Transcript
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From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
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They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
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And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
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physical body because I was somewhere else.
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The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
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anything else to be felt.
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I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
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I'm back home again.
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Incredibly safe and felt at home.
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Welcome to RoundtripDeath everybody and I am so, so excited for this show today because
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we have Dr. Raymond Moody and Paul Perry here live with us.
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Say hello.
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Hello.
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Hi.
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Thanks for listening in.
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If you are students of near-death experiences, you've heard of these two people.
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If you're not, let me just give you a very brief background so you realize who we're
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talking to here.
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Dr. Moody is the leading authority in the world on near-death experiences.
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In fact, he was the one that coined the phrase near-death experience back in 1975.
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Or I think.
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1974.
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So nearly 50 years ago, authored many books, many studies on the subject and thank you
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for being with us, Dr. Moody.
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Well, thank you, Eric.
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And thanks again to the folks listening in.
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This is so fascinating.
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It's you and I have already mentioned and it's just, I'm delighted with people who listen
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to me.
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Well, thank you.
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And Paul, what I have here about you is you are a co-author of five New York Times best
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sellers.
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Right.
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You've co-written dozens of books on near-death experiences, four of them was Dr. Moody and
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directed two popular documentary films on the subject.
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Right.
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Oh, come on.
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You can say more than just write.
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That's amazing.
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You know, I've really written over a dozen books on near-death experiences.
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It's only that five were New York Times best sellers.
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And well, since you've given us the right to have bragging rights, I've also written
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a number of other books as well.
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I wrote a biography of under S. Thompson.
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I went to Egypt and followed the trail of Jesus through Egypt.
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The hits just keep coming.
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That's great.
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And we could talk to each of you for hours and hours and hours, but we're going to get
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right into the topic that this podcast is all about, which is near-death experiences.
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And I know that a lot of what's in your most recent studies is also shared death experiences.
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Let's start off with talking about the difference between the two, maybe a definition of the
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two so people understand.
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Okay.
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Well, the interesting thing about near-death experiences, which occurred to someone who
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almost dies and it's revived and shared death experiences, which occurred to people who are
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not ill or injured, but who are present at the death of someone else, that those two
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kinds of experiences are actually identical.
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And they consist of the same phenomenon.
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We've known for years about the near-death experiences where people there in cardiac
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arrest will say they live their bodies, they watch the scene of the resuscitation from
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above.
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They eventually realized that nobody could see them.
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Nobody could hear them, although they can see perfectly what's going on.
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They realized, oh, this has something to do with death.
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And they talk about from this point on, no matter how articulate, no matter how many
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degrees, no matter how brilliant, how brilliant they are, people say, I just keep
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this car for you.
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There are no words.
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But the best they can do is they say they proceed through this passageway.
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They come out on the other side into an incredibly bright and warm and loving light.
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And in that light, say that relatives or friends of theirs have already done, seem to be there
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as a greeting, committing almost.
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Then at some point in this, everything else kind of disappears.
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Time stands still and they see everything they've ever done in a sort of panorama all
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around instantly, often in the presence of a being of complete compassion and love, who
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helps them review this.
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And in this review, they say, you see everything you've ever done, but you see it also not
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just from your perspective, but from the perspective of those with whom you've interacted.
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So if you see yourself doing something mean to somebody, then you feel the hurt.
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And if you feel, see yourself doing a kinder action, you feel the good feelings.
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And when people come back from these, whatever they have been chasing for, knowledge, as
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in my case, or power or fame or money or any of these other things, people say, what, this
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is all about his love.
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It's learning to love.
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Now shared death experiences are the same phenomenon, except they occur not to somebody
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who almost dies in return, but who somebody happens to be there at the death of someone
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else.
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These occur to doctors as well as to the friends and relatives of the dying person.
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One of the things that people say is that as grandma or whoever died, that they see
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something leave the body, it's hard to describe, they try to say it's like a cloud or what,
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but it is very difficult for them to describe it.
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They say it lifts, leaves from the body.
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And other people say that, yeah, as grandma died, I myself left my body and went up partway
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toward this light with her.
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Then I came back to my body.
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Or people say that as their loved one is dying, that apparitions of the dying person's deceased
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relatives come into the room, people can see them.
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And that people say the room fills with white and most troubling to me in a way, this is
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the most thought-provoking thing I know from my studies.
