#343 - BONUS Episode: Dr. Melvin Morse's Study of Childhood NDE's

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 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 realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome to this bonus episode of Round Trip Death.

0:41 Earlier this week, we released episode number 342 with special guest Susan Walter. In that interview, we referenced a prior episode in which we had a discussion about children and NDEs with Dr. Melvin Morse. This show is an abridged version of that discussion, and I think you'll find it fascinating. Today on the show, we have an unusual guest and unusual in the fact that Dr. Morse, who we are about to hear from, is not someone who experienced a near-death experience, but he's someone that has studied the topic and dealt with a lot of people that have had them.

1:22 And we're going to get a medical perspective on things today. So Dr. Melvin Morse, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It is such a pleasure, Eric. I've been looking forward to this. And before we get into your medical background, do you want to tell people what's going on with your voice? Yeah. I just had some surgery on my throat, so I apologize for sounding kind of hoarse. But on the other hand, we just want to talk and get this message out there. If we wait until the time is right, you never know when that time will be. Whereas, I hope people will appreciate what I have to say, even if it comes in a kind of a spooky, gravelly voice.

2:08 Well I'm sure they will. And that was kind of profound. We don't want to wait until the time's right, because you and I have been going back and forth trying to make this thing happen for a while. So I'm so happy that we finally have you today, and your voice is just fine. Anyway, would you mind telling us a little bit about your medical background so people understand a little bit about the scientific study that you have? Absolutely. You know, near-death research is kind of my hobby as a former associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington for about 20 years.

2:52 I taught medical students in residence at Seattle Children's Hospital for 25 years. The studies that I did primarily were in the Department of Neurology, having to do with neuro-oncology, anti-cancer drugs, things such as that. I was a critical care physician and also in private practice pediatrics for many, many years. So, you know, I don't really comment this naturally. This is something that I sort of stumbled upon, and I feel a responsibility, frankly, to share this information.

3:34 Okay, where did you go to med school? I went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, and trained at the University of California at San Francisco, and then did more advanced training at Seattle Children's Hospital, University of Washington. I completed a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in neuro-oncology, which is, you know, brain cancer, basically. Okay. With that kind of resume, I don't think anybody can dispute that you're a real-life doctor. What got you interested in your death experiences in the first place? So I worked primarily in critical care medicine for many years, and I worked for an outfit called Airlift Northwest, and we basically flew throughout the Northwest to small community hospitals, picked up critically ill children, resuscitated them, and brought them back to Seattle Children's Hospital.

4:33 Well, my mom always loves to say she's had a near-death experience. She loves to say there's no coincidences, but just by coincidence, I just happened to pick up a young girl named Crystal Merzlach, and she had nearly drowned in a community swimming pool in Boca de la Lido. She was under water for 20 minutes, documented. And our teen went into resuscitator. She was so close to death that I told her parents that they should go in and, you know, basically say goodbye to her. They had a prayer circle at her bedside, and I said that they needed to prepare themselves that she could go at any time.

5:21 Let me just mention to our listeners that Crystal was on our show a couple of weeks ago. So if they want to hear this story from her side, which I think is fascinating to put the two together, go back to episode number 232, and you can now hear both sides of this story. Okay, doctor, keep going. So, well, you know, against all odds, we were in fact able to resuscitate her. Got her heart beat back, got her breathing, and she was transferred down to Primary Children's Hospital in Utah and then made a complete recovery three days later. And it's interesting, the nurses at her bedside said that the first thing that she said when she woke up was, where is Andy and Mark, who are apparently her playmates in heaven?

6:14 Wow. So how did you hear about this, that she had gotten better and had this experience? Well, I just happened to be working at a community clinic in Pocatello, Idaho. It was part of my training. At the ivory tower, we want young residents to be exposed to what it's like to work in the community. So another coincidence. I just happened to be in the very office that she came in for follow-up after she was discharged. And I looked at her and I said, well, Crystal, I bet you don't remember me, but I sure remember you.

6:59 I thought I would never see you, you know, walking and talking like this. And she looks at her mother and she says, huh, that's the man that put a tube in my nose. I don't like him. I didn't like it. Okay. That's crazy. How does she know that? That's what I thought. I thought that's crazy. How could she possibly know that? And for people who think that perhaps somehow, you know, maybe she was conscious during her resuscitation, we routinely tape the patient's eyes shut because we don't want stuff to fall in their eyes while we're resuscitating them, et cetera.

