Original subtitles

Mr. Black: It was July 18th, 1969.

It was early in the morning, about 5:30 a.m.

It was a beautiful day to fly.

No wind to speak of.

So how could it be better?

We start up the engines.

We were full of fuel.

Everything was fine.

And we started taxiing.

And then sure enough,

the aircraft started to climb.

Chuck brought the landing gear up.

We were accelerating and climbing

above the runway,

and I think we were about

100 feet above the ground when I started noticing

that something was wrong.

You have one engine at higher rpm,

another low rpm.

Now that can happen with an engine failure.

And I mean, I grabbed the chairs

and held on and looked out

and I saw a bunch of green grass

and it looked like a city park

And I thought, well, worst case scenario,

we've always been trained to just land in a park.

But the next thing I noticed was

towering trees were filling our windshield

Chuck grabbed the flight controls,

and he yanks them all the way left.

As far as they'll go.

And then he pulls them all the way back,

against his chest.

I suddenly found myself

above the crash site,

but unaware

of what I was looking at or why.

I was not in any pain.

I was not in any fear or discomfort.

I was just above this crash site.

I could see an airplane and I could see a pilot.

First of all, my eyes went right to one pilot.

This was Gene.

And then I went over and I saw another pilot

right next to him five feet away.

And I recognized this as Chuck.

And while I'm processing what I'm looking at,

I see a third pilot also about five feet away.

And this is me.

Mr. Burke: Imagine if what we're living here on this

earth is really being lived on a flat, black

and white painting on a wall,

and death is separation.

So when we die, our

spirit separates from our physical body.

You die and you're ripped off

that flat, black and white

two-dimensional painting

your brought out into a three-dimensional room

of color all around you.

You're experiencing things

you've never experienced before,

even though you can see your world

is contained within this world,

then imagine you're put back into

that flat, black and white painting,

and you have to describe

three dimensions of color

in two-dimensional black and white terms.

How would you do it?

Dr. Sabom: Medically,

Scientifically,

the point of death

cannot be defined.

What we do know is there is a process of dying

during which I feel the

near-death experience occurs.

75% of the people in that first study

have had a documented cardiac arrest.

Part of the experience is they

said they floated up out of their body

and they can see what was going on

during the resuscitation.

I felt that myself, as a cardiologist

could pick that apart.

Mr. Burke: This is clinical death as we know it,

sometimes for a few minutes,

sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes hours.

And yet modern medicine or the miraculous,

I don't know,

resuscitated them

and they were able to come back

and talk about it.

You may think you've died.

Dr. Sabom: All definitions, medically,

scientifically, and legally

state that once you go across that red line,

i.e. you die,

you don't come back.

And I like to say doctors resuscitate,

not resurrect their patients.

Mr. Burke: I was actually an agnostic.

I didn't know if I believed there was a God.

I thought, I don't know if I believe

there's a heaven or not,

but my dad was dying of cancer

and someone gave him the very first research

on what's now called near-death experiences.

And I saw it on his nightstand,

picked it up and read it in one night.

And that just got me curious.

So I kind of opened my my eyes, my mind,

and I started to explore from there.

I found it fascinating,

kind of, the train of how this

whole near-death experience phenomenon

started to get traction in America.

Dr. George Ritchie was the first one

to really talk publicly about this.

He was actually at Camp Barkeley

getting ready to go fight in World War II.

Joan Rivers: What happened during those 9 minutes?

What did you see? What happened?

Dr. Ritchie: I met the Christ

because I was told to stand up, you are

in the presence of the Son of God.

He came into my room

and he conducted me through four different

realms of life after death.

Life really is forever. We don't die.

Death is nothing more than just a gateway

through which we go.

Mr. Burke: Dr. Moody actually heard him lecture

at the University of Virginia,

where he was a visiting professor

and heard him talk about

this near-death experience.

Dr. Moody: In 1969,

I became a professor of philosophy

at East Carolina University

and in teaching courses on Plato.

I began to hear these

experiences from my students

and also from other faculty members.

Dr. Sabom: I was brought into this

field kicking and screaming.

I was at the University of Florida in Gainesville

with Sarah Kreissinger

who was a psychiatric, social worker

at the hospital I was working at.

And she had picked up

Raymond Moody's book Life After Life,

about two months

after it was initially published.

She read it. She gave it to me.

She asked me what I thought.

This is Dr. Raymond Moody,

noted psychiatrist, lecturer, and researcher.

He is perhaps best known as the author

of the groundbreaking examination

of the near-death experience.

