going to understand that at the end. I'm not going to get it now, but I am going to believe that there is an answer for it that I will then fully understand when I get to the other side.

34:27 Yeah, we'll get as much as we can here. We'll try. And then this podcast is doing. Yeah, we'll try. Things are going to be a little bit different there. More deep dive on each of these 10 things can be found in your book 10 life changing lessons from heaven. We'll put a link to that in the show notes so people can find that. All right, I'm going to shift gears and come up with some questions a little different that that you may or may not have answers to, but you've studied this enough that maybe you've formed some opinions on at least that is one commonality that we see a lot and people having NDEs as adults is that they get divorced not long after. What's that all about?

35:11 Yeah, I think what happens for a lot of people is there's such a radical change in what their value system might be, what their priorities are. And because of that change, the person who married them in the first place, it's almost like you're a completely or at least substantially different person now. Most people will go through a job change after an NDE, that's much more service oriented. And the things, the materialism things of, you know, I want to have this fancy house and this amazing vacation. And now those things just aren't important to them anymore.

36:04 A Rajeve party as a guy who was an anesthesiologist had a 10,000 square foot home, had a Hummer, had all these amazing human toys. And after his NDE, he downsized and he got rid of his Hummer and got a hybrid. And his wife is like, I thought we were trying to kind of be the kind of best people in our neighborhood and have the best looking house and all these toys. And where's that guy that I knew for 20, 25 years? Where did he go? So I think the relationships get strained because the person you were before and the things that you valued before the NDE are usually very different. And if the spouse is not open to that, or if the spouse's priorities haven't changed, which they usually don't, they see the same person, they see the same human being externally. But what's happened is their hearts changed, their souls changed, their mind has changed, and they're a different person.

37:13 And that does put a big strain on a lot of relationships after the NDE. Yeah, unfortunate. I'm not, I'm not sure that there's a fix for that, or there should be. I don't know. It's just something that I ponder on some. All right, let me ask you a few other things. So you've heard in these NDEs, you've heard all kinds of different ways that people have had the death part of their experience. Any of those stand out is just very unusual. I think for me, you know, what's interesting and even in your podcast and other podcasts, for me, it's always the NDE. And yeah, you know, sometimes I think you had one guy in Australia get run over by a ship and a zodiac and all that. It was certainly interesting in that aspect.

38:04 Greg Kealy got run over by a Navy ship. Unbelievable. Yeah, exactly. So that's obviously a unique one. But for me, it's always like, I want to get to the NDE. It's for me, NDE is kind of the key thing. And yes, it's tragic or sad how they may have gotten there. But for me, it's always like, okay, well, what, when you got to the other side, what did you learn? So that's more of been my focus, I guess. You know, Jeff Olson is a guy who with his accident that he had and seeing his wife, Tamara, and seeing her and her telling him, you have to go back and be a dad for your son Spencer. So that's definitely one that sticks out. Nancy Rines is another one. And she was an atheist who got run over while she was in a traffic circle on her bike and basically, you know, wakes up in heaven and was like, well, what am I doing here? I didn't believe in you. And it's like, well, yeah, we know that, but we still love you unconditionally anyway.

39:16 So those are two that kind of stick out in terms of just unique ones. So speaking of heaven, what do you think about people that have an experience with hell? Yeah, it's a it's a good thing. And I do write about that in the 10 lessons book that I think there's three main reasons. You know, those if you look at Jeffrey Long and Jody Long, who put together the near death experience research foundation site that now has about 5,000 NDEs on there, when they look at their hellish ones, they say that basically 2% are ones that might be anything than a positive one. And for some people, they start in this black void. And some people say it's all this black void, it was so peaceful and velvety and nice and other people get in this black void. And they're like, oh, there was nothing there. And I wasn't sure about what was happening. And I didn't see anything. So for some people, that black void is interpreted as a negative thing. So that may be a hellish NDE for them.

