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show. Welcome back to the laughing matters podcast y'all. I am your host WS Walker and well, we are
tackling momentary departures to the afterlife. So let's get after it.
I've been reading up on the science side of near death experiences recently, also known as NDE's
and the origin of that whole field of study. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but for
most of my life, I hadn't really made up my mind about God and I'd really not given full credit
to the people that, you know, had reported near death experiences or people who experienced
miracles or you know, that reported angel sightings. It wasn't that I didn't believe them.
I didn't think most of them were lying. I just, I think it was more that I had already predetermined
that that was to be filed under whether or not I believed in a God or that God existed or
really had nailed down any of the defining parameters of God. And there was no file
cabinet part of it designed yet to hold those files. And therefore they were all filed away.
And the I don't know yet bit got pretty full. So until recently, the main opponent of these reports
in my personal belief filings was that I had remembered hearing that scientists had put forth
a apparently very convincing theory that there were sporadic bursts of neurological activity
and a large DMT dump that occurs, you know, when the biochemistry and the body changes as the body
is dying and they are outside of the basic points where people's stories overlap that I'd seen
in some documentary on an old TV when I was like 12 or 13. Whatever I remembered from that,
and then the tropes that we all heard in, you know, media, television, movies, like everybody
seen a new somebody who dies momentarily comes back. It's, it's expected in Hollywood at this
point, I didn't have much, you know, to go off of, and I really never noticed, but then
nobody really talked about it happening. That was not a subject that came up a lot in the
sixties or the fifties or the forties. It's only in the later 1900s that we see these arrive for
the first time. And I mean, look at us now, everybody in pretty much the world, I would assume
has heard of a near death experience or something that goes along with it, you know, floating up to
the ceiling, watching the people around you work to revive you going to a bright, lighter tunnel.
Seeing a loved one or meeting Jesus Christ or God themselves. It's, we've all heard or seen these
things in countless movies and such that we've watched or read, right? It's saturated. So near
death experiences, and this actually surprised me to learn this, they really only got to be a
household name and like the 1980s and the term was never really heard of before. It was, it was
a term was never really heard of before 1975, which was when the term was coined in a book called
life after life. Its author at the time of writing the book was a, he was an MD with PhDs in
philosophy and psychology. His name was Raymond Moody, but that was in like 1975 when he published
the book, 10 years before that as an undergrad, he meets this guy, Dr. George Ritchie.
Uh, so Dr. Ritchie is a professor of psychiatry, uh, who tells him about this nine minute experience
he had where his body was dead and Raymond Moody soon after heard another account and he would end
up spending the next 10 years of his life researching others who had had similar experiences
and ended up tracking down over 150 people who had experienced a very similar thing to what George
did. And so we named the phenomenon near death experience and his published findings, which is,
I mean, it's not a very good name for it. The fact that nearly all of these cases were the result of
clinical death. It's kind of a misleading name. They didn't go near it. They passed straight
through it and out the other side. So bad name Moody. I'm sorry. It's not, it's not a great name.
Whatever. We're not going to kick him while he's down. I think, no, he's still alive. Raymond Moody.
Let us check. Okay. So he's alive. Um, he's 74 years old today and apparently in 1991,
he's stating that he had his own first near death experience. He attempted suicide.
Wow. I did not know that. I might add a little bit in here. He didn't. All of that aside though,
why was it that nobody had heard of this concept? Like even if it didn't have a name, I mean,
people die all the time, right? Without near death experiences being public, like media knowledge,
people who experienced them, that would be, you'd be talking about it without precedence. Like most
likely whoever's hearing this is hearing this concept, not just them talking about their
experience, but the concept that this is an experience that could be had for the first time.
I did several of the people that Moody spoke to stress this. They wouldn't offer the information.