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It is common enough that it can be studied cases of where the bystander empathically
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co-lives the dying wife or you.
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The first two of these that I really studied happened to be from women, middle-aged women
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who had lost their adolescent son.
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And then I began to hear from other groups as well, including and Carleton Georgia, this
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woman who had been literally the childhood friend of her husband.
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They had been together all of the life then.
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But as she was telling me that as he was dying in the hospital, he was very old at that time.
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But she said she was watching this life review all with and they were communicating with.
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Now you see, that's so troubling to me because I'm hoping to recuse myself from my own life
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review.
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Much of the idea of a spectator there is all they're troubling to me.
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However, people say that it's not like that.
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What I learned as a psychiatrist is we all have pretty much the same secrets.
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And so it makes sense that to the person who's having this, it will be natural.
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I always assumed it had to be somebody intimate, but some years ago, Cheryl and my wife and
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I got a communication from a doctor who was called to the ER to resuscitate a patient who
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never laid an eye on us.
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And he said, as this guy was dying, his whole wife reviewed, sprang up a link.
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Those are the phenomena we're talking about.
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I have a dozen comments and questions already.
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I'm not quite sure where to start.
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I guess my first one is, as you were describing, NDE's and really the same goes for these
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shared death experiences, SDE's.
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Not everybody has the same experience.
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Why do you think that is?
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Paul, do you have an idea?
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That's the million-dollar question.
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That is a million-dollar question.
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Another million-dollar question is why everybody doesn't have a near-death experience and why
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everybody doesn't have a shared-death experience.
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Why aren't they all the same?
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I think, as far as near-death experiences go, about 20% of people, maybe more, who have
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a cardiac arrest because that's the gold standard of studying because you can't argue
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that a person is actually bearing near-death at that point.
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People have a cardiac arrest, only about 15% to 30%, depending on which study you want
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to take a look at or believe, have a near-death experience.
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It's not possible yet to tell how many might have a shared-death experience because it hasn't
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been really studied yet in that way.
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Is it possible that it's a lot higher than 20%?
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But the 20% is how many people remember it.
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That's correct.
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I wonder if nearly everybody has one, but most people just can't remember it.
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Many people who have a cardiac arrest are given drugs that are a side effect to them
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is that they make you forget.
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So you end up with a lot of people who come out of the operating room and there's several
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people, so we've run into this several times, people come out of the operating room, they're
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in the waiting room, they're trying to talk to their nurse or doctor about a near-death
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experience, and then later when they get an opportunity to actually speak to someone at
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length, they forget most of it or they forget what they were talking about when they come
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into the waiting room, into the recovery room.
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So yeah, I think it's much higher than 15% to 20%.
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Another factor, Eric, is how you collect information.
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Some of these studies where it's 20% have been like a questionnaire.
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Right.
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Well, how would you feel if you suddenly given a questionnaire?
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Well, I think, and yet, Dr. Fred Schoonmaker was chief of cardiovascular medicine at St.
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Luke's in Denver, this is the late 70s, early 80s, and concurrently Dr. Bender was chief
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of cardiovascular medicine at St. Vincent's Hospital in Hamburg, Germany.
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And both of them had found this out from just their patients, you know, and Fred had interviewed,
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I talked to him in the early 80s, about 1600 patients that he had resuscitated.
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And he said that it's about 60% of the people.
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And similarly, Dr. Bender, who had the same method, said it was about 80%.
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Now, these two guys are both what you call oral personalities, and they tend to be sort
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of roundish and orally oriented, and they tend to be humorous and also tend to be oriented
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to service others.
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They often own restaurants, for example.
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And both of these guys, Dr. Schoonmaker and Dr. Bender were oral personalities.
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And you see, it seems to me that, you know, the way they did it, they just come in after
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the resuscitation, and you got very close to what you remember about that.
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Now my guess is that that would be a much more productive way to get some information
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from people that handing them a questionnaire.
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But I don't know.
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And I think that's one factor that's taken.
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You find that numbers to be different with children?
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Well, I want to say one thing about the type of doctors.
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Years ago, we were writing our first book, The Light Beyond, and I was also working on
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a book on reversing heart disease.
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And I was working on it with a doctor in Cleveland.
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And so I went to see this doctor and working on our book, and he said, what else are you
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working on?
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And I said, well, I'm working on a book on near-death experiences.
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And he said, you know, I've resuscitated hundreds of people, and I have to tell you
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that I have never, ever heard a near-death experience in hundreds of people that I've
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talked to.