40:22 Second one is the life review. And not only as we talked about, do we see the positive things, but we feel the negative things. And I think you've had Peter Panagore on your podcast. And he talks about having to experience all the hurt and pain that he caused people was definitely a negative hellish experience for him, knowing that people felt in negative ways because of what he had said or done. And then there is the third one. I mentioned Howard Storm before, who did have more of a hellish NDE. And what a lot of NDEers as they look at that, for those few that have had it, they felt like it was more of a self-imposed, temporary condition. It wasn't like God sent them there. And it was more of a self-created detour that they went to. And as long as they look for the light and as long as they look for the positives, they're usually then going to that heavenly realm. So it is a very small percentage that have the hellish NDE's. And usually it's one of those three reasons, the dark void, the life review that they're feeling the ill effects of what they caused. And then there are some that may have that more demonic aspect to it, but usually they feel like it's more of an opportunity for reflection. And then once they look for the light, then they can get out of those situations.

41:53 Howard Storm And what have you learned from people that talk about how they learned of past lives that they have lived? Where do we go with that? David Bowman Yeah, I was actually just Ken Ring, who I mentioned before, lessons from the light, who's one of the early researchers along with Raymond Moody and a guy who started the IONS International Association for Near-Death Studies. I was just corresponding with him and he said that in some studies that they had that some of his students had, maybe not a huge number of people, but at least something that 70% of NDE's believe in reincarnation versus if you look at Pew Research, only 33% of Americans believe in it. So there's definitely over double in terms of NDE's and a lot of them will say, yeah, I may not have believed in reincarnation before my NDE, but once I was there I started believing it. And Andy Petro, who I mentioned I believe before, talked about in his life review, a lot of NDE's will say it's almost like I was in this huge basketball arena and every seat around me, so imagine you're in a 20,000 seat basketball arena, standing at half court and on every single seat going on around you is a video of a different aspect of your life. So maybe you're over there and it's your one-year-old and you're

43:27 having your first steps with your parents and then you're over there and you're riding the bike for the first time and then you're over there and you're having your first kiss. And all these situations are going on around you. And Andy Petro said, not only did I have my previous life going on around me, but it was almost like those two sections of the arena over there were my past Andy Petro life and those two sections of the arena over there were some other life that I'd had and those two sections over there, so he had multiple lifetimes going on, life reviews around him. So there are a lot of near-death experiencers and it's probably opened up my viewpoints on reincarnation too that I think it may certainly be more of a likelihood or probability than I would have previously thought, having not studying as many NDEs.

44:23 And most religions have a hard time with that. There are some religions that believe in it but use different terms for it, such as a pre-earth life or a pre-existence or something like that. Let's go back to life reviews for a minute. I don't feel like we finished that topic. Again, we talked about the whole guilt, non-guilt. I kind of think that love is such a positive emotion and a positive high vibration and guilt is a very negative low vibration kind of thing that maybe there's something in between this being able to learn from our mistakes that can happen on that level, that can't happen on this earth level very well because we all of a sudden go straight to guilt versus some emotion in between that is just the positive side of it.

45:21 Right. I mean, when I was putting together, I ended up writing a whole book on this called your life's ripple effect. And when I was putting this book together, I stopped and thought, okay, why would we even have a life review? Why would the universe or God or again, source whatever term you want to use, why would every single event of our life be captured and recorded and not only recorded but in such fine detail. Some of these NDEs say when they went through their life review, they could in essence see the nose hairs on the doctor who delivered them or they could count the mosquitoes that were in the air when they were six years old back out in their yard.

46:10 So why would the universe go through that kind of detail and not only that, but why do you not just see your life from your singular perspective? But so many of them say you see and feel it from other people. And oftentimes it's like you're a drone hovering above it as well and experiencing your life from it. And to me, it kind of goes back to there must be an educational component to this. And a lot of times in the sports world, you'll have a coach and an athlete will go back and watch a past athletic performance and they'll stop it and they'll pause it and they'll go in slow mo and they'll kind of say, okay, outside of the heat of competition as you're watching this here, what did you learn? And if this situation comes up again in the next game, how would you do things differently? So all of this kind of gets back to that so many NDEs say this earth is a classroom opportunity.

47:14 It's not a courtroom as Vinnie Tolman who you may have had on as well. Yeah, love Vinnie. Yeah, Vinnie's great. Vinnie talks about this is not a courtroom. It's a classroom. So this whole life review opportunity gives us a chance to look at all of our choices. And we get to see, oh, yep, loving choice there. Nice job. Ooh, that you felt that you felt what they felt in that situation. Probably an unloving choice. And a lot of times, NDEs will say in their life review, they will be shown alternatives of what they could have been, could have said or done, not again to make them feel guilty, but to see, oh yeah, I had a choice and if I would have phrased that a little differently, or if I would have led with my intent rather than my selfishness, then that would have gone a whole lot better.