7:41 So she's not seeing in any way. And yet she was able to describe her entire resuscitation to me blow by blow. Now some people talk about lifting up out of their body and being in that room. She mentioned that she was in heaven or some kind of a heavenly place and could just look to the side and see what was going on down there with her body. That's what she says. But all I know is that she accurately described everything that we did. She said, then I saw you put me in a big donut, which was her description of a cat scanner.

8:22 I had to call my superiors at Children's Hospital because it's kind of a complex case. I didn't know exactly how to handle it. She was able to repeat my conversations with them word for word. But clearly, I mean, this isn't what I learned in medical school. Clearly she was conscious and alert and awake at a time that I know that not only was she in coma, but it was in depth of coma that few patients recover from. We score comas. She had a Glasgow coma score of three. It's very unusual for a patient to survive after that profound coma.

9:08 And certainly they're not hearing and seeing and processing information. You know, Eric, there's a lot of the reason as a medical professional, I feel obligated to discuss these experiences because I'm always hearing people say, well, isn't this just some sort of a dream? Or isn't this some sort of neurochemicals at the point of death or some sort of hallucinogenic hallucination at the point of death, et cetera? That does not do justice to what's going on. These patients are clinically dead.

9:50 She had no brain activity. She is not having hallucination. She is not dreaming. She, by at least conventional medical training or knowledge, she shouldn't be having any experience, none whatsoever. Instead, she's having this incredibly complex emotional experience. She's accurately describing everything that's happening to her. And then she says she's in heaven and talking with the heavenly father and being given a choice to return to earth or not. And this is not consistent with modern neuropsychiatry.

10:35 Are you familiar with the study that just came out? I'm not sure from where that tried to explain these, the way that you just did, whereas there's some kind of chemical reaction that happens when your heart stops. Are you familiar with that? Yes. If nonsense. These things are done. They're actually real life critical care physicians. These are patients that I personally resuscitated by and large. After Crystal's experience, I returned to Seattle Children's Hospital. I was working with the head of the Department of Neurology, the head of the Department of the Intensive Care Unit.

11:19 And we basically said this does not fit what we're taught in the medical textbooks. And we needed to investigate further. So we systematically studied every single survivor of cardiac arrest at Seattle Children's Hospital over a 15 year period. And I'm talking about patients that I personally put a needle in their heart to restart their heart. So I mean, there is not, these are not neurochemical bizarre reactions at the point of death. These are brains that are not functioning.

12:02 And yet the only way to explain this is to flip what we thought medical science for years has thought that the brain creates consciousness. The only way to understand the near death experience is to see consciousness as using the brain to create this reality. Because then now it makes sense when the brain dies, then of course, consciousness becomes expanded. You have a greater sense of consciousness and awareness. So once the brain is out of the way, then of course, you can hear and see things that that are limited by our five senses.

12:51 And remember, we can only see what we can perceive with our senses. Once the brain is dead, then the consciousness is freed to experience a much greater array of reality. Well, what kids call the real, real. It was real. It was real. Dr. Morse, it was realer than real. And that only makes sense if not some kind of chemical reaction of the brain, but the death of the brain, getting the brain out of the way. And that is what's happening in these patients. The difficult thing that I have experienced with adults that I've interviewed is they've had an amazing experience like what you just described with these children.

13:40 But then they're trying to explain it to me in words that aren't capable of describing it. We just don't have good enough adjectives yet. How did you get the children to describe what they experienced? Mostly by drawing pictures. Some draw pictures that speak much deeper than any kind of words. And furthermore, children have very, they're not trying to translate this into human terminology. Their words express the sincere awe and wonder of it.

14:23 As one young man, he was under water for 45 minutes in freezing cold water. And there's old adage in critical care medicine, until you're warm and dead, you're not dead. So he was successfully resuscitated. And he says to me, well, I was in a huge noodle. And then he stops and he goes, no, no, it couldn't have been a noodle because noodles don't have rainbows in them. And so he said it must have been a tunnel. So that's you're actually seeing him trying to put this into human terms.

