[00:00:00] Speaker A: You near death experience? A typical detailed one would start out with that out of body experience.
Consciousness typically rises over the body and from that vantage point they can see and hear ongoing earthly events including efforts of others frantically trying to bring them back to life.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Is there life after death? Can science shed any light on this age old question? And is the mind simply the workings of the brain or is it something else? Welcome to ID the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott and today my guest is Dr. Jeffrey Long. A radiation oncology physician practicing in Kentucky. Over 25 years ago, he founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. Dr. Long has investigated over 4000 near death experiences or NDEs as they're called which is by far the largest number ever scientifically studied. The results of his previous research were published in The New York Times best selling book evidence of the Afterlife the Science of Near Death Experiences. Dr. Long is one of the scientists appearing in a new documentary feature film called After Death which explores what happens after we die based on real near death experiences and conveyed by scientists, authors and survivors. Dr. Long, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Well, you've been researching near death experiences since 1984 when you first saw the term in a medical journal. Can you tell us how you got interested in studying NDEs?
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Sure. All those years ago, I was in the medical library looking for an article in a bound medical journal that related to cancer. And quite by accident I found an article that had the term near death experience in it which I'd never heard of before. So puzzled, I stopped and read the article and was immediately fascinated. Here was a cardiologist, Dr. Sabaum, describing his study of people who had near death experiences. Consciousness separated from the body during their cardiac arrest, heart stopping and what they could see and hear of ongoing events around them even though they were literally comatose after a cardiac arrest and people frantically trying to bring them back to life. What they saw and heard when they verified it later was pinpoint accurate down to the finest details. So I knew as a scientist, that's impossible from physical brain function. So I was immediately fascinated. I mean, how can you not be fascinated about what happens after we die? So I remember thinking, prophetically, why aren't more people doing research on this fascinating phenomena? And as time was to later bear out, I indeed did start doing research.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Okay, well, what's a good definition for those who aren't quite used to this topic? A good definition of a near death experience? What are the hallmarks?
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Right. There are several different concepts of near death experience floating around. But the most, I think, rigorous and scientifically accepted definition would be as the name implies, you're near death. In other words, you're so physically compromised that you're unconscious or clinically dead with an absent heartbeat at that time when it should be impossible to have any type of conscious remembrance, people do. And that's the experience part of a near death experience. A highly lucid, organized event with the characteristic elements that occur during a near death experience typically occurring in a logical consecutive order. So that's a near death experience.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Okay. And in 1998 you started an organization and a website to collect and analyze near death experiences giving you a really big picture view of the whole affair. And in a very detailed and rigorous manner. You've studied over 4000 of these. What are some of the common themes you've discovered in this research?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Sure. Well, again, while no two near death experiences are the same what I've seen and what many other researchers have is that there's a very consistent pattern of elements near death experience. A typical detailed one would start out with, as I mentioned earlier that out of body experience described by Dr. Sabaum consciousness typically rises over the body and from that vantage point they can see and hear ongoing earthly events including efforts of others frantically trying to bring them back to life. They then may pass to or through a tunnel. Variably described often at the end of the tunnel there's a beautiful, unearthly, mystical light. There can be a beautiful realm on the other end of the tunnel. Or later on in their near death experience analogous to Earth in some ways in the sense that there can be buildings people often deceased loved ones are there and yet completely different in a lot of ways by that time. In their near death experience, movement is nonphysical. Communication is essentially always described as telepathic. There may be beautiful colors there that are beyond anything that are even conceivably possible on Earth. Per their assessment, they may have a review of part of all of their prior life called a life assessment. I mean, a life review. And it's typically a very beautiful part of the experience at this time even though physically they're brushing up against that death event that nearly killed them. At this point in their near death experience they're overwhelmingly describing sense of peace. Calm and love are among the most commonly descriptive words used to describe the experience.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: At this point right now in your book where you relay your research evidence for the afterlife you say that to reach your conclusions you followed a simple scientific principle and that was what is real is consistently seen among many different observations. How does this idea relate to your findings?