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And he was called away from the nurses station where we were talking.
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And the nurses came up to the counter, and they said to me, he's never heard a near-death
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experience because he's never asked his patients what happened when they were under.
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And that's, as Raymond points out, it's how you get the information that is in many ways
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very important.
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And then I had a question about children.
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Have there been different studies done on children?
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Are the numbers the same?
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Well, I don't know.
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Now, Raymond's got something to say there, but I don't know that they are because I don't
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think there's any studies on that with children.
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There's studies dealing with children and near-death experiences.
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I've written several books with Melvin Morris who did most of the work on this type of work.
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But I don't really, I've never heard a study on children and how many have you?
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I've never heard it.
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By the way, Paul, Eric interviewed Mel Morris recently.
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Yeah.
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My memory of that interview was he made it sound like the numbers are a lot higher with
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children.
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Like the majority of people that, of kids that he interviewed with the parents permission
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were able to color things that they had seen while they were gone.
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Yeah.
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We have beautiful drawings that children have done of near-death experiences.
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They have tunnel experiences and bright lights and people of bright light and themselves
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looking at them.
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No, they're really beautiful drawings.
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But I think I'm going to make a guess here is that he ran into a lot of parents who didn't
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want their children interviewed about this because parents can be so touchy about, gee,
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this might damage my child or they might start believing things I don't want them to believe
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in.
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And I just don't think anyone's really been able to crack through that wall, which is
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definitely, there definitely is a wall in many hospitals against interviewing people
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about this.
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Okay.
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Let me go back to another statement, Raymond, that you made earlier, which was about the
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life reviews and I find it so fascinating that people tell me about their life review
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that even when they saw things that had hurt others and they realized and felt that hurt,
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they didn't feel guilt and shame.
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So maybe it's not that bad to have somebody there with you watching this.
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And I'm not sure why it is that way.
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What do you think?
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Well, yeah.
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I mean, this existence appears very differently once you cross over that line and things that
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seem so important and troubling here are just fate and insignificance.
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I think that the life review is to me a particularly fascinating part of these near death experiences
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because as you know, I was a professor of logic and in reality, in the real world, it's
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very difficult to draw entrances about this kind of thing.
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But one in the case of these life reviews, if we set aside the notion of an afterlife,
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it is very can be very plain to us right at this moment that you can make an absolutely
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startling and a mind bending inference from life reviews.
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It is obviously now and I mean, you can't get out of this and that is for at least some
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of us life is a two phase process.
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I think we live it forward as the protagonist or the actor.
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Then time stands still, there's a 180 degree turnaround and you've witnessed all of that
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things you've gone from the point of view of other people.
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And to me, I mean, that's a that is a very plain inference.
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You can't get around that.
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When you think for the mom for a moment about that significance, holy mackerel that we have
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a two phase life.
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We lead it forward as the protagonist and then we watch it from the point of view of
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the other people and fall.
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I mean, I think that's just absolutely phenomenal.
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And I assume the purpose of looking back is just to learn and to be forgiven and to get
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a clean slate.
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You know, that's it.
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That's how I look at it.
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I think people really clean slate from their life review.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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That's right.
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It's like this man, a wonderful guy and architect and Zurich who had a profound your
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death experience in 1964 in the Alps when he had a car crash.
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And that's what he said.
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He said, at that phase in his life, he'd done all these things when he said, there
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was this life review and he said it was just solved on.
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And that's presents to some extent a problem at times because once you get a clean slate,
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you're not the same person you were.
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And so you run into a significant number of divorce cases with near death experiences
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because the person they married is no longer the same.
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I've noticed that too.
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The divorce numbers seem to be really high.
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Are there any percentages on that?
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Has that ever been studied?
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Oh, there used to be percentages batted around, but I never believed them.
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I thought they were way too high.
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I don't feel like they were medical journal stuff.
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What do you think, Raven?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I just don't want, you know, I don't have a basis for making that assessment.
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And I just don't know.
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But I do know the phenomenon yet it does occur, but I don't know in terms of how likely it
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is.
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But it's really kind of, we call it the Scrooge effect.
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Oh, I like that.
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Okay.
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Explain that more.
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Well, Ebenezer Scrooge from the book Charles Dickens wrote Christmas Carol saw his business
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partner Marley at late at night.
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He didn't believe in Christmas.
