Welcome to Round Trip Death, the podcast where we have discussions with people who have experienced death, seen the other side, and returned to talk about it.
Today we have a very, very special episode that you'll want to share with family and friends.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Melvin Morse, and if you're not familiar with him, let's just say that most people consider him the world's leading scientific authority on near-death experiences.
We will hear about his studies, but don't worry, he's not a boring scientific geek. He's a medical doctor who is passionate about this subject and has the research to back up his beliefs.
Today on the show we have an unusual guest, an 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.
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, you know, I hope people will appreciate what I have to say, even if it comes in a kind of a spooky, gravelly voice.
Well, I'm sure they will. And that was kind of profound. We don't want to wait until the time is 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.
I taught medical students and residents 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 come at this naturally.
This is something that I sort of stumbled upon and I feel a responsibility, frankly, to share this information.
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 near-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.
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 Merzlock.
And she had nearly drowned in a community swimming pool in Boca de Hala, Idaho.
She was underwater for 20 minutes, documented. And our team went in to resuscitate her.
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.
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 heartbeat back, got her breathing,
and she was transferred down to a 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?
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 that they, you know, 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.
I thought I would never see you, you know, walking and talking like this.
And she looks at her mother and she says, 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 a patient's eyes shut because we don't want stuff to fall in their eyes while we're resuscitating them, et cetera.
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.
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.
So 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 a 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 a coma.
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, you know, hallucination at the point of death, et cetera?
That does not do justice to what's going on. These patients are clinically dead.
She had no brain activity. She is not having a 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.
Are you familiar with the study that just came out? I'm not sure from where that 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. It's nonsense. These things are done.
We'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.
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 there is not these are not neurochemical bizarre reactions at the point of death.
These are brains that are not functioning.
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, you know, that are limited by our five senses.
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. Morris. 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.
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 how did you get the children to describe what they experienced?
Mostly by drawing pictures.
Children 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.
This one young man, he was underwater for 45 minutes and freezing cold water.
And there's a 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.
Well, so that that's you're actually seeing him trying to put this into human terms.
My favorite one is a young girl.
She says to me first, you know, 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. 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 cart thing.
And I heard all the nurses yelling. And she says to me, and then I saw my grandmother 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.
Wow.
But I've interviewed enough adults to understand that.
Unfortunately, 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.
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. Their mother says he didn't have a birthday party when he 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, describe Christian religious figures.
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.
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.
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, 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 that kids use, is God.
We don't have a mutual understanding of that.
And 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 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.
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.
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 work with us and they work 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.
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 that's 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?
And she goes, I didn't think you were supposed to be able to talk to God.
So even at her age.
Now, I've got to tell you something else about our study.
Sorry, this is a little out of order, but that's OK.
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.
OK, how many remembered something from their experience?
How many didn't? I know I've read recently that in adults who's who have, quote, died or in other words,
their heart stopped, they came back a little under 20 percent.
Remember something that happened? Is that is that right?
And is that what your study showed to you?
You're talking about Ben Von Lommel study.
And we did our study at Seattle Children's Hospital.
And then I collaborated with Ben Von Lommel.
And so he did a very similar study in adults.
And we wanted to make sure that we were comparing apples with apples.
We wanted to both do very similar studies.
We don't know why adults report.
You know, 12, 20 percent of them have these kinds of experiences.
That was not our experience.
We interviewed 27 children.
Twenty three of them reported some sort of near death experience.
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.
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 pin von Lommel 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.
We're in the same scary intensive care unit also had the feeling that they were going to die.
So that's one theory. You know, these are sort of fear of 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.
You know, this research has been done. Ben von Lommel 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.
Ben von Lommel 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 most still skeptical?
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, well, scientists say that these experiences aren't real.
So I say, OK, which scientist was that?
And if it was a scientist, usually it isn't.
But if it was a scientist, it was a scientist who's outside the field, you know, is just not aware of this type of research.
But I don't know of any, you know, 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. You know, 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 resistance.
It's our society. Our society is not nurturing spirituality.