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Very glad you brought that up. That's absolutely true. Literally all of science starts with observation and near death experience research is exactly like that. So how do you know, out of a series of observations like thousands? Well, what's real and what's not real? Well, the answer is if you see it consistently if you see people consistently describing that life review that encounter with deceased loved ones and almost never encountering living people in this unearthly realm. That is a type of consistency that you see over and over in near death experience research, not just with mine, but with other researchers as well. So by the time you see that overwhelming consistency and a remarkable lack of inconsistency that helps nail down that near death experiences are, in a word, real.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And as I read your book, I was glad to see you describe yourself as a prove it to me kind of man, which reflects not only your hunger for knowledge, but also your upbringing. Can you tell us a little bit about what you learned about science growing up?
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. Growing up, my father chaired the department of pharmacology at the University of Iowa, so we would literally hear about his research at the dinner table. So I grew up in a very strong scientific household, and that was really literally my upbringing. I mean, when you're making an exceptional claim like near death experience, providing evidence of life after death, I think obviously, scientifically, philosophically, the burden of proof is really on people making that claim. And exceptional claims really do require extraordinary evidence. The good news is, in all my research and the research of many other fine investigators, near death experiences have been, I think, to my satisfaction and the satisfaction of many others, verified as absolutely real, absolutely not possibly explainable by physical brain function in any way. And their consistent message, not only of their reality, but of an afterlife beyond death, is very striking.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Now, although near death experiences have been reported for millennia, as the film touches on, the series scientific study of NDEs is relatively new. Within the last 40 or 50 years, what contributed to the rise of that study and the interest in it?
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Sure. Near death experiences started to become a household word when Dr. Raymond Moody published his groundbreaking book, Life After Life in 1975. Here were over 60 near death experiences being described in this groundbreaking book, and all of a sudden, the world was fascinated about the concept of near death experiences and their strong implication that there's life after death. So it was really after 1975 that serious research began and many, many other investigators started looking into it. To this day, actually, there have been literally hundreds of scholarly articles about near death experience published in some of the world's leading medical and scientific journals. There's no question about it. Near death experiences occur. It's a subject of very serious scholarly investigation today, and I'm very happy to be a part of that important scientific endeavor right up to the current time.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: And we also see more numbers of them because of the increased technology in resuscitation efforts. Isn't that correct? Would that be a fact?
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. In the 37 years I've been practicing medicine, there's been a revolution in our ability to bring back people from the brink of death with modern day resuscitation techniques, more people are being saved than was ever possible before. But in addition to that, we also have a situation where because near death experiences are so widely known and accepted, people are more willing to share them. The healthcare environment is much more likely to have heard about it be accepting of near death experiences. And so people now more than ever, and of course with podcasts like this, the word is getting out. So people now more than ever are willing to share their near death experiences. And in fact, there was a major survey of the American public published in 2021 by Pew Forum, a major survey company, and they found interestingly, that in America, 72% of adults believed that near death experiences were an observation of an essence departing from the physical body. Notice they didn't use the word soul, they thought that was loaded word. But that's really what's going on. So interestingly, we have nearly three fourth of Americans already accepting the reality of near death experiences as being that consciousness, essence, soul, if you will, separating from the physical body.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Okay? And yet we also have statistics showing us that belief in God is lessening, people are going to church less. And so there's that dichotomy there. But perhaps films like this and books like yours can encourage people that that essence is real and not just an illusion. Well, in your book Evidence of the Afterlife, you describe in detail nine lines of evidence. And I encourage listeners and viewers to check out your book. It's not intimidating, it's a good read. Can you just maybe tease out a couple of lines of evidence that you mentioned in the book?
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Sure. A couple of the stronger ones are well, we've talked about that out of body experience where you can observe ongoing earthly events while the physical body is unconscious or in a coma. That's impossible, actually. Those out of body observations can occur geographically, far from the physical body, like even a mile or more away from the physical body. And yet when people check them out later, what they saw, what they heard, accurate down to the finest details, almost always so that's beyond any possible physical brain function. Another good one is that typical near death experiences occur while under general anesthesia. Now, under anesthesia, you should have no conscious remembrance for especially those of you that have been through anesthetics. You know that. And yet when your heart stops under general anesthesia, it should be, if you will doubly, impossible to have any remembrance. And yet, near death experiences do occur. Typical near death experiences, their level of consciousness and alertness, even if they're under general anesthesia when they have a near death experience, is exactly the same as near death experiences under all other circumstances, showing that even the powerful general anesthetic agents don't modify that typically super lucid degree of consciousness in near death experiences. And by the way, talking about the heart stopping or cardiac arrest, if you will, the moment the heart stops beating, as is a common precipitating event in near death experiences. Well, of course, immediately blood stops flowing to the brain ten to 20 seconds after that, the EEG, or a measure of brain electrical activity generally goes absolutely flat. There's no measurable brain electrical activity, or at least organized, certainly activity that would account for consciousness in essentially any of these people. And yet that's the time when people by the hundreds have reported near death experiences. Again, it should be absolutely impossible.