15:07 My favorite one is a young girl. She says to me, first, again, this is the one that I had to put a needle in her heart to resuscitate her. So that's near death. I mean, that's that's death. Yeah, that's there by any criteria. That's not some sort of, you know, there's no specialized neurochemicals going on in the brain in that sort of situation. Nothing's happening in her brain. So she described, she said, yeah, I saw you getting that crash guard thing. And I heard all the nurses yelling. And she says to me, and then I saw my grandmother.

15:48 And I was just so shocked to see her. And then she stops and she says, and then I was back. And I said, well, what do you mean by that? And she clenches her fists and she says, that's what I'm trying to figure out. But I've interviewed enough adults to understand that. Well, I don't know if it's unfortunate or not, but adults want to fill that gap. It's much harder for an adult to simply say, that's what I'm trying to figure out. You know, as adults, we just have a natural instinct to want to fill in the blanks.

16:33 And I mean, you know, going outside the field of near death experiences, by and large, when you ask adults, even simple questions like, what was your 14th birthday party like? They will tell you in great detail what their 14th birthday party was like. And then you can ask their mother. The mother says, he didn't have a birthday party when it was 14. It's just as adults, we have that urge to fill in the blanks. And we fill in the blanks with what we know. So you know, obviously then, people are Christians, described Christian religious figures.

17:14 I did a near study of near death experiences in Japan. We heard all Japanese religious figures. I did a study with some African psychiatrists. And we heard all sorts of African imagery. They don't travel in tunnels in Africa. They get into gourds and they come out of gourds. And apparently that has some sort of meaning, you know, which frankly, I don't understand. We just have to understand that this reality, Eric, is the invented reality. We create a mental model of this reality.

17:54 Our eyes aren't video cameras. Our ears aren't microphones. Instead, we sample the sensory information that is surrounding us. And we take that information in our brain and creates a mental model, which is what you and I are experiencing right now. Well, our mental models are pretty similar because we have similar brains. So think about what happens when you have an experience that's completely outside your mental model, that you have absolutely no frame of reference whatsoever.

18:38 So what do I mean by that? Well, even the color red, Eric, is a part of a mental model. And think about it. When you're two and three year old, your parents are constantly telling you, that's red. That's red. So we have this mutual understanding of what is red. But we don't have a mutual understanding of what the light that comes to us when we die is. We don't have a mutual understanding of what this, I'm going to use the word the kids use, is God. You know, we don't have a mutual understanding of that.

19:20 And so as a result, then it's very, very difficult, particularly for adults to describe these experiences. And that's why I love working with kids because they just candidly say, I saw a light and it had a lot of good things in it. And kids are so ridiculously honest, just blunt, honest. They are not going to make something up to make you feel happy. But I think it was a great blessing for these children to have a doctor who believed what they were saying. I've interviewed so many people that said, I had my near death experience 30 years ago.

20:00 I told my doctor and I told my teacher or somebody and they didn't believe me. And they said, just keep it quiet because you sound crazy. And that must be very difficult emotionally then to process what's happened and to deal with it and it's usually 20 years later, they finally feel like they can talk about it. But since you are helping children and saying, yes, that's a real thing, I imagine that really helped their mental health as well as everything else. Eric, what you're saying is heartbreaking because remember what our study was. Our study was not, we didn't permit volunteers.

20:43 You know, people didn't come to us with their experiences. Instead, we identified survivors of cardiac arrest and then we got their permission, the parents permission, to interview the children. And we heard that story again and again. And it just is heartbreaking and you're absolutely right. We had clinical psychologists who worked with us and they worked with those families and to try to bring validation to those children and tell those children that they weren't crazy because, for example, one child had in fact, she was given the assignment as, you know, a typical school assignment, write about the most memorable thing that you can remember.

21:27 And she wrote about her near death experience and the teacher called up her parents and said, you know, she's just making stuff up. She's like fantasizing and I can't have that in my class. You know, that wasn't a class assignment. I had another little girl, this kind of a funny twist on it. She told me she hadn't told anybody her experience, not even her parents. Because remember, we simply interviewed everybody. You know, we didn't know whether they had an experience or not. And so I said to her, well, how come you didn't tell anybody?