They wouldn't come forward and say, Hey, I've had this experience. But if someone asked them about
it, they loved sharing this wonderful experience with them. And I mean, can you blame them for
keeping it quiet? I mean, let's be fair 40s, 50s, 60s, not exactly the rock and roll. I mean,
not exactly the rock star years with diagnosing and dealing with mental illness. Electroconvulsive
therapy was still popular in the sixties and seventies. So we have all this working against
people coming out and speaking. And at the same time around the seventies, we were getting a lot
better at bringing people back who had technically died. It's interesting to note that it was the
early 1970s that the defibrillators started showing up in the average hospital as they were
finally able to become, you know, portable, portable enough to be feasible. And we have
Northern Irish professor and cardiologist, James Frank Pantridge to thank for that.
He was actually able to get the weight down to just under seven pounds. And as a result,
ambulances could start carrying them. And suddenly the ability to restart a heart with
miniature lightning pads could be raised to the sides of those who had recently shuffled loose
the mortal coil, but were apparently still within an arm's reach. So I've actually really enjoyed
reading up on the science side of heaven and been researching outside of this. There has been
kind of a ridiculous amount of research. Like I had no idea. I did not realize that the scientific
community hadn't really ever settled on these experiences being explained as a burst of
neurological activity from a dying brain. And that seeing a tunnel was replicated by stimulating the
right synaptic paths during the biochemical and the changes that are occurring when you're dying.
And I remember that being put forth as the, you know, the dying brain theory being kind of
science's last say on the matter. And it seemed to me like at the, at the time that this was kind of
like where scientists, I, this was the stop that they were getting off the train at. And I pretty
much just let that be what it was. I mean, it wasn't something that people just brought to the
conversation. And so they're my understanding of it state as well, but I was wrong. Dead wrong,
nearly dead. This is so stupid.
Oh, I like me. Okay. Bandit. Judgy eyebrows for me. It's weird as he's getting older,
he's getting white right here. So it kind of gives him eyebrows. It adds layers to his expressions
now, but it wasn't until very recently that I found out that this was actually not at all the
case. The only real study of the neurological burst activity theory was it was a study of
four hospital patients. They were hooked up to EEGs, which showed neurological activity. And
they died from cardiac arrest while they were hooked up. And two of the patients had their
heart rates increase as well as showed an increase in gamma wave activity, which is the fastest brain
activity. But here's the thing. Number one, four person sample size. That's that's you. You won't,
you need more people for a study. Number two, there were four people that were hooked up.
Two of them showed this burst of gamma wave activity and an increase in heart rate
simultaneously right before they died. But again, here's the thing.
I'm guessing some of you have already figured out what I'm about to say.
If your heart rate is increasing and there's fast brain activity happening,
you have not yet died. You're not dead yet. And as for the DMT dump claims, the study that those
articles are referencing, they gave people a concentration of two people. And they were
a concentrated dose of DMT in a lab, which was more than your body can produce in the course of a
year. They listed several of the traits that near death experiences have in common with one another.
And then they asked them if they felt more like those near death experience traits that people,
you know, experienced. They asked them while they were high on DMT, did they feel those traits more
than when they were sober? So, you know, do you feel like closer to an outer body experience
while you're doing DMT? Probably. Do you have an expanded consciousness right? Yeah. Uh huh.