The bestselling book, Life After Life.

It has sold upwards of 15 million copies,

and has been printed in 14 different languages.

Dr. Moody: They tell us, first of all,

that they seem, from their point of view,

to leave their physical bodies

to float up above the scene of the resuscitation

and to watch the events going on down below.

They tell us that they go

through a narrow passageway or a tunnel

into an incredibly brilliant

and warm and loving light

Dr. Sabom: Hogwash.

I never heard these experiences before.

I went into the hospital

asking some of the older physicians,

"Hey, you ever heard a patient say this?"

"No."

So I was very skeptical

that these things were even occurring.

And if they were occurring,

they were either hallucinations

or delusions or whatever.

In cardiology, we're about scientific studies.

So I asked a few people

who had been resuscitated,

and the third patient

I talked to had an experience

similar to what Moody talked

about in his book, Life After Life.

So, Sarah and I said,

Well, maybe we ought to look into this further.

We devised a scientific protocol

to interview these people.

We tape recorded the interviews.

We took down their background data,

the demographics, etc.. And...

this went on for five years.

First of all, I'd get permission

to tape record it and then say,

okay, go...

Dr. Sabom: These people say,

"I've never told anybody about this, doc.

And by the way, I'm the only one

that's ever had this."

So the near-death experience at that time,

and that's about 45 years ago was not well known.

And so these people were sort of

coming up with it on their own,

and they were suspicious of me asking the questions,

which to me

lent credibility to what they were telling me.

Dr. Moody: Many of them said, for example,

that they had tried to tell their doctor about it

or a minister about it and that they were dismissed.

And in those initial years,

the people that I talked with were just very happy

that at last somebody would listen to them.

Mr. Storm: I started at Northern Kentucky University

in 1972.

I was hired as an assistant professor and I was

offered a promotion to full professor

at the age of 25, and I was also given tenure

my third year.

Seven students, myself

and my wife

toured Amsterdam

and then went up to Denmark.

Spent a few days there, went to Sweden for a day.

And last week, it was a three week trip,

and our last week, was a week in Paris.

It was an art tour, it was, pretty much all museums.

On that Saturday morning,

June 1, 1985,

and I had the most acute

pain I'd ever experienced in my life

in the center of my abdomen. Right there.

It was terrifying because it

it just came from nowhere.

And I never experienced such acute pain.

I mean, this was like

the kind of pain that blows

the top of your head off.

A doctor came very quickly,

got me up off the floor,

with a great deal of difficulty because

I couldn't move.

He knew exactly what was wrong.

and told me that I had a perforation

of the duodenum.

Which means I had a hole

go through my small stomach.

What was happening was the hydrochloric acid

and the enzymes

and the bacteria in everything

are now migrating, leaking

into my abdominal cavity.

To put it in crude terms.

I was digesting myself, on the inside.

Without exaggeration,

what it felt like was fire.

my wife riding alongside me

in the back of the ambulance

as we traveled 70, 80 miles an hour

through the streets of Paris to the big

city hospital

they confirmed basically,

if I didn't have the surgery in an hour,

I would die.

So they sent me to the surgical hospital.

And because it was the weekend,

there was no doctor available.

No surgeon available at the hospital

they sent me to. So I was put in a room.

I begged, I screamed,

I yelled,

and my wife begged

and yelled and screamed,

Nurse, can someone please come in here?

Mr. Storm: Sorry.

We need a doctor to prescribe something

Can you please talk to someone who can help us?

There has to be somebody,

how can there not be someone here?

Mr. Storm: There I was for 10 hours.

About once an hour, the nurse would come in

and ask how I was doing, and I would tell her in

French and English that I was dying and

shrug their shoulders and walk away.

I wasn't in fear.

I was in terror

Because I was 38 years old, very successful

in my career at the university,

you know, wife and two kids, nice house, two cars.

The thing that kept going through

my mind is this can't be happening.

This can't be happening. This can't be happening.

People ask me,

How do you know you were dying?

It's like the stupidest question in the world

when you're dying, you know it

with every breath.

I felt like I had one more breath to go.

Nurse came into the room at 8:30 that night

and said they were sorry,

but they were

unable to locate a doctor and they would try

to find one the next day, which was Sunday.

Well, when she said that, I was like,

okay, it's over. Done.

You know, I can't do this anymore.

You know, I'm exhausted.

And I looked at her [Beverly],

and it was horrible to see her crying like that.

And I closed my eyes and stopped trying to breathe.