22:08 And she goes, I didn't think you were supposed to be able to talk to God. Wow. So even at her age. Now, I've got to tell you something else about our study. Sorry, there's a little out of order, but that's okay. I would like to hear a lot about your study. So I don't mind you backtracking. I'd like to know how many kids were in it, how many remembered something from their experience, how many didn't. I know I've read recently that in adults who have quote died or in other words, their heart stopped, they came back a little under 20% remember something that happened.

22:50 Is that right? And is that what your study showed to? That's right. We're talking about bin von Lommel study and we did our study at Seattle Children's Hospital and then I collaborated with bin von Lommel. And so he did a very similar study in adults and we wanted to make sure that we were comparing you know, apples and apples. We wanted to both do very similar studies. We don't know why adults report, you know, 12, 20% of them have these kinds of experiences. That was not our experience. We interviewed 27 children, 23 of them reported some sort of near death experience.

23:39 And we defined a near death experience as meaning that they were conscious and alert and awake at a time where we knew that they were clinically dead. So most of the kids that we interviewed had this experience. Now you talk about this issue of, you know, that oftentimes children aren't believed and many times adults aren't believed. But our study addressed an issue that really needs to be emphasized because what breaks my heart is many people that have these experiences don't believe them themselves.

24:25 And even in the year 2022, after all the research that's been done, I hear people tell me experiences that you could start a religion over and yet then they say, oh, but that was just a lack of oxygen to my brain. Oh, that was just the chemicals that they gave me when I was dying. That was just some sort of crazy hallucination. Our study and then also PINVon-Lummel study, we looked at that specific issue. Remember I told you that we interviewed survivors of cardiac arrest. We carefully compared them to other children who were treated with the same chemicals, the same lack of oxygen to the brain, were in the same scary intensive care unit, also had the feeling that they were going to die.

25:23 So that's one theory. You know, these are sort of fear death experiences. You know, the brain's way of, I don't know, you know, maybe, you know, making it so death doesn't seem so bad or something. And none of our control patients had this experience. Absolutely not. We wanted to really make sure this was correct. So we interviewed hundreds of control patients, patients who were exactly like our children who survived cardiac arrest except they weren't at the point of death. You know, you've got to get the word out, Eric. The research has been done.

26:05 You know, this research has been done. PINVon-Lummel study was of eight different hospitals in Holland. He studied hundreds of adults and found the exact same thing. These experiences are the dying experience. These studies are published in the most prestigious medical journals. PINVon-Lummel study is published in the Lancet, which is arguably the most prestigious medical journal. We published our studies in the American Medical Association's medical journals. So has it made a difference? Do most doctors now believe this or are most still skeptical?

26:48 No, most doctors believe this. I don't think the problem is doctors. I think it's the problem is that this has not trickled down into the general public yet. I think it's just, well, I'll just give you a hint. So I'm always hearing from people, they'll say, will scientists say that these experiences aren't real? So I say, okay, which scientist was that? Even if it was a scientist, usually it isn't. But if it was a scientist, it was a scientist who's outside the field. It was just not aware of this type of research.

27:32 But I don't know of any, certainly no practicing physicians, nobody who's in the hospital setting dealing with dying patients. We all understand that this experience is in fact the dying experience. The general public, I think, is having a harder time. And that's interesting because it's true. 40 years ago, doctors used to tell patients they were crazy. And I would agree that 40 years ago, doctors by and large thought that these experiences were hallucinations. But I just don't think that's true anymore. I think it's that the resistance will not really resist.

28:16 It's our society. Our society is not nurturing spirituality. That we don't see spirituality as something that's real is, I think, the long and short of it. Yeah, I have questions about that. One of them is, and you may have to speculate on this, is it because people think, okay, if these are real, then there must be a God? I mean, is that the leap that some people are making why they don't want to accept it? All right, Eric, what's the name of our show again? Roundtrip Death. Roundtrip Death.

28:57 Okay. People that have died and come back to tell us about it. Yeah. And at least in the medical literature, that's been there for well over 100 years. And I don't know of any scientific or medical literature that disputes that this is in fact the dying experience. So let's see, Eric, when people die, they by and large have an expanded sense of consciousness and awareness. They think that they're outside their body.

29:38 They think that they're merging with some sort of spiritual light. Children who I've interviewed now, dozens and dozens of children. And I just, I love children because they're not trying to, you know, the word God can be a very divisive word for adults. You know, some people, oh God, I've given lectures and people come up to me and they say, I don't believe in God. I believe in a higher power. And it's just great to talk to children because they say, God told me that he saved me when that came up. I was telling the nurses that our team had saved her and she corrected us and she said, no, God saved me.