Ego death was five stops ago. Not to mention, sorry, but not to mention that the amount of DMT
that was produced in our bodies is so small that in order to result in a complete
disassociative hallucination, the dose would have to be so high that the pineal would have to
suddenly produce and distribute more DMT than it has in total over the course of your life,
of your life, your entire life. I don't, I don't think that these are scientifically sound. Who's
pitching these? Anyways, but you know, we've seen that time and time again. Uh, there's,
there are people that will latch onto a study because it's an option. It's not a probable
option. In fact, a lot of times they're just looking for, is it possible? Is it possible
that this is the case? The least likely case that could be proposed. It's still has validity
because it could potentially could happen. I digress as it happens. Dr. Jeffrey Long put in
about 30 years of extensive research into that subject. And he concluded summarily that it was
not possible with a flat EEG for electrical activity in the lower brain to produce a highly
lucid and ordered experience. Let me say that again, highly lucid. So you are there. Things
make sense. Things make sense after you leave the place and talk about them in life. It's
completely fallible and it's ordered, which means everything happens in a cohesive order. That right
there. Okay. I'm listening. Do you got me? I apologize, but I really wanted to share my new
found joy with this because seeing the science side of it is so refreshing. It's, it's really
extremely interesting to note that people who reported the experiences early on before the
world was really wired into each other without being able to hear about other people's experiences
with near death experiences, all tended to describe the main core elements and impressive
similarity. The basics of so many of these stories, they line up. There's definitely different
things that occur, but there's a central core that keeps coming back to including one very fascinating
one that John Burke, the author of imagine heaven as a very good book, but he points out that
children who have had near death experiences before they have a concept of life or death,
they still described only meeting deceased family, friends, pets, you know, but only deceased ones.
They didn't, they didn't know what it was to be dead or what it was to have somebody die,
but yet none of them in their experiences featured meeting anybody living. So we know it's not
imagined. Plus getting a kid to tell an ordered story repeatedly without changing it. If it's
something that happened, not, but okay, actually probably pretty difficult, but people also of
their near death experiences feel a report feeling as if the memory is somehow more real,
more tangible. It doesn't fade, you know, years and years and years and years later, it's still a
crisp memory for them. And that's, that's really cool too. So over the years, Dr. Long performed a
study of 1300 participants. Each one of them had confirmed died and come back with a story to tell.
So he took the data from all these reports and found 12 elements that reoccurred with a frequency
that was, was really telling to the authenticity of the reports. So number one, an out of body
experience, you know, some kind of separation between consciousness and the physical body,
75.4% reported that we have number two, the heightened senses, you know, more conscious
and alert than normal. A lot of people actually talk about being able to see something like 10s
or hundreds of miles away, just like zoom in, like you're there, just all of a sudden,
and they're able to see it. They can look at somebody and know what they were thinking.
And they just felt good all over their sense of touch, their sense of taste, their sense of smell.
They were smelling and seeing and feeling all these things that they, you could not see or feel
as a human being with our limited senses, 74.4% on the senses. Number three was intense and generally
positive emotions and feelings, including an incredible piece that was 76.2%. We have number
four, which is passing through a passageway, usually enclosed like a tunnel. That was 33.8%.
We have number five, which is encountering a mythical or bright light entity. So that was
64.6%. We have number seven, which is a sense of alteration to time or space, like
while zipping around at the speed of thought or teleporting. That was 60.5% of 1300 studies
that were mostly put together before it was a mad media phenomenon. It's just mind blowing. If this
was a study for anything else that we could physically further test and prove, it's just
mind blowing. If this was a study for anything else that we could physically further test and prove,
we would consider this the front running theory. Like this, so much of it lines up.
That would be, yes, statistically viable. For number eight, we have getting some kind of life
review where they lay out your whole life all at once and you can see every part of it all at once.
And you have the ability to concentrate on literally all of it all at once. So only about 22.2%,
still a significant statistic, but only 22.2% got that. So I guess the ones that got that needed
that got that. And then you have number nine, which is encountering other worldly realms,
going to heaven, going to hell, going to, you know, going wherever you go. That's going to be 52.2%.
And then we have number 10, which is encountering or learning special knowledge,
such as things that were happening in the physical world while they were brain dead and they had no
way of knowing or recording the memory. That was 56% y'all. That's ridiculous.
So second to last of our 12 is going to be encountering some kind of boundary or barrier
that they could not go past, which I have to say, I got a bit of a thrill when I was reading that.
That plugs right into my, we are not allowed to know theory. 31%.
I don't know why I said that one like that, but you have it now. And number 12, of course,
is returning to the body, which that's going to be 100% obviously, because you can't really get
the near path and near death experience without it. So many people described their spiritual
afterlife bodies and I've thought a lot about them, how their true form, they felt like themselves
for the first time, the form that is truly them. They could fly and they float and they would simply
pass through walls and travel on a thought, vast distances and were surrounded by light and love.