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He ran people away from his door who were asking for money for charity and on and off.
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But Marley came back and he had had it.
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He died and he had clearly had a near death experience because that's really what this
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whole book and TV show is about is Scrooge's near death experience.
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But because he followed the advice of Marley after that, which was to, he had a life review
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and then as a result of his life review, he was also guided through his own life review.
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Scrooge was by an angelic being who of course happened to have chains all over him.
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When he came back, he was a totally different person.
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He opened the door.
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He bought people turkeys.
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He went to a Christmas dinner and started to help Tiny Tim.
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And that's the effect you run into with people who've had near death experiences.
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One of the other things that I hear quite a bit actually, and by the way, for you too,
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this podcast is completely non-denominational.
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We're not pushing any one religion over another, anything like that.
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Nor are we judging or putting down any religions.
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But I've had quite a few people tell me, hey, I thought I should go talk to my clergy about
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this and that ended up being a bad experience.
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Yes, it does.
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Yes.
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Explain why you think that is.
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When I started out with this, it was back in the late 60s, early 70s.
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That was a very common thing I heard from people.
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They said, well, when this happened, I tried to tell my doctor about it.
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But he would either say, oh, it's just hallucination or a dream, or else would say, well, you
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know, you better talk to your minister about that.
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So then they would go to their minister and tell the same story.
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And their minister would say, well, that's out of my... you better go talk to your doctor
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about that.
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So there was this kind of run around that people experienced.
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But I hear many that are even more negative than that, more like, hey, hey, that's not
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in the Bible.
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That's not of God.
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That's what it is, and I went to the wake of my brother-in-law about a year and a half
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ago.
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Half of my family is Seventh Day Adventist, and the other half is Baptist or other.
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I was with the Seventh Day Adventist half that were at the wake.
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And they asked me what I was doing.
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Am I still writing those books?
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And I told them, yes, I am.
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And I told them about the book I'm working on right now, the book we finished, Proof
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of Life After Life.
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One of my cousins are... well, I don't know what the relation is, but I guess he's a cousin
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in law came over and he said, you have to be careful because Satan takes many forms.
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And that was it.
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But there's a lot of inference there that what happened to you was not of God, it was
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of Satan, right?
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Right.
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On the other hand, I have found that Mormons are very accepting of your death experiences.
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They have an old book from, I don't know, it must be the 19th century called The Book
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of Mormon Discourses, and it's full of near-death experiences.
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And then recently, I was talking to a Mormon friend, this is last week, two weeks ago,
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maybe, whose father had died.
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She's Mormon and he died up in Utah.
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And she said that she went up there for her father's funeral, and all of her aunts were
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sitting around talking about experiences like shared-death experiences that they had had.
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I think as a culture, they tend to take care of their people who are passing much closer
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than other cultures do, other religious cultures do.
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So they're there at that time when these people are starting to pass over.
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As soon as Life After Life was published in 1975, I started getting scared.
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I was scared of letters from Utah saying, yeah, we know about this, this is part of it.
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And then when I went to, I lectured at BYU in, I think it was 1977 at the Marriott, so
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they later gave me a, sent a thing that over 10,000 people I think had attended.
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And after the lecture, these kids just swarmed up with their family records, show us their
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own, their great-grandfather, and had such an experience or whatever.
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Oh, that's awesome.
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There are cultures that are very open to it.
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For example, the Salto Indians of Canada had a full tradition of carrying these stories
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of near-death encounters along, and their oral culture for ages.
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And it's interesting when you read them, they're just like, one, when a guy was saying he got
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out of his body, and he said, I came into this place.
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He said it's hard to describe, and it was like, teat-piece of light.
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And you know, that's what people say is, I see cities of light, but he was saying teat-piece.
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From his perspective, and speaking of perspective, getting back just a little bit to the question
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about everybody's experience being different, have you found that their culture has something
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to do with it, if, for example, if they're Christian, maybe they see Jesus, or if there's
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something else they see Buddha or Muhammad, or is that something that's common?
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To a degree, but to a degree not.
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You know, I've had lots and lots of people over the years who say before this thing,
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add just no contact with religion at all, and then all kinds of religions.
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And one thing also, Eric, that people say is that, I hear this often, is that, well,
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I tell you about this experience, I have to draw images or words from my own tradition,
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but that's because the only ones I have, but that it's not like that, that it's far beyond
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the terminology of my religion.