30:25 Oh, there's a humbling experience for a doctor. That was great. Anyway, so at the point of death, your consciousness has expanded and you think you see God. Well, Occam's razor, which is, you know, the principle that the simplest solution is probably the right solution. Occam's razor would be, maybe there's a God. I mean, it's kind of hard to reach any other conclusion. I'll tell you this much.

31:06 I certainly agree that these are not after death experiences. And I have many thoughtful conversations with other neuroscientists, et cetera, who do point out that, you know, this isn't an after death experience. These people are clinically dead, sure, but, you know, the death is not as cut and dry as, you know, as people think. You know, we have patients that have no vital signs for 20 minutes and they come back to life and we have other patients that you think they're going to get up and leave the hospital and they abruptly, you know, pass over.

31:50 But when these guys try to explain or women try to explain why we would see God when we die, they twist themselves into knots. It's almost impossible to explain other than there actually is a God. I mean, it's just, why would we evolve such a system? What possible evolutionary, you know, why would human beings evolve seeing a God when they die? It doesn't help you to live any longer. Doesn't make your life any better. Has no survival advantage. You get all twisted up and that's why you have all these ridiculous, oh, well, it must be this neurochemical is being released to death and this and the other.

32:40 The near death experience is an amazingly complex experience that involves emotions, sensation, intellect, rational, you know, every part of, you know, of your intelligence. That's not some sort of dysfunctional hallucination when you die. That's an incredible experience of another reality. There's no other way to scientifically explain it. And remember, I told you about the color red, you know, colors. Yes. Okay. So David Aigleman, who is I don't know, I think he's the premier neuroscientist explaining the brain and he points out that we can't imagine a color that we can't actually perceive.

33:40 So because like I said, we create colors in our brain, brain colors do not exist in nature. And yet those who have the near death experience suddenly see colors that they have never seen before. And if that, that to me is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that they are seeing something real because it's just, if the brain just doesn't work that way, we can make up a color unless we have some sort of sensory input that goes along with it. So when these children say to me, I saw colors that I've never seen before.

34:20 I believe them. They're seeing something that does not exist in this very limited reality. We had an artist on this show a little while back. He's a painter. He had a near death experience. Really interesting, saw a lot of nature and that kind of thing. And I asked him if he had tried to paint it because he can't describe the colors well enough. And he said, you know, I tried to paint it, but the colors were not in my palette. Exactly. But this might sound like a minor point, it is not.

35:05 To me, that's the most compelling piece of evidence that near death experiences are real is that they see colors that do not exist in this reality because we simply don't. So that, I guess that throws out the hallucination hypothesis, what I'm saying, when you hallucinate, you see colors of this reality. When you are seeing something that is truly unique, it's just, remember, we only see a tiny visible spectrum of light. So suddenly, when our brains out of the way, when our eyes are out of the way, all of a sudden we can see the whole range of colors that there are.

35:56 So they're seeing something real. Well, if they're seeing something real, they're probably seeing a real God too. I'll tell you what I did to try to answer this question. First, I got to tell you why I was inspired to do it. God, I love working with kids. So this kid, he tells me about his near death experience, and then he goes, but was it real, Dr. Morse? Because it was real. You got to tell all the old people. So I really took that seriously, and I tried to think to myself, how can we know if this is real?

36:38 Well, they see God, but I don't know how we can prove if God is real or not. I don't even know if we can define God. But this is something that they do say. They say they enter in a world of all knowledge. They say that suddenly they know everything. They understand all of reality. So that's something that we can test. Is that true? Is there truly a informational reality that all information exists in, that we can access?

37:19 And we can't. And we know that because of the science of control-removing. And control-removing is the art of entering into that informational universe and coming back with very specific and validatable pieces of information. Now, that sounds kind of real. I mean, this whole journey for me has been a long way from Johns Hopkins. First learning that dead, dying brains actually have an expanded sense of consciousness. And then learning, or at least speculating, that we can access information beyond our ordinary senses.