And I think about how unrestricted those bodies are compared to the fleshy vehicles that we drive
around, you know, its brain with its, its computational amazement, still shortfallings
that can't view more than a memory or two at a time, much less an entire lifetime and focus on
all of it at once. The skin suit that we have is something that the spiritual body has to keep
alive. It has to nurture it, despite the fact that it's surrounded by potential life-saving
constants. Fortunately, it has this handy dandy brain that is really good at latching on, on
creating a predictable life. But you know, watch the rest of the series if you want to hear about
that. But this means that we can't zip around to wherever we want on a thought, you know, we have
mass, so gravity and air friction are a thing. And that spiritual body could go flying through
space on a thought if it wanted to, while our flesh bodies would require a constant and abundant
amount of oxygen intake at all times not to go into full system shutdown. A space is very cold.
And if we put these bodies outside of a very small window of too much or too little heat energy,
it either cooks and injures or freezes and stops that meat vehicle. That your spirit, your
consciousness, your soul, afterlife body, that it would choose to take on these caveats, these
handicaps on a level of Harrison Bergeron's for you Vonnegut fans, and that it's only on the day
that the vehicle finally breaks down for good and falls for good. That it breaks out of its
restraints and unshackles from all the rules and the conditions of our physical realm.
Our body auto-ejects the pilot, which, you know, is now just that core body, one that is saturated
and light and love. It's interesting to hear people say how good it felt to be in that form and
how their moment to moment worries were just gone. And everybody inherently wants to stay.
That's one of the things that lines up across so many of the momentarily departed's accounts,
is that the reason they chose to return is never because they want to go back themselves.
They felt incredible, better than they've ever felt. And everything was saturated in light and
love. They never want to return to life on earth because they picked life on earth.
No, if they are given a choice, the ones that choose to return always did so because they had
people they felt they needed to be there for. Now you guys, you guys have to know at this point why
I find that marvelous. As much as I advise that our connection to one another is the point of all of
this, inherently when all of this mess that is our physical life is gone, to get that reassurance
that they otherwise have no desire to go back and they want to stay there and the only thing that
can make them choose to leave that place of light and love like they've never felt before, the
greatest place that anyone could be, they choose it because of the ones they love.
Take a moment and picture yourself right where you're sitting, right where you're standing,
right where you're driving or where you're going. Picture that spiritual self exploring the world
of the physical and that needy and distracting demanding flesh suit completely foregoing romping
the literal universe not limited to these three dimensions for it to stay here tethered to all of
our pain and all of our sensory short fallings and we don't just choose to return to life on earth
and limit it by these meaty bone bloody restrictions. Most of us actually heavily fear
letting go of these bodies. Now I get why we so thoroughly invest in these amazing meat suits. I
mean in nearly every single case these bodies are individually unique. They are unique. They are
unique. You know everybody gets their own that isn't like anybody else's. Those bodies are also
completely shapeable, malleable, constantly customized. We decorate our bodies with the
stories of our lives. Every scar or wrinkle or tattoo or piercing or haircut, every outward
appearance we choose for ourselves including how we eat, sleep, exercise and clothe ourselves.
I've heard several statements from witnesses in the rooms of someone who was about to die
and not come back in which they stated that those people often said something about a presence in
the room, often angels or someone that they loved who had previously passed. But in near-death
experience accounts there weren't any that before the person died they said something about presences
in the room. No angels, no dead loved ones, no Jesus or God meeting them while they were alive.
It was only after they left their bodies that once they experienced death. It's such an interesting
I don't know what to do with that but the fact of the matter is not a single account that I could
find had that in it. So maybe that's just when it's when it's actually time for you to go.