That we don't see spirituality is 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,
is it because people think, OK, if these are real, then there must be a God?
I mean, is that 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?
Round Trip Death.
Round Trip Death. OK.
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 a hundred years.
And I don't know of any 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. They think that they're merging with some sort of spiritual light.
Children who I've interviewed now, dozens and dozens of children.
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 get in 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. Oh, there's a humbling experience for a doctor.
Yeah, that was great. Anyway, so at the point of death, your consciousness is 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.
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. 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.
But when these guys tried to explain our 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, that and the other.
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 that 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 Eaglin, 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.
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, the brain just doesn't work that way. We can't 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, 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, this might sound like a minor point. It is not.
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.
You know, so that, I guess that throws out the hallucination hypothesis, what I'm saying. When you hallucinate, you see colors, you know, of this reality.
When you are seeing something that is truly unique, it's just, remember, we only see a tiny visible spectrum of, you know, 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.
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.
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 if it was real, you got to tell all the old people.
So I really took that seriously, and I tried to think to myself, you know, how can I, how can we know if this is real?
Well, you know, they see God, but I don't know how we can prove if God is real or not.
I don't, you know, 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, you know, all of reality.
So that's something that we can test. Is that true? Is there truly a informational reality, you know, that all information exists and that we can access?
And we can. And we know that because of the science of controlled remote viewing.
And controlled remote viewing 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, you know, well, I mean, this whole journey for me has been a long way from Johns Hopkins.
You know, first learning that 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.
So that was something that I just.
You know, I couldn't take other people's word for it.
And so I went to the military remote viewers. You know, our government has a huge program of controlled remote viewing.
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.
And the United States government, well, Saddam Hussein was discovered in part by military remote viewers.
Can you explain a little bit more what that is? 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 work their protocol and they determine that Saddam Hussein was in a dark, enclosed place that was probably underground.
And sure enough, that led to actionable intelligence. And they found Saddam Hussein.
So that, you know, they've recovered downed aircraft.
You know, 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, it doesn't come to your ordinary senses.
Well, the only way that could really be true is if that information exists in some sort of, you know, the informational reality, which is what people that have near-death experiences.
That's what they say. They say they enter into a world in which they know everything.
And this is not actually all that far-fetched. 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 that it's a respectable scientific theory.
It has practical applications in controlled remote 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?
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 melvinmorsmd.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 that 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.
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, it would black out and crash their plane and lose millions of dollars in aircraft,
which I'm sure was their main concern.
I don't want to be in that study either.
Well, I know the guys that did that study, and that does seem to be their main concern.
But anyway, so they whirled them in these centrifuges.
And the pilots lose consciousness.
They go into coma.
They frequently have seizures.
They lose their, you know, belt on.
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.
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 Transformed 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.
You know, you were going to say they become priests or something.
Well, 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 Winnery is another guy I know pretty well.
He told me the same kind of thing happens, that these experiences are transformative.
So 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.
Well, 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.
All of the money I made from my books, I plowed back into my research.
I lectured and still do lecture quite a bit.
Again, I always donate my lecture fees back to the institution.
I consider this to be sacred information that people need to know about.
I feel honored that these are patients that I by and large resuscitated, or my team did.
So we don't have to have all that, were they really near-death and all that kind of stuff.
I meet skeptics all the time.
People who say, you know, this is bunk, this isn't true.
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 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, your Christmas cactus that always bloomed in late November,
and now it's starting to bloom on the anniversary of your son's passing, 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 they don't get any validation.
And then there are people that just prey on the con artists that are just trying to,
I don't know what their motives are, but you've 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.
I hate to pause right in the middle of a fascinating discussion, but we have a lot more from Dr. Morse.
So this episode has been split into two parts, and the second half will be released later this week.
If you want to be notified the minute it's available, go to roundtripdeath.com and sign up for email updates from us,
or hit the follow button on your podcasting app for updates from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever one you use.
In part two, we get a lot more personal with Dr. Morse as we discuss how the knowledge gained from his studies has affected and changed his life.
Hope to see you again for part two later this week.