38:06 So that was something that I just, you know, I couldn't take other people's word for it. And so I went to military remote viewers. You know, our government has a huge program of control-removing. And I learned how to do it. And it's absolutely true. You can, in fact, enter into this informational reality and come back with real verifiable information in the United States government, where Saddam Hussein was discovered in part by military remote viewers. Can you explain a little bit more what that is?

38:46 What does that mean? Remote viewing is the ability to get information from beyond your ordinary senses. So for example, well, you know, Saddam Hussein is halfway across the world. They were trying to find him on a farm. And they were unable to find him. Military remote viewers, they have a very specific protocol that they use that was developed by scientists at the Stanford Research Institute. And they worked their protocol, and they determined that Saddam Hussein was in a dark and closed place that was probably underground.

39:34 And sure enough, that led to actionable intelligence, and they found Saddam Hussein. So they've recovered down their craft. They can, Soviet military secrets have been looked at by remote viewers. And basically they're sitting in a room in Fort Meade, Maryland, and accessing information and that you, you know, doesn't come through your ordinary senses. Well, the only way that could really be true is if that information exists in some sort of, you know, informational reality, which is what people that have near death experiences.

40:23 That's what they say. They say they enter into a world in which they know everything. And this is not actually all that farfetched. Information theory is in fact the reigning scientific theory of how the universe works. And information theory essentially says that reality consists first and foremost foremost of information. And then the material world is based on that information. So this idea that we're basically information, not material beings, is a, that it's a respectable scientific theory.

41:11 It has practical applications and control of viewing, which our government spend millions of dollars and people have near death experiences. That's what they describe. I'm sure you've heard that from adults as well. Sure. So at least that tiny piece of the near death experience is definitely real. Yeah. For our listeners who maybe love all the hardcore science kind of stuff, are there any other studies on near death experiences that you would recommend? Okay. There is. Let's narrow it down. Where would someone start if they wanted to see some?

41:53 Here's the problem with near death research. Everybody has a little piece of the puzzle. And I'm just going to have to say that you got to go to my website. That's what I put my website for. It's melvinmoresmd.com because I tried to put all these little pieces together. I'm laughing just because this is so astonishing. The military did their own study of near death experiences. And they experimentally proved the near death experiences are real. But you've never heard of that, Eric, because it was published in an aeronautics scientific journal, which most people, particularly consciousness researchers and spiritual seekers, don't actually read the aeronautics literature.

42:52 But this study came out of the National Warfare Institute. They took fighter pilots and they whirled them in centrifuges at tremendous speeds. And their goal was to see what kind of G forces the pilots could endure. Because obviously they don't want a plane to be able to fly faster than a pilot can handle, you know, with blackout and crash their plane and lose, you know, millions of dollars in the aircraft, which I'm sure was their main concern. Judge, I don't want to be in that study either.

43:33 Well, I know the guys that did that study and that does seem to be their main concern. But anyway, so they whirled in these centrifuges and the pilots lose consciousness. They go into coma. They frequently have seizures. They lose their, you know, bowel tone. And then right at the point of death, when the blood flow has theoretically stopped in their brain. These fighter pilots regain consciousness and they frequently have out of body experiences.

44:15 They have the same kind of amazing spiritual experience. And it's transformative. I did a study of the transformations of, you know, people that have near death experiences are quite transformed. I wrote a book about that called transform by the light. These military pilots, after they have these types of experiences, they immediately quit the military and become family therapists and stuff like that. Okay. I thought you were going to say they become priests or something.

44:56 The wealth that I don't know. I only know one of my good friends was actually one of the military fighter pilots who went through this and he spent most of his time doing war games for the national warfare Institute. After he had his centrifuge experience, he immediately quit the military. He has a nonprofit in which he supports disabled veterans and became a family therapist. And according to the head researcher, Jim Winery is another guy I know pretty well. He told me the same kind of thing happens that these experiences are transformative.

45:39 So that the science is there. They're just, you can't get away from it. If I read on Facebook one more time that science debunks near death experiences, I'm just going to barf. The science is there. You know, you can believe everything on Facebook. For those that don't know me, sarcasm comes naturally. Let's talk about something you just mentioned for a second. You mentioned transformative, how it changes people. Eric, I'm going to interrupt you. I'm sorry to do this to you. It's okay. Go right ahead. It's just I've done this for 35 years and I don't really have a horse in the race because my income is primarily from being a physician.