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I think Jeff Long, who has studied this a lot, he founded the near-death community.
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He's a near-death experience research foundation, and he's an oncologist in Louisiana.
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So he's looked at thousands of near-death experiences from all over the world.
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He has an amazing organization.
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And his result on that question is that people, they see the same thing, but they interpret
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it differently.
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So if someone says, well, I saw it being of light, and it was counseling me, and it was
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Jesus, and they'll say, okay, what does Jesus look like?
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Well, in this case, I couldn't see him.
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He was just a being of light.
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So there's that cultural interpretation is like that.
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And as Raymond says, they have to use something from their culture to describe what they're
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experiencing.
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How has, as you've been studying this for many years, both of you, Raymond, 50-plus
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years, has it changed over the years?
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Have you learned a lot of things recently that you didn't know before, for example?
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Well, I can say one way that it's changed a lot, and that is that, as you'll see in
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this book, we have a lot more doctors talking about experiences, their own experiences and
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the experiences of their patients.
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And then we have more doctors talking about some of the, what really edgy experiences,
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like seeing a mist come out of somebody who was dying back in 10 years ago or so.
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You wouldn't have had that at all.
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There's been definitely a cultural change with doctors, that's for sure.
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Dr. Hagen, who was the editor of Missouri Medicine, which is one of the best state medical
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journals.
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Some years ago, did a series and the Missouri Medical Journal of doctors who had had near-death
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experiences or had studied them.
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And the series went on for about 18 months.
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And Dr. Hagen's a good authority on this, too.
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It's just became fascinated by it as a physician.
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So Paul, you mentioned the book just a minute ago.
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It's called Proof of Life After Life.
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Has anyone mentioned to you yet, that is a very bold statement.
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It is very bold.
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I'm sure you knew that when you made it.
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But from my point of view, what you have here is, to me, the primary difference between
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a shared-death experience and a near-death experience is that other people experience,
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someone's near-death experience, are other events as well.
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And that makes it objective as opposed to a shared-death experience, which is subjective
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because only one person has it.
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And therefore, only one person can really describe what happened to them.
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But with this shared-death experience, there's someone else who comes in and says, yeah,
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I went up the title, I saw the same people he did.
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Are there other examples?
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And that's the real difference between what we're doing here and what we've done in the
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past.
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And what we're doing here is that shared-death experiences have a way of proving that consciousness
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can leave the body.
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And it's evidentiary that they can based on shared-death experiences.
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Yeah, you couldn't have a murder trial with just subjective evidence.
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But what we have here is objective evidence.
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I have a little bit of a different take on that, Eric, as a logician because I'm fascinated
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by the concept of proof.
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And there's all kinds of different meanings of that term, of proof.
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What's in my mind, Mosul, is like Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead in the Principia,
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Mathematica, and the notion of a mathematical proof is very fascinating to me.
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But there are other kinds of proofs, too, which have come through the years.
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And the reason I'm OK with this word now is that over the years, or 50 years, people
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have been coming to me and saying, often in the context of a loss of a loved one or a
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terminal illness.
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And they say, Raymond, is there any proof of this in England?
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And they want that word proof, is something.
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So I had to sort of study, what do they want?
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I mean, I know it wasn't what Bertrand Russell articulated.
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What are they asking people?
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And when I would try to put it in terms of logic, people's eyes would just roll up.
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So I realized that's not what they want.
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What do people, most people want when they say they want proof of an afterlife?
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Well, what I finally figured out is, and what I am willing to say is, the question is, is
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it rational to confidently expect and anticipate that there's an afterlife?
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And I say resoundingly, yes, because I can't think my way out of this era.
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You know, I am a skeptic in the general sense.
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These people falsely use that term skeptic.
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They don't know what they're talking about.
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And they make me so mad, not because anything to do with near death experiences, but because
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I love to teach Greek philosophy.
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And when I get to the skeptics, which is a Hellenistic philosophy formed by Pyrrho,
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yeah, I have to undo the damage that these morons have done to my students' minds by
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their completely false and incoherent use of this term.
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They don't know what they're talking about.
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00:32:10,520 --> 00:32:13,040
Let me explain what a skeptic is.
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The skeptical movement was launched by Pyrrho about 30 years after the Aristotle roughly.
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But Aristotle is the person who codified logic and Pyrrho knew logic very well.
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But now he asks, well, if you think about logic as a machine for generating conclusions
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from premises, right?