48:08 A whole other way to learn. It is. I love the analogy of sports and the coach because a good coach, when they're looking back at film of the game from the day before, they don't just criticize you for everything that you did wrong. Right? You can do that all by yourself. Yeah. They're turning it into, okay, how do we fix this? How do we get better? How do we move forward? It's also interesting with these life reviews as people have told me, okay, there's so much to see, right? Every minute of my life, somehow it all came at me at the same time. It didn't take years and years to look back over all this video footage. Somehow their minds were expanded to be able to accept all this knowledge at one time. Exactly. And then you've probably heard multiple times that there really is no similar sense of linear time on the other side, that this life review all seems to happen in a flash because I think our minds are operating at this super speed that we don't need the step-by-step thing. But they say, as we look at those videos going back to that arena, and there's a certain video playing on one of those chairs, it's almost like it is like we can jump back into one of those videos. We have the angels and God and sometimes some of our deceased ancestors are by our sides loving us with it. And it's almost like, and

49:41 they do say we can press a pause, we can go in slow mo, we can then feel it from somebody else's brain and then jump into a different one. And all that basically happens, in essence, instantaneously. And we're like, okay, well, how do I live 80 years? And this happens instantaneously. But again, this is kind of that miracle and magic of the other side getting out of our limited human brain and being able to process things at lightning speeds from multiple perspectives, all designed to help us learn and grow and improve. And again, that's why I believe all of this is recorded so that we can leave the bliss and beauty of heaven and perfection, jump into this earth life, have adversity, have strife, have our own egos, and to see did you make a choice there that was loving? Or did you make a choice there that was more selfish? And what did you learn from that? And what kind of ripple effect did that have on other people? So it is kind of a school for our soul, a boarding school for our souls that we leave home, we learn lots of things, we have lots of challenges, we have tests, we get a recess every now and then, and then we go back and we kind of basically see it all again and see what we learned from those situations.

51:02 And speaking of our brains working at lightning speed, I love people telling me, hey, I totally understood quantum physics. And I go, what? They may not understand it all once they're back in their body. But it's like, okay, when I was there, I completely understood it. It's how the universe works. And now if I pick up a book on this subject, I can, I get it. It's like, Oh yeah, I remember that. Oh yeah, I remember that. And they learn it so very quickly. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And so many of them talk about that all universal knowledge is available to them when they get to the other side. And, you know, Evan Alexander talks about our brains as this filter. And with the electromagnetic spectrum, we only see a small little slice of it. But when we get out of these limited human brains, we in essence, then open up to universal knowledge. And what's so interesting to me is it's not most of them say it's not like I'm learning it for the first time. It's as if I'm remembering it. It's like, Oh, yes. That's what it was. So it seems like maybe we start with inner with universal knowledge on the other side. We make a choice to come into these human bodies and brains and Jeff O'Driscoll is one who's said, you know, a lot of times the body is the veil, the brain

52:38 is the veil that we put ourselves, our spirits into these human incarnations here. And we become limited and we only see a sliver of the world and we can only comprehend a little bit of what's going on. And I guess this ties back to our trust completely, that when we do pass away, die, whatever word you want to say, and we do go to the other side once we get out of these limited human brains. Now we do understand it all and it is easier to trust completely because now it's like, Oh, yeah, that's what I remember. And that's why all this happened because now I'm back into this universal knowledge again.

53:22 I can't wait for all that universal knowledge again. Jeff, and me too. I like to use the analogy of remember when all we had was encyclopedias that were up on the shelves of every home. And now we have Google and other search engines and it's so easy to find answers to everything. Now imagine before there were even encyclopedias or if you were living back, you know, in the dark ages or earlier where there weren't even printed books, how hard was it to go find knowledge on any particular topic, let alone Google type knowledge or AI type knowledge. So take that to the nth degree with how we're going to be after this. Yeah, exactly. It's just all there. We don't even have to ask for it. It's just all there. Yeah, I think it's a great analogy. And yes, when we do get to that other side, that universal knowledge is in, we're, we remember it again. We go back to it and it's infused back into our, I don't know, you can't even say a brain because we're not in the brain where it's infused into our essence or our consciousness, I guess would be the best term for it. Or our spirit or our soul or whatever we want to use. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. We need to wrap up soon. I wanted to ask you about some work that you're doing with a parents group. Yeah. A parents that have lost children.