46:26 All of the money I made from my books, I plowed back into my research. I, you know, I lectured and still do lecture quite a bit. You know, again, I always donate my lecture fees back to the institution. I consider this to be sacred information that people need to know about. And I feel honored that these are patients that I buy in large, resuscitated or, you know, my team did. So we don't have to have all that, you know, were they really near death and all that kind of stuff. And I meet skeptics all the time. People who say, you know, this is, this is bunk. This isn't true.

47:08 And by and large, I find that almost everybody I meet has had some sort of profound spiritual experience and they dismiss it and they trivialize it. And they don't think it's scientific and they don't, they don't feel validated. And that's got to stop. Science is validating your spiritual experiences. If the near death experience is real and it is, then your premonition of death is real. Your after death experience is real. The experience you had that your Christmas cactus had always bloomed in late November and now it's starting to bloom on the anniversary of your son's passing.

47:58 That's real. And you know, maybe science can't prove that, but the science of the near death experience is so solid, is so profound, is so unshakable. That really, to me, it really validates the whole range of spiritual experiences. And even the most skeptical people, by and large, they've often had spiritual experiences and then they look around, there's a lot of con artists and, you know, and they don't get any validation. And you know, then there are people that, you know, just prey on, you know, the con artists that are just, you know, trying to, you know, I don't know what their motives are, but you got to look past all that and start to trust your instincts because your spiritual experiences are real if these children's experiences are real.

48:55 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, you know, 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.

49:35 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, you know, that's from my own religious upbringing. And that part of it was my own preconception in 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.

50:16 But they're not going to be able to sort that out if they're constantly second guessing themselves. And that's a normal thing as adults, because, you know, 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, okay, what really happened? Was I dreaming? Was I, 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.

50:57 It's, you know, it's when you're not oriented to person place, you're misperceiving things, you're taking ordinary experiences and twisting them in some way because of your own personal fears, or your own psychology, or your own biochemistry, 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.

51:42 So by definition, you're not crazy for having them because at least a third of our brain is dedicated to having spiritual experiences. Yeah. I'm going to just brag about all the books I read, I guess. I wrote a book called Where God Lives. 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 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.

52:33 The only scientists that have challenged it have said, wait a minute, Morris was all wrong. It's not a God spot. 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.

53:16 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, 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.

53:57 We have a frontal lobe that allows us to process all sorts of higher mental processing. Nobody doubts that real. And we've got a big area of our brain which allows us to communicate with God. 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, et cetera. That's unfortunate. I'm not using that in God in that sense. You know, I'm not saying one person's God is the right God, another one's the wrong God.

54:40 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 of dogmas. Okay. I did ask you 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.

55:22 So and that's a scientific fact. Okay. So 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 sad in 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.

56:08 And that's the word I hear the most. 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. 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.

56:54 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. 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 who'd passed. Her grandmother was helping her with her homework. Okay. Why not?

57:34 Yeah. I mean, these experiences are very real and very pragmatic. Another experience a young man told me that his father would pass, still took him fishing. You know, it was sort of there spiritually where the money went fishing. So finally she says to her grandmother's pass, 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, yes, well, this conflicted with their church's belief of what heaven was like.

58:20 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. 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?

59:02 And you know, all this kind of stuff. And 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. It just was the sort of thing you might tell a child. And so it is, it's 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.

59:51 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. I mean, really, I'm not too much about process. I'm pretty much about the bottom line. But I, you 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.

1:00:32 I mean, even if you really read the religious tracks and the Bible and, you know, the various religious writings, they only say you've got to get the ego out of there to understand God. And it's our own ego that keeps us from understanding God. Well, that's a great way to get rid of your ego is to have your brain die. That 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.

1:01:13 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. Okay. Getting back to something I asked, seems like ages ago now. 20 minutes or so ago. The transformation. Transformation. How do these change people? I'm sorry. I'm laughing. I'm laughing because... That's okay. Let's have a good time here. This journey has been so astonishing for me and nothing really is all the encounter intuitive for me.

1:01:54 So 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. 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 near death experience on and on like that. And we learned what the great secret of life is by doing this.

1:02:38 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 have near death experiences. They're more likely to be in helping professions in our control group. They... When personality studies, they definitely are nicer. They have almost no fear of death. We gave them all sorts of 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.