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So Pyrrho's saying, well, what if we don't follow the conclusion?
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That is, we really press down and ask every question.
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We're very rigorous.
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But in the end, we don't draw a conclusion.
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But why?
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Because, number one, they found, as anybody who does this for any preciful time, realized,
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if you constantly do that, it has this amazing mind-expanding experience.
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You get David Hume that mentioned that, too, the great skeptic of the 18th century.
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And also, if you think about it, and everybody else is heading in this way to get to the
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conclusion, but your technique is to avoid a conclusion, then you see things along the
463
00:33:19,040 --> 00:33:22,480
side that everybody else admits.
464
00:33:22,480 --> 00:33:24,520
You see side effects.
465
00:33:24,520 --> 00:33:30,040
So now, run that knowledge back through these claims of these morons.
466
00:33:30,040 --> 00:33:33,760
You say, oh, I'm a skeptic about these near-death experiences.
467
00:33:33,760 --> 00:33:37,120
I think it's just the chemistry of the brain.
468
00:33:37,120 --> 00:33:43,560
What that ignoramus has just said is, I'm a person who doesn't draw conclusions, and
469
00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:46,280
my conclusion is such and such.
470
00:33:46,280 --> 00:33:52,560
And that is a very annoying thing for somebody who's interested in the foundations of this
471
00:33:52,560 --> 00:33:55,760
whole rational system, the great philosophers.
472
00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:57,400
So that's why I get agitated.
473
00:33:57,400 --> 00:34:01,600
I don't have anything to do with near-death experiences.
474
00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:09,520
But in my skeptical process, Eric, trying to, every way I could, to think of what are
475
00:34:09,520 --> 00:34:10,840
the objections?
476
00:34:10,840 --> 00:34:18,000
What do you think of the things that it, the reasons why it is not, is the way you proceed
477
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:20,800
to get confident.
478
00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:26,200
And in that process, I just reached what were I given up.
479
00:34:26,200 --> 00:34:28,960
And I mean, I can't think my way out of it.
480
00:34:28,960 --> 00:34:37,920
I never felt with that big, oxygen deprivation to the brain because, number one, that depends
481
00:34:37,920 --> 00:34:43,680
on an incoherent theory of the mind called epiphenomenalism.
482
00:34:43,680 --> 00:34:47,120
So there's a philosophical strike against it.
483
00:34:47,120 --> 00:34:54,160
But also in terms of the more practical side of it, one of my own medical skill professors,
484
00:34:54,160 --> 00:34:59,400
my first year of medical skill, told me about having this experience when she was trying
485
00:34:59,400 --> 00:35:02,080
to resuscitate her own mother.
486
00:35:02,080 --> 00:35:03,880
He was dying.
487
00:35:03,880 --> 00:35:10,160
And obviously my physician friend, I have oxygen deprivation to the brain, but she had
488
00:35:10,160 --> 00:35:12,440
this same experience.
489
00:35:12,440 --> 00:35:15,680
And so that's never been an issue for me.
490
00:35:15,680 --> 00:35:23,680
But the fact that it is not oxygen deprivation to the brain simply does not imply that it
491
00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:24,680
is life after death.
492
00:35:24,680 --> 00:35:25,680
See what I mean?
493
00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:28,760
And so this is my process.
494
00:35:28,760 --> 00:35:32,480
I just finally got to the point where I give up.
495
00:35:32,480 --> 00:35:39,760
And some of the events, I have a friend named Anthony Chakoria, who is a PhD in physiology
496
00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:48,680
and an MD, an orthopedic surgeon and a professor of orthopedic surgery, who in 1994 was struck
497
00:35:48,680 --> 00:35:55,160
in the neck by a bolt of lightning and had a cardiac arrest and got out of his body and
498
00:35:55,160 --> 00:36:01,360
went all through this resort center where his family was having a family reunion and
499
00:36:01,360 --> 00:36:02,800
saw what they were doing.
500
00:36:02,800 --> 00:36:06,960
And he told me, he said, this is more real than real.
501
00:36:06,960 --> 00:36:08,560
This is not life to train.
502
00:36:08,560 --> 00:36:11,400
This is hypo reality.
503
00:36:11,400 --> 00:36:17,440
And so when Anthony got back from this, unaccountably, he started to think, well, I'm
504
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:23,040
unaccountably, he started getting interested in the pianos, never in interest.