54:52 Tell us a little bit about that and how you're able to help them. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's two amazing groups. One is called Helping Parents Heal started by Elizabeth Boisan and she, she herself has had two children transition one early on and one is a 20 year old and she has created this amazing organization called Helping Parents Heal that is specifically designed for parents who have had a child pass away before them. There's another person, Emily Graham, who has a great organization called After Child Loss and both of those groups are groups that I've worked with. And I found that again, when death is dumped into your lap, as we talked about at the very beginning of this and death is dumped into their lap when a child goes before a parent, as most of us know the natural order, at least in our minds is the parents are supposed to die first and then the kids can die somewhere down the road. Well, obviously, I think it's 19% of cases. You will have a child pass before a parent and probably, and I'm just getting the chills right now, probably the hardest hardship of human life to have your flesh and blood go before you. So for most of these parents, what they thought they knew of the world and what they thought they knew of religion and God and all these things just gets absolutely shattered because now I have lost my child

56:26 and they like me go on the spiritual quest and start asking the big questions like, is my child still around? Is their essence, is their soul somewhere? And if they are, are they okay? Are they being cared for? And not only that, will I get to see them again because I miss them. I miss their physical touch. I miss their smile. I miss even their annoying things that used to do. I miss those things so much and these parents go on the spiritual quest and like me, they find a ton of hope and reassurance and comfort and solace in near death experience accounts because here are people who quote physically die, but their spirit's still going on. And not only is their spirit still going on, but they're going to a pretty amazing place and they're seeing deceased relatives and they're seeing angels and God and they're feeling these wonderful feelings of love and peace and universal knowledge as we just talked about. So these parents who are just devastated wondering, is my child still alive and where did they go and are they being cared for? Can hear about these NDE accounts and know, wow, okay, there's thousands and millions of these people who have died and they were taken care of and they were still alive and they were greeted

58:01 by loved ones and our pet who passed away two years ago was there waging his tail licking their face excited to see them. So in this absolute horror of having a child pass before them, they get a sense of hope from these NDE ears and what we do is with my different books that I have our 10 lessons book, we will do a book discussion group where we'll take one of these lessons and we'll read it and then get together as a group and talk about it. And for so many of these parents, a lot of times, unfortunately, because our society doesn't handle death well, they've lost half of their relationships with their friends because their friends don't know how to talk to them anymore, they're uncomfortable or half their family has kind of ostracized them when they need them the most because most people in our society don't know how to talk about death and for a lot of them, just hearing their kids name and that they're thinking about them goes a long, long way.

59:05 So I think part of it is this hope that the near death experiencers provide for these families, but also when you get a group of 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 moms and dads who are going through this ordeal together, when they can talk about their struggles and talk about their breakthroughs and talk about their happy moments and maybe a sign they got from one of their kids, then it helps make this journey a little bit just less gruesome for them. So it's something I, not only have I learned a ton from near death experiencers, I've learned just as much from parents who've had children pass away and it gets me, one of the things I do with my own daughters anytime she leaves the house, I've got to have some kind of physical touch with her because now I realize there's a chance she may not come back because just as these parents I work with, they thought when their kids went out the door or whatever it may be, they'd see them again and they didn't in some cases in their family.

1:00:12 So it's hopefully been a mutually beneficial opportunity for the parents that I work with and definitely for me. That's beautiful. Thanks a lot, Jeff, for being on with us today. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you, Eric, for asking me and thank you for getting these messages of hope and healing out there. I know you've got a great following and I look forward to continuing to listen to your podcast as they do provide me with a lot of hope and healing as well too. Thanks again for listening and remember to share this podcast. To be notified when the next episode goes live, follow us on your podcasting app or click over to roundtripdeath.com and sign up for our email newsletter.

1:00:54 One last thing, we are continually trying to improve this podcast and we value your feedback. If you have a comment about what you like or what we can do better or a near-death experience or that we should have on the show, send an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com and that's Eric with a C. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.