And I went unconscious.

I was an atheist, and I knew that

when you die, it's just over.

It's like the big nothing, you know, void the end.

Mr. Black: The official

impact speed recorded by the National

Transportation Safety Board was 135 miles an hour.

We impacted right below the cockpit

with that impact speed.

It just exploded the cockpit into...

We just, everything was opened up.

We hit that dome and fell,

boom, right down to the ground.

I'm told by the curator

of the mausoleum, that the mausoleum

was six stories, seven stories tall.

And we slammed

right into the top of it.

I can remember today

as well as I could five years ago, ten years ago.

You realize that you are not

a body.

I believe it's

what happens to everyone when they die.

Mr. Storm: I awoke from unconsciousness

standing there

next to the bed,

feeling better than I ever felt before in my life.

My vision was greatly increased.

Instead of seeing 106

degrees, I could see almost 360 degrees.

My depth of field was total.

When I looked at something close, I, everything

far was in focus.

Being an artist and being a visual person, not much.

The first thing I was like, Wow, I've never been able

to see like this.

Then I realized I could hear,

smell, taste, touch, everything.

I could feel

all the little nuances in the cold linoleum floor.

I could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights

in the ceiling really loudly.

All of my senses were greatly, greatly enhanced.

Mr. Black: I'm looking down and I'm realizing

there's my body, but I'm up here.

I can't be dead because I've never felt more alive.

I was not only alive, I was free.

And I didn't understand this.

But I realized then, okay,

I am a spirit.

I have a soul.

And I used to live

in that body.

I was pressed up against the instrument panel

and was motionless.

It was 16 minutes before the fire department

got there.

The paramedics got there right after

they put me and Chuck in the same ambulance.

And I have tremendous strong memories

that I'm watching my body and Chuck and I'm chasing

that ambulance as it goes through the streets.

I have no idea how to explain

a lot of the things we're talking about.

But chasing that ambulance without really any effort.

How did I do that?

I don't know.

I wasn't worried.

I wasn't in pain.

I wasn't concerned really.

I was questioning, what is this all about

Dr. Long: Now, while no two near-death experiences

are the same,

they have a very consistent

pattern of elements or what occurs

during the near-death experience.

That typically occur in a very consistent process.

The very first thing that

happens is that close brush with death.

They're unconscious.

They may be clinically dead with absent heartbeat,

absent breathing.

At that time when they shouldn't

have any experience at all, they do.

Often the first thing that happens is

what's called an out-of-body experience.

Mr. Burke: People leave their bodies.

They're, they're watching

the resuscitation many times, but they say

they still have a spiritual body.

Dr. Long: From that vantage point,

they can see ongoing earthly events

and often later describe

frantic efforts at their own resuscitation.

Mr. Burke: They move out of that place

of their resuscitation,

and they come to a place of exquisite beauty.

- Dr. Sabom: - They very commonly see a light at times.

They interpret that as a religious figure.

Mr. Burke: And this light was light that is love and life.

It was palpable

and not hard to look at,

but it came out of everything,

and yet it made everything vibrant.

The colors, they say, are far

beyond our color spectrum.

Dr. Long: Music has been

described so beautiful

that they say they've never heard anything like it.

Nothing like that is possible on earth.

Dr. Sabom: Deceased relatives or friends often

come to meet them there.

Mr. Burke: You know, they say we still have all our memories

our humor, we're the same people.

But we meet again on the other side.

Dr. Sabom: And some of them say, well, I reached a place where

I felt like

if I went any further, I wouldn't come back

Dr. Long: At that time,

they may then have a life review.

They may see part or all of their prior life.

Dr. Sabom: The whole experience is

very calm, it's very peaceful.

Some people don't want to come back.

Mr. Burke: And then many talk

about a God of light and love

that they experience in this presence.

This light is brighter than the sun,

but again, not just light like we would see

here on earth.

And they feel an unconditional love

and peace and acceptance

from this God like they've never experienced before.

- Dr. Long: - Ultimately, they either make the choice to return

to the earthly body or sent back involuntarily.

Mr. Burke: This God almost always says to them,

Your time is not up yet.

You still have a purpose on Earth.

Sometimes he asks them,

Do you want to stay or do you want to go?

Many times he says, You got to go back.

None of them want to go back.

Mr. Burke: Not every single one of

them experiences all the commonalities.

Some do, some experience three, four or five,

some ten, 20, some, all of them.

But those commonalities overlap.

But there are uniqueness to each experience.