Many, many of the other nine lines of evidence we've had people that have reported near death experiences even though they were born totally blind, blind from birth. And yet even with this group of people, they have highly visual near death experiences. I interviewed one such near death experiencer. Her name was Vicki. Highly visual near death experience. In fact, it was interesting when Vicky described her vision during her near death experience, even though she was born totally blind, vision was unknown and unknowable to her up until that time. She described what many near death experiencers describe, and that is 360 degree vision. She was simultaneously aware of visual awareness front of her back, right, left, up, down, technically spherical vision. And in fact, when I told her how those of us in our regular earthly everyday life only have these pi shaped visual fields, she laughed at me. Because don't forget from her entire life experience, that was not how she knew vision. She knew it in a spherical sense.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Wow, that's really interesting. Well, one of my colleagues at the Discovery Institute, Dr. Stephen Meyer, he's a philosopher of science, and he is known for saying this science is always provisional, but there are many stable theories that have persisted because of a preponderance of evidence that points to, and continues to point to the same conclusion. And as I look at near death experiences, that's what I think of. It. Seems to me that one of the strengths of the scientific evidence for NDEs is the consistency and the similar features of the reports, regardless of age, culture, religious perspective, or even, as you say, whether someone is blind or seeing. Would you agree with that? And what was the tipping point for you with the evidence?
[00:14:10] Speaker A: After I set up my near death experience research website back in 1998, by the time I had a couple of dozen near death experiences, I was very aware of the consistency and the impossibility of these experiences being due to physical brain function. So I realized very quickly there was something very significant and important going on. So that was clear. And that's only been corroborated enormously by the thousands of near death experiences subsequently shared. But I want to get back to a real important point you made there, and that is near death experiences are consistent wherever on Earth they occur, including non Western countries. We have a fairly large collection of near death experiences from non Western countries. And the content of the near death experience is strikingly similar to typical Western near death experiences. And in fact, I'm corroborating with an Iranian near death experience investigator who's looked at several dozen people that had near death experiences in Iran who were Muslims. So we've published this, as you might expect, the content of Iranian near death experiences as all other non Western near death experiences, strikingly similar to near death experiences occurring in America or anywhere else around the world. So it really doesn't make any difference whether you're, say, a Muslim in Egypt or a Hindu in India or a Christian in the United States or even an atheist in the United States. It makes no difference whatever your prior belief or disbelief in religion was, when you have a near death experience, the content is strikingly similar.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Wow. Very telling. Well, how did you become involved in the movie after death? And what's the takeaway we should get from that, in your opinion?
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Right. This is a sentinel event. The movie is going to be released nationwide in theaters on October 27. I'd encourage everybody to go down and hear a lot more about that. They interviewed some of the leading researchers, some of the leading people that had near death experiences. There's a huge collection of New York Times bestselling authors in this. So this is really going to be a sentinel event that really presents near death experience in a very beautiful, dramatic way. If you look at the trailer for this movie, after death, you'll see what I mean. But this is really they actually found me. So they approached me and came and interviewed me several years ago. And then all of a sudden I went, wow, I suddenly heard they were able to make a big movie about this. But this is a very prominent studio called the Angel Studio, for example. They made a very popular movie, The Chosen, so they've really done a good job. So I would say this is not only going to be visually fascinating and entertaining, but I think even more importantly, it's going to be profoundly informative. It's going to help everybody that sees this better understand near death experiences, better understand that it's absolutely inexplicable by physical brain function and that there really is a message of life after death ingrained in every one of the near death experiences they talk about.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's going to bring the evidence to a lot more people. Well, one of your colleagues in this field, Dr. Michael Sabom, said in the film that true skepticism is good, but ideological rigidity is bad. What did he mean by that? And do you agree?