505
00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:29,440
And he started having a recurrent dream, which he was playing a piece on a piano on a concert
506
00:36:29,440 --> 00:36:30,440
stage.
507
00:36:30,440 --> 00:36:35,880
And so he learned how to transcribe music to transcribe the piece.
508
00:36:35,880 --> 00:36:37,600
And he learned how to play the piano.
509
00:36:37,600 --> 00:36:43,880
And now, in addition to being a renowned orthopedic surgeon, he's a concert pianist.
510
00:36:43,880 --> 00:36:50,560
Now that series of events does not fit into consensual reality.
511
00:36:50,560 --> 00:36:53,040
By the way, he's been on this podcast too.
512
00:36:53,040 --> 00:36:54,040
Oh, really?
513
00:36:54,040 --> 00:36:58,480
And so if anybody wants to hear his whole story in it, it's awesome.
514
00:36:58,480 --> 00:37:03,600
And some of his music we put in the podcast, we'll get that one in the show notes.
515
00:37:03,600 --> 00:37:06,520
I forget the number off the top of my head.
516
00:37:06,520 --> 00:37:10,960
And now here, another one, right out where you live.
517
00:37:10,960 --> 00:37:19,640
An advert graphic artist, Jeff Olson, some years ago, had a car crash in which his legs
518
00:37:19,640 --> 00:37:21,160
smashed off.
519
00:37:21,160 --> 00:37:23,720
His wife was killed instantly.
520
00:37:23,720 --> 00:37:26,960
One of his kids, I think, and then the other one, Leah.
521
00:37:26,960 --> 00:37:29,600
So he was taken to the hospital.
522
00:37:29,600 --> 00:37:37,520
And Jeff O'Driscoll, who's an ER doctor, was there in the hospital when Jeff came in.
523
00:37:37,520 --> 00:37:46,160
And as Jeff was having his near death experience surrounded by tubes and wires, Jeff O'Driscoll
524
00:37:46,160 --> 00:37:52,640
was talking to Jeff Olson's dead wife and the hospital.
525
00:37:52,640 --> 00:37:59,080
And you say, I can tell you, and does another physician, friends of mine, Eben Alexander,
526
00:37:59,080 --> 00:38:01,480
for example, the neurosurgeon.
527
00:38:01,480 --> 00:38:06,320
And all of these people, I trust their medical judgment completely.
528
00:38:06,320 --> 00:38:10,080
If something happens to me, I go to anyone else.
529
00:38:10,080 --> 00:38:16,920
Unanimously, their judgment of their own experience was that not only was it real, it was more
530
00:38:16,920 --> 00:38:20,880
real, in order to awaken reality.
531
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:28,560
So I am in a situation, see, I can't think my way out of how can I trust their medical
532
00:38:28,560 --> 00:38:33,240
judgment to the point that I would put my life in their hands.
533
00:38:33,240 --> 00:38:39,400
But on the other view, what does that do about their unanimous opinions that this was real?
534
00:38:39,400 --> 00:38:40,600
So I give up.
535
00:38:40,600 --> 00:38:42,760
I just can't think my way out of it.
536
00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:47,880
I love that term, and I've heard it so many times, that their experience was more real
537
00:38:47,880 --> 00:38:50,080
than real.
538
00:38:50,080 --> 00:38:54,680
And those of us that have not been through it will probably never understand that, but
539
00:38:54,680 --> 00:38:56,760
more real than real.
540
00:38:56,760 --> 00:39:02,560
But for the antagonists, they're still going to say, Paul, your book says proof.
541
00:39:02,560 --> 00:39:07,640
What other proof do you have?
542
00:39:07,640 --> 00:39:11,800
Today's interview was quite a bit longer than most, so we've broken it up into two
543
00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:13,160
episodes.
544
00:39:13,160 --> 00:39:19,440
We just ended part one with the question, what other proof is there of life after life?
545
00:39:19,440 --> 00:39:23,920
In part two, which will be released later this week, we'll find out the answers to that
546
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:26,280
question from the experts.
547
00:39:26,280 --> 00:39:28,600
I hope you'll come back for the conclusion.
548
00:39:28,600 --> 00:39:32,800
By the way, if you want an email reminder when new episodes are released, click over
549
00:39:32,800 --> 00:39:36,480
to roundtripdeath.com and get on our email list.
550
00:39:36,480 --> 00:39:55,240
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.