Like when they encounter this god of light and love,

each one of them feels like

they are the only one God loves.

And yet,

they all feel that way.

Mr. Burke: You know actually, these near-death

experiences are not new.

Plato wrote in the Republic about

a soldier who comes to on his funeral pyre

and had an experience like this.

Paul in the New Testament, who wrote much of

the New Testament,

I believe in Acts chapter 14,

He's stoned to death in Lystra

and left for dead.

And then he gets back up and he talks about

how he had an experience of going to heaven

Dr. Moody: In the ancient world.

Presumably these experiences were very rare.

By the time I started investigating it

in the 60s and 70s,

the advent of cardiopulmonary

resuscitation had greatly increased

the number of people who had been to the brink

of death and recovered.

So there were a lot of cases.

Dr. Sabom: Some of them say, well, I reached a place where

I felt like

if I went any further, I wouldn't come back.

And I get questioned about this a lot.

And the question

is, well, is that really a barrier or not?

And my answer is,

well, I've not been able to interview

any of them that didn't come back.

So I assume

that if they do go over that, it very well may be

a point of no return.

I have no evidence to suggest that,

except I have no evidence to refute it either.

Raymond Moody heard about our work,

so he called us up to his house,

along with two other researchers.

Dr. Moody: And that's when I met all of these wonderful people

Bruce Grayson and Mike Sabom and Kenneth Ring.

Dr. Sabom: We got together, we compared notes

and we said, you know, we ought to form

a group and share with one another what we're doing.

And it eventually turned out to be

what's now known as IANDS

International Association and Near-Death Studies.

Mr. Burke: After five years of doing research, Dr. Sabom

ends up writing a book convinced that

this really does show that there is life after death.

But then even more fascinating, he publishes

in the Journal of the

American Medical Association

his findings and what changed his mind.

Dr. Long: I was in my residency training

and I was going through a bound journal

looking for a cancer related article.

And completely by accident, I found in the title

of an article the term Near-Death experience.

Dr. Long: Everything I knew as a doctor said,

This is medically inexplicable.

In this article

all around the world, were people

having these experiences while they were unconscious

or even clinically dead

who can't be mystified by that question

of what happens after you die?

Dr. Moody: As I've traveled around the world to China

and Japan and India

and North and South America and all over Europe,

people all over the world use the word light,

but they say that it's not

the light that comes

from a light bulb or from the sun.

But universally the description is that the

light of complete compassion and love.

And people also say that they learned

from their experience that what we call

death is a transition into some other reality.

So they lose their fear of death.

Don Piper: The day was January 18th, 1989,

very chilly by South Texas standards.

I almost stopped in a little town

before you cross all the bridges to get some

some coffee. I didn't.

The people who were on the highway ahead of me,

she wanted some coffee. They pulled over.

I drove past them and they came in behind me,

Dick and Anita, Onarecker.

It was foggy and a slight rain.

It was wet

and I knew I would have to cross some bridges.

It was an old bridge

and it is very narrow.

I'm just really focused on getting back

to Alvin, Texas, where I lived.

I was headed back that way

and looking forward to seeing my family,

which I missed for three days, especially my wife.

What I didn't know

was that steep embankment was there.

It's like going on a tunnel

because you had this big metal superstructure

above you, on both sides of you.

You can see only really

to the end of the bridge and then

the highway goes up.

So I couldn't see beyond the end of the bridge.

Out of nowhere, a tractor

trailer truck hit the car in his lane,

then came over to my lane and hit me head on.

When we approached the bridge,

the first thing on the right

was this large 18 wheeler, and then the next

thing on the left, I believe, was a gray car.

It had a single older man in it.

Then the next thing was Don's red car

that was all crushed and smashed.

So we were only four vehicles on the bridge

at that point.

Swen Spujt: I was stationed

in Walker County at the time.

I said, How does it look for him?

And they said, "not good at all."

That was, you know, just something I never forgot.

I mean, was seeing that

it was a miserable, miserable day.

Traffic is backed up from miles

in both directions because at that time

there was the only bridge across that lake,

in fact, Dick Onarecker.

And Anita

had to leave their car and walk up on the bridge

to get to where the accident was.

Police approached Dick first and said,

Don't even bother with that man.

I've already checked him and he has no pulse.

And then Dick did check,

and he could not identify any pulse.

You could see from this wrecking yard picture that

the trajectory of the truck as it went over.

When the truck hit me, it literally took

this arm over my shoulder into the back seat.