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's a good way to put it.
I'm a show it to me kind of person. You could call me a skeptic. Listen, I treat cancer patients every day. I make decisions based on medical evidence, not on my gut feeling, not on my hopes, but basically on prior studies, evidence and reasoning based on that large volume of medical studies. So that's the way I think everybody should approach life, especially for extraordinary claims like near death experiences and their consistent message of a life after death, a wonderful life after death for all of us. It's very appropriate to approach that with an open mind. What's the evidence? How do we know? And I think once people make that journey, like I did all that time ago, as Dr. Sabom did all that time ago, the evidence is so overwhelming that you really have to conclude your death experiences are real. While we're on that important topic, what are the counters? Okay, speaking of evidence, what is the arguments or evidence, if you will, that near death experiences aren't real? Well, here's the trouble with trying to address these skeptical arguments. There are over 30 different skeptical explanations of near death experience floating around. Now, you might say, well, why are there over 30? And the answer is very simple. There's no one or several of those skeptical explanations that makes any sense at all, even to the skeptics of the group. I mean, think about it. If you had one or even several of these explanations that seem to adequately explain near death experience, you wouldn't need 30 floating around and seemingly a new explanation every year, too. Really, the bottom line is the skeptical explanations trying to concoct brain function into explaining near death experience. Not only does it not work, but it literally can't explain anything that we observed in a near death experience, let alone the totality of all that we observe in near death experiences.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Sounds similar to some of the arguments for intelligent design that we put out at Discovery Institute and Materialists Push Back. But their ideas are getting more and more exotic by the year with the fine tuning and trying to explain with the multiverse.
There's a concept called Occam's razor. The simpler, more elegant explanation is usually the one you can depend on, and I think that applies here. Well, wrapping up with the last question or two, Dr. Long, I know your time is very valuable, sir. According to materialist thinking, there is no basis for a distinction between the mind and the brain. The mind is an illusion. Meaning and purpose are just adaptation for survival. Why does this position run contrary to the scientific evidence that you're finding?
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Sure, because near death experiences, line by line, refutes the fact that we are all just brain. And when we die, our brain stops, and we're permanently, irreversibly dead by the thousands, not just in my study group, but by thousands of other near death experiences shared with other researchers. We're finding overwhelming evidence that consciousness, absolutely soul, if you will, does indeed separate from the body at the time of a life threatening event death. And there is, by the thousands people observing this unearthly, if you will, heavenly realm. So the evidence is overwhelming overwhelmingly in terms of numbers in the depth of which they describe this consciousness, apart from the body and the unearthly realms and the consistency between my studies and many, many other researchers. So, again, I think the powerfully positive message of near death experience, which I fact, I think is one of the most powerfully positive messages, even conceivable for all of humanity, that there is an afterlife and a wonderful afterlife for all of us, is based on a mountain of evidence. Skeptics haven't even begun to explain anything we see in near death experiences, let alone all of it.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Well, Dr. Long, where can listeners and viewers learn more about your work?
[00:21:16] Speaker A: Sure, certainly there's the book that we alluded to, evidence of the Afterlife the Science of Near Death Experiences. But hey, we're free. You can go to our website nderf.org standing for the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. There are thousands of near death experiences posted by far the largest publicly accessible collection in the world. Feel free to browse that. In fact, if you want to go on the fast track, go to that upper tab where it says Experiences and drop down to exceptional experiences. I will challenge your viewers here. If you read even ten of these so called exceptional near death experiences, you overwhelmingly will see what I did all saw those decades ago, the tremendous consistency of what's described, sort of the deeper pattern and elements, and that profound and reassuring message that we don't really die, that we really have life after death.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great resource. Well, thank you so much for your time and for all your research in this topic. It's really a treasure.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Great questions, great podcast, and I really appreciated the opportunity to be here.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, learn more about the movie After Death at the website of its distributor, Angel
[email protected]. And as we mentioned, pick up your own copy of Dr. Long's book, Evidence of the
[email protected]. Until next time. I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the Future. Thanks for listening.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: The moment the truck struck me, I was standing at the gates of heaven.