Well, they meet you at the door. It's just it's really interesting that there doesn't seem to be
an overlap there. It's almost like you know for the for those of us left behind when someone dies
who's not coming back with their tail, sometimes we're given the opportunity to get a glimpse
of the other side. For that person to give you the gift of knowing that there's something
after. Whereas the people that come back have the choice to talk about it or not.
And from what these accounts describe I mean the afterlife is magnificent. I mean provided you go
to the good one. And you guys I'm sorry I really should have gone into more details of the accounts
but I kind of want to stay on the science side of it and just kind of contemplate based off of what
these reports say. And the the reports that I've read the people that give the reports are still
dumbfounded about how magnificent it was. I mean I mentioned before and I'll stress this point.
Read Imagine Heaven by John Burke. My mother who is an advid and constant listener of the show
gifted this book to me several years ago. She assisted several times at the end of the show.
She assisted several times. It's like every time we would show up for a visit it would come up that
I needed to read this book. But she stopped pestering me about it after a while. And that
was back when I had zero education and near-death experiences. And then several months ago my Aunt
Nancy cornered me at a get-together and insisted that while everyone should read it I especially
needed to read it. My Aunt Nancy is also like one of the most die-hard listeners of this show
and has read my book twice. I love you so much. My mother has read my book as well. Thank you.
But one of the things that I've said for a long time now is that I don't believe that we were
told that heaven was a motivation that this should be transactional. That it should motivate you to
do proper actions. I don't believe Christ told us, you know, quote, be good so that you can go to
heaven. It's something that I hear quite a lot of the time and I've seen it dangled from quite a
few sticks in places of the carrot. And I'm sure we all have. You do this to get that. You'd be
surprised at just how many people think that good deeds are contributing to the admission fee.
That's got to be worth some points up there as they do something for somebody else. And I feel
like that might not be why he was telling us about that. You should be kind to one another because
that is the right thing to do. I believe the real reason he spoke to us about heaven was so that
we wouldn't fear the consequence of death. And likely that's why we get these stories
when people come back that even though their brain and their memory recording was technically
turned off, they're coming back with these experiences, these memories that should be
impossible. That should not be possible. That really shouldn't be put. How did it record
whatever they came back, they've got the memory. I would say that's, that would be a pretty big
miracle part of it is just the fact that it recorded the memory. Somehow, somehow it's in
there. There you go. But we get these little glimpses of the don't be afraid to die for
doing the right thing. Don't be afraid of anything for doing the right thing.
And you got God looking out for you. But even the consequences, hey,
he get to go around the universe on a thought feeling better than you ever have, you know,
in your truest self. Oh, and remember the people that you love who have died. They're waiting for
you. I believe it was his way of telling us not to fear doing the right thing, even if it looks like
it would take you out of this plane of existence. I mean, after all, all fear comes from the fear
of the unknown. And by telling us of heaven, not only does he dethrone that fear from death, which
is, I mean, if there was ever a banner boy for the fear of the unknown, but it also reassures us of
life through faith, it stacks up logically. Let's think about our decisions from this angle. Let's
think about them as as gifts that we give to God. And I think that one of the most crucial elements,
if not the most crucial element of that gift that we're giving God with each of our decisions is
the intent behind it. Like that's one of the most influential elements of it. It affects the taste
of it, so to speak. And which gift do you think he would prefer if that's the case, the one where you
remembered that there's a heaven and that you want to go there and time for you to make a kind or
generous or helpful decision? Or the one where you chose to help or be kind or to give because you
care about them and you want for their happiness because you love them and because Jesus told you
to love them and that's what you're going to do, dadgummit. And you see the benefit in it. You are
in that flow of life-affirming love. I feel like that latter one is going to be worth a lot more
and it's also easier to do. You don't have to deal with the internal turmoil of it. So in summation,
be good to them because you love them. Be good for them because well you want for their happiness
and not because of what you get. And you're after. It's going to be fantastic.
I'm WS Walker. You're the fantastic you and eventually the unfathomably magnificent you. Be sweet.