The steering wheel

actually went horizontal and into my chest

My head had banged up against the metal side

of the interior of the car.

My right leg was broken at the knee,

but I must have slid on the seat a little sideways

because it hit from that angle.

And when it did, it literally severed my left

leg just above the knee,

and four and a half inches of the femur

was ejected from the car and actually never found.

I had been killed instantly.

My heart was not beating,

so it was not pumping blood.

I died on the bridge.

Dr. Neal: I'm a board certified orthopedic spine surgeon

and physicians spend their entire career

evading death.

We believe that if we are smart enough,

if we are well-trained enough,

and if we do a good enough job that we can control

the outcomes, that we can control the variables

and we can cheat death.

My husband and I were avid kayakers.

Kayaking is

both challenging and exhilarating.

We began to go down the river.

We went over the first couple of drops.

It was very high flow, very high

current, strong current.

There is another client that sort of bobbled

her way past me and

ended up sideways at the entrance to the chute.

So my only option was to veer over

and go over the main part of the waterfall

and the front end of my boat

became pinned

and the boat and I were then

completely submerged under 8 to 10 feet of water.

I recognized that I was probably going to drown.

I would think about the fact that

I must be dead, but I didn't feel dead.

I felt more alive than I've ever felt.

I felt this incredible experience

like I was just part of the water.

I felt magnificent, actually.

I knew that I was being held by Christ

as purely as I know,

anything.

I know it sounds crazy,

but it's just something that

is outside of our language.

Peter Panagore: We went up a world famous climb,

maybe 500 feet, three pitches up

David Ditchfield: As the train started pulling out,

I just thought, This is it. I'm going to die.

I took a corner to a 90 miles

an hour, flipped over, and it landed on the top.

All I remember seeing was a big white, white light.

The knife had gone all the way through my liver.

I had a punctured lung and I started feeling myself

leave my body.

You were in the hospital bed, right?

But you had left your body and you

Betty Eadie: My body was on the bed and my spirit ...

and I could see in every direction.

Up on the ceiling looking down.

There was this feeling of a presence. It felt like God

Not like this guy up in the sky.

And that was God.

I just know it was God

The meaning of life, of everything,

It was unlike anything I've ever experienced.

I have no fear of death.

...it's with total knowledge and unconditional love...

It was all the love that is in the universe.

Death is not the end. It's probably the beginning.

I looked into his eyes, It was like

I was looking at forever inside of him,

and I could see the love he had for me.

You know, people don't believe you

when you say the story, but it's just so real.

Dr. Neal: Almost 30 minutes had gone by.

Enough time had passed that they had shifted from

a rescue mode to purely a body recovery mode.

I could see this bloated purple body

and I never felt alive and then dead.

I never felt conscious and unconscious.

I felt conscious and then more conscious

I felt alive and then more alive.

Dr. Sabom: I came into this thing skeptical, mean

I could have very easily blown this whole thing off.

If you go to the resuscitation

for 20 minutes

and you've been

without oxygen for 20 minutes or whatever,

you're going to lose some neurons,

You're going to have brain damage.

You may not live either.

You'll die a neurologic death

general rule is, the longer without the oxygen.

Normally, the more brain damage you're going to have,

and it's progressive until it's restored.

CBS News: A new study may provide answers

to the age old question

What happens to our brains when we die?

Dr. Zemmar: The brain has always been the most fascinating

and the most interesting

organ to me because to the world

it is completely unexplored.

I was working in Vancouver at the Vancouver

General Hospital.

This was the 87 year old gentleman.

He came during the emergency shift

with a bleed between the brain and the skull.

We call it a subdural hematoma.

And we decided to operate.

We removed the skull.

We removed the bleeding.

He did fairly well after the surgery

for about three days.

And then he started having seizures.

So we went and applied an EEG to see

where the seizures are coming from

and how to treat them.

Once we had this applied,

he had a heart attack and died.

So that left us with

the rare recording of the human brain

that went from a life to death.

It's the first ever recording of a dying human

brain, one that happened entirely by chance.

We've heard about people

before who have faced near death experiences.

Describe this moment

where they were the important moments

in their life flashed before their head.

Is that what we're talking about?

Is that what this is?

- Dr. From what this case of

One tells us

all the things they are consistently

being described by people who undergo

near-death experience.

These guys have exhibited these brain waves

that exactly the same ones we're measuring

when we record the activity of this patient

30 seconds

before the heart stops beating

and 30 seconds after the heart stops beating,

that we found was quite astonishing.

