 Imagine you're on the operating table. You've been put into a state of deep sleep and are having some kind of surgery. All of a sudden, there's some strange singing bowl-like sounds. You become aware of vibrations and suddenly you're up and about, standing in the room. Looking around, everything seems brighter, more vibrant and full of life. You turn around to get a better look and the next thing you know, you see yourself right in front of you, lying on the table. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of near-death experiences. NDE's are one of the more curious phenomena of our life experiences here on Earth. Much like psychedelics, they take us out of the mundane world and into something mystical. People who have survived encounters nearing death, or even those who have technically died and being revived, seem to share similar lucid experiences that seem to relate with going beyond their physical body, into another world, a world of light. The whole light at the end of the tunnel and life flashing before your eyes actually originated from psychiatric research on the subject way back in the 1970s. But the truth is, there's a tremendous mystery here, one that today still hasn't been solved. Stories of strange and mystical experiences surrounding NDE's are not anything new. As far back as the 6th century AD, people were fascinated by similar stories in Pope Gregory's dialogues of jesters and businessmen visiting the Christian hell after having accidents. Why hell and not heaven? Hmm, maybe the jesters told bad jokes, or the businessmen made shady deals. I don't know. Either way, individuals who come back from these early NDE's report similar experiences to what is being currently studied today, such as meeting other dimensional beings or lost loved ones, along with a feeling of permanent transformation. If people were writing about this kind of stuff even in the 6th century, it seems that our interest in NDE's has stayed pretty constant. However, as usual, the scientific community had largely written off the events as hallucinations, until late last century. One of the huge icebreakers for this shift in mindset were the experiences of a woman named Barbara Harris in 1975. Nowadays, Barbara is a therapist specializing in the study of NDE's, a successful author, and was on the faculty of Rutgers University Institute on Alcohol and Drug Studies for 12 years. Now, Barbara certainly had more than her fair share in terms of an experience, having not one, but two, deep NDE's in a single week. In a nutshell, she was born with a bad case of scoliosis, a crooked spine, which she struggled with throughout her life. But in 1975, it became too much for her, and she was admitted for surgery to help correct it. After a five-hour operation, she was left in a full-body cast, unable to move on her own. Then, two days after surgery, her life support systems began to fail, as she found it difficult to breathe. She lost consciousness as the support staff ran in to help her. I imagine this probably happened in slow-mo as well. So that night, Barbara woke in the middle of the night standing in the hallway, after worrying that nurses would be mad at her for standing up. Yeah, standing. She made her way back to her room and noticed that she was actually floating level with a speaker that she remembered to be mounted on the ceiling. She looked down and saw herself lying on the circle bed, and as she looked at the woman in the bed, she was overcome with the profound knowing that the person there wasn't the real her, as if her soul was identifying her ego, and in understanding this, she was overcome with a deep sense of peace. Then, Barbara felt this connection with her deceased grandmother, and began to be transported away. She became overwhelmed with the feeling that what was happening to her was more real than anything she had experienced in her life up until that point. She actually said that she gave in to this belief, and as she did, she felt a great toxic energy release from her, and simultaneously was beginning to relive every moment that she had ever had with her grandmother in the nineteen years they shared on Earth. Barbara emphasizes that she wasn't just remembering stuff, she was reliving every moment of her life she spent with her grandmother. At a talk she gave in 2015, she recalls spending dinner with her grandmother when she was only three years old with stunning detail. It's like they were sharing memories. After this journey through her past, she witnessed what she could only describe as a tunnel, and saw a light growing at the end. She felt herself expanding, and moving towards a droning noise, sounding kind of like a singing bowl, until suddenly, she was back in her physical body again. Now, we won't go into all the details here, but about a week later, it happened again. A complication with her bed left her unable to breathe, and she entered into another NDE. Ironically, despite being an atheist her whole life, Barbara's complete inability to describe this energy she felt, led her to later refer it to simply as God. She often still says that, It wasn't an old man with a long white beard, and it took me a long time to use the word God. She describes that she experienced her past at breakneck speed, and with all of this information coming to her about her life, it allowed her to transform her experiences of herself and her life from self-judgment into love. As she understood more and more of her life through the lens of love, a mantra appeared in her head. No wonder she was the way that she was. She understood completely now the impact her mother's drug addiction and her father's absence had on her childhood, and how it had shaped her into who she was today so strongly. She understood deeply how her own mother's pain and neglect from her childhood shaped her into someone who didn't know how to love. The full story is moving and profound, and we'll link her writings in the description below. Now, there is one more interesting thing here. Before she returned to her body, she found herself behind the nurses station where they were talking about her. She overheard them talk about the nurse on duty who had to be sent home after feeling responsible for Barbara's incident. She also caught that they were planning online to her about how long she would have to spend in a body cast so that she wouldn't be even more stressed out. So naturally, when she returned to her body, she explained that she was in the halls during the conversation. And they, of course, didn't believe her. Amused and slightly irritated, she told them to call the nurse and let her know that she was okay and not to lie to her about how long she would be in the body cast. The nurses were... Well, how would you react to something like that? Now, you might be wondering why we spent so long going on about just one woman's case, especially since NDEs are surprisingly common. But the truth is, Barbara Harris' experiences invigorated public interest in the subject of NDEs. All of a sudden, people started becoming more interested in the stories of others who underwent these experiences, too. What really intrigued people, aside from the prospect of a life after death, was the similar themes present in all of the accounts. Leaving one's unconscious body, entering a beautiful, eternal glowing light, or a relaxed darkness seem to be common aspects of the experiences. People commonly described the presence of an all-loving being or consciousness, giving them insights into their own lives. Now, of course, this is humanity we're talking about, and scientists are often rigidly skeptical. So formal research, still continually