1:03:23 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. And when we ask them, what did you learn from your experience? When 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?

1:04:06 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 giving him some sort of, I don't know, messiah complex or something. So I said to him, okay, 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.

1:04:47 And he said, those numb 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 who he thought his life was all about was to run a small remodeling construction company and hire all his high school friends. 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.

1:05:27 And when I talk with adults who have near death experiences, I'm sure you've heard the same thing. This one woman I interviewed, she was the head of a large pharmaceutical company and she's 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. 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.

1:06:19 And, you know, for an overachiever like myself, you know, proud of my books about 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, 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.

1:07:07 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. 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 the age three, age five, it's not really coming to me how they express it.

1:07:52 But you just get that sense from them that they understand that this world is about love. All right, Dr. Wright, I'm going to get a little bit more personal with you if you don't mind. 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 is it's made me pay a lot more attention to other people's feelings and frankly, unloving ways that I've been.

1:08:53 My failures of love, my failures of being able to love other people. And thinking that that was important in my life was writing a paper or 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.

1:09:37 And once I could understand that, it's a lot easier then for me to start to understand other people and how I've heard them. And even to the point where I learned a meditative technique called Tong-Glin 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.

1:10:21 She was a teenager and I asked her, I said, you know, what is it meant 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 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 out-of-boy and we're going to get a sense of you did your best.

1:11:15 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, the 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 whatever it was, that whatever we're struggling with was a lesson.

1:12:04 Maybe we failed the lesson. 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 then 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.

1:12:52 And whatever it is that I'm struggling with. So those are the two ways that 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.

1:13:34 You know, I'll expand on that just a little bit. I'll share with you a story from a good friend of mine. He unfortunately got drunk one night and ran over a elderly woman and killed her. And after years struggling with this in serve time and 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 he just decided to forgive yourself for getting drunk and running somebody over.

1:14:17 And I said, well, what would you tell 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 too. 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.

1:14:59 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 then, you know, but it's true that he couldn't then move forward. 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.

1:15:41 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? 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.

1:16:25 I wanted to publish papers. That's the academic, you know, I wanted to write books. 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. I had my own struggles. 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.

1:17:13 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? Thank you so much for opening up, being vulnerable. Wow. 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.

1:18:00 And so people can see how this has applications for grieving for grief resolution. And then I have a particular interest in working with recidivism prevention, working with the X incarcerated and bringing another heroine addiction. 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.

1:18:40 That's a good, that's a good thing. Thank you. I appreciate it so much. Alrighty. I mean, I'm going to ask you if you have any last thoughts first, tell me on a scale of one to 10, 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 she, 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.

1:19:22 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, et cetera. I'm not sure that's true, Eric. The near death experience to me says that we're here to learn lessons of love. Well, those lessons of love by and large are pretty painful at times and can involve a lot of suffering. And I don't think, and you have to learn, you have to live it.

1:20:09 It's not a Facebook bumper sticker slogan. You have to actually make mistakes, fail at those lessons and understand what you did wrong and be willing to look at them. And I didn't understand till I actually had to face my own challenges. And every single person here that's listening to this, you know, you're, there's a song that I often listen to that says, would if your blessings come with tears, what if it's raindrops?

1:20:53 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 is, there's a reason for the various things. Well, they say it, I understand why there's war. I understand why there's 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.

1:21:41 So it's not for sissies, you know, learning your lessons of love. Mr. Earthlife is not for sissies, and I do believe there's a message of hope and 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. That's beyond dispute. We're going to get an out of boy or an out of girl or, you know, we're going to get that, that hug of unconditional love and unconditional love. Think what that means here. People don't think of that.

1:22:21 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, this dying experience? Unconditional love, non-judgmental. That means you're not being judged. The judgment comes because you judge yourself, 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.

1:23:05 The non-judgmental God, I think, is more terrifying in many ways. But I believe all lovings still. Absolutely. Yes. And 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. Oh. Oh, you've got to have a couple of favorites. Well, my favorite is, I'll tell you 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.

1:23:54 And she drew a rainbow. That was, but I just, my favorite one is the young girl that said to me, I said, I'm sure I saw a light and it had a lot of good things in it. 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 it, so I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.

1:24:36 If you've had a round trip death experience, we would love to hear from you. Send an email to Eric at roundtriptest.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.