denying the entire idea, finally got the funding required nearly 20 years after Barbara's experiences to produce collaborative research on the phenomenon and make scientific insights. They couldn't ignore the sheer number of claims without at least looking into it a little bit. So they hired this guy named Hap, who kidnapped some people and killed them and then revived them over and over in a secret basement and recorded their experiences. Wait. Hold on. Our hidden spirituality of the OA episode script must have got mixed in here. Oopsie! Rather, this initial wave of research that wasn't illegal was shared in a Psychology Today article entitled, Bright Lights, Big Mystery. And as always, you can find links to this in the sources of this video. From this wave of research, it was discovered that 95% of the world's cultures have made mention of an NDE in some form. A crazy number to think about. Further, nearly 17% of critically ill patients across nine countries are reported to have undergone an NDE. So NDE's aren't extremely rare. In fact, they're quite common. I suppose, however, that it's also quite paradigm-shattering for if we globally took this seriously, atheism might disappear entirely and the fields of science would never be the same. One contributor to that research, Dr. Melvin Morse, examined thousands of reports of NDE's to try and learn more about them. What's curious about Dr. Morse's research is that despite having no way of proving anything happened from people's reports, the reports he studied were so similar that he was able to paint a picture of what a typical NDE might look like. From independent reports, Morse found that full-blown NDE's shared the nine following features. One, a sense of being dead, the sudden awareness that one has had a fatal accident or not survived an operation. Two, peace and painlessness, a feeling that the ties that bind one to the world have been cut. Three, an out-of-body experience, the sensation of peering down upon one's own body and perhaps seeing the doctors and nurses trying to resuscitate them. Four, tunnel experience, the sense of moving up or through a narrow passageway. Five, encountering beings of light or glowing ones at the end of the tunnel. Six, the presence of a god-like or omnipotent figure or force of some kind. Seven, life review, being shown one's life by the being of light. Eight, reluctance to return, the feeling of being so comfortable and surrounded by the light often described as pure love. And nine, personality transformation, a psychological change involving the loss of the fear of death, a greater sense of spirituality and a sense of connectedness with the Earth and a greater zest for life. This was painting an interesting picture for scientists, but there was still some skepticism and some questions. Was the cultural significance of an NDE shaping what experiences people were having? How do we know that people are actually having an NDE and not just exaggerating a dream or other disassociative experience? Is being near-death actually necessary to undergo what is being reported as an NDE? If being near-death wasn't necessary to undergo the phenomenon, then patients should report them even when they were never in mortal danger. So a researcher named Dr. Stevenson located the medical records of 40 patients who reported an NDE and found that more than half of them were never actually close to dying. This was starting to support the idea that the fear of death was sparking a purely psychological response. But Stevenson wasn't satisfied, and so we found a group of 58 people who reported NDEs and like last time, 30 of whom who had not actually been near-death. He interviewed them and discovered something that they couldn't ignore. A significantly greater number of patients who were actually near-death reported elements of the core experience, including the bright light than those who were not. It seems that truly being near-death is necessary to encounter the established phenomenon. Ironically, in the scientists' attempts to show the experience purely as an experience of the mind, they ended up showing the opposite. At this point, someone probably got a raise or was fired. By this point, science had failed to do what it so often excels at, simplifying the world and squashing questions. And in that failure lies so much wonder and curiosity that has paradigm-shattering consequences for us all. Think about it. If this experience is universal across almost all of the cultures of the world, it breaks down religious ideas like My Heaven or God is the only one, revealing a more unified understanding of what is quite possibly the afterlife shared by all. But it's more than just a culture shock. Recall Barbara Harris' story from earlier. At one point, she was transported to the physical world but outside of her body and heard information that was otherwise secret to her, bewildering the nurses with her knowledge when she awoke. This is so far out there, and Barbara's story is not an isolated event. Back in 2008, something known as the Awareness during Recessitation Program, Aware for short, followed 2,000 heart attack patients across the globe and studied the amount of NDEs that occurred among survivors. Some of these survivors reported an out-of-body awareness and for one of them, the awareness was confirmed to be accurate by hospital staff. A similar study in 2001 looked at similar patients' experiences. With the researchers stating that, didn't appear consistent with hallucinatory or illusory experiences, as the recollections were compatible with real and verifiable rather than imagined events. In a nutshell, somehow these people are aware of the world around them, even sometimes past the range of their physical body despite showing all of the signs of being clinically dead. Now, we're way past our time limit here, but this stuff is just so interesting that before we wrap things up, there's one more important thing I have to share with you. Despite the recent studies seemingly acknowledging these kinds of experiences, helping to affirm their existence, ancient Buddhist texts refer to the ability to enter a near-death experience without physical threat to the body. And the method for this ability is, as you might have guessed, meditation. Of course, in learning of this, people at the Journal of Mindfulness went on a three-year study with monks from different Buddhist schools and monitored them during meditations. Amazingly, the monks were seemingly able to plan ahead of time when, and even how, the NDE would manifest. Along with this, researchers confirmed that meditation-induced NDE's produced the same long-term mystical enhancements in a person's life. As always, if you want to read these studies, you'll find links to them in our sources below. So, what do you think is really going on? Even today, mainstream science tends to believe that an NDE is simply a psychological phenomenon, one where the brain is reliving its memories. It's a convenient explanation, but one that does not explain the commonness of descriptive experiences or the knowledge of events that are so far removed from someone going through the experience. It also conveniently ignores the verifiable experiences by the monks. Truly, I feel the day that we as a society, except NDE's, is the day that we make leaps forward in our understanding of life, death, and the nature of consciousness. But in the meantime, if you are someone who wants to make leaps forward in your own journey, consider checking out the 7-day transformation, nearly guaranteed to help you radically transform your life in only one week. You'll find links below, and I hope to see you there.