After searching and searching,

we had not found anybody at the time when we wrote

the manuscript and submitted it

that had full brain recordings

from the dying human brain.

Under acute clinical environments.

brain waves are always present

in our brain.

They differ in frequency,

meaning how many times per second they oscillate.

The high frequency waves are called gamma waves.

Then the lower ones we call them

beta, theta, alpha and delta waves.

Those are slower frequent oscillations.

We found an increased interplay

of these oscillatory bands with each other.

We looked at how this, for example,

theta waves that are known for memory recall,

how do they couple with gamma waves?

And we found an increased coupling of the

two after a heart stopped beating.

The brain is a prediction machine that is designed

for survival.

So we see something,

we interpret the signal,

we generate a response

in all kinds of responses that the brain generates.

The only one we can measure right now is movement.

We can't measure what we call thinking.

Can you measure emotions?

Feelings?

I don't know what to answer you.

We can't measure all these things.

We know that the brain somehow does these things.

We may never understand

what exactly happens.

And maybe that's not the most

important thing either.

If the science

can contribute even a minute percentage

and can shed light

on the nature of the human brain dying.

If I could go to my patients

and I could tell them,

it may be that your loved one is replaying

some of the memories of their life.

It somehow makes things easier.

It tells them they're not suffering.

That, I think, would help patients in that

tremendously difficult time.

Growing up in South Korea.

I grew up in a Buddhist home.

Ever since the age of six, seven,

I was asking questions like, Why are humans made?

Why are we born?

What is the purpose of mankind?

Why am I here?

The Buddhist monks at the temple

would say things like, Oh yeah, Steve,

you can go to heaven, you can go to hell,

come back,

you can get reincarnated

into an animal or a different species.

They taught you how to do right and do wrong,

and try to earn your salvation.

My mother, who was trained as a registered nurse,

she got recruited

by a VA veterans hospital in Boston.

You know, she prepared the way for us to come.

So I came with my younger brother in elementary school.

The older I got,

middle school and even up to freshman year,

and I remember feeling a lot of confusion.

I remember looking in the mirror and saying,

How come I'm the only one?

How come I have to be Korean?

And it was a big struggle and led me to become

a little rebellious.

Like I joined the garage band. I tried to...

I think I tried a little harder

than others to try to fit in.

And I just remember, you know, always feeling

a little empty, feeling confusion and emptiness.

You know, from high school.

I remember in the summer of 1998,

we will get high in the morning,

in the afternoon, in the evening, the whole summer.

I don't remember being sober for an hour.

And my mom and brother were getting super worried.

I called the Buddhist temple for help.

They didn't help either.

So I realized, like,

this is something that is beyond my power ability to

to to save myself from.

You know, people say when they see demons

or evil spirits, they might think

somebody comes with a pitchfork and horns.

But I had an open eye

vision of all Asian grandpa coming.

He's talking to me like I'm talking to you.

He said, Hey, Steve, I know you're

having a hard time.

If you commit suicide and take your own life,

then I can give you 50,000 less years of hell.

And I'm like, That's a great deal.

I went to the kitchen.

I grabbed the biggest knife I could find.

Got on my knees.

So I grabbed a knife

and I cut my neck open here,

which, you know, was very painful.

My mom sees the event happening,

so she calls 911.

The cops came, and then there's

the Grandpa spirit is still there speaking to me,

says, Steve, you got to hurry up.

You're going to miss your chance.

Go for the stomach.

So I cut my stomach open, which actually is,

you know, the scars go down all the way here.

I lost a big part of my blood.

The cops came and whacked me with a bat.

I dropped the knife.

I remember losing consciousness.

The whole living was bloody red.

My mom was crying. I remember hearing her.

They put me in the stretcher

because already I'm very damaged.

I'm losing blood, like at a very fast rate

and I'm going in of conscious.

The grandpa spirits gone

and then it was just into the unknown after that.

I remember coming out,

seeing my body and then seeing the E.R. room.

I remember going through just darkness, like even

seeing rocks and stones around me just falling.

It just felt like I was falling in an elevator.

And I don't know how to put it into words exactly,

but I knew I was going to a different place.

There was still real,

more real than anything here on Earth.

I was still fully conscious.

Everything's happening,

but now it's like

there's different set of rules,

there's a different set of awarenesses.

And you're saying goodbye to Earth.

I knew I was saying goodbye to Earth.

And going to another place of eternity.

And then God came to me and like a ball of light,

that became like a triangle.

Behind it I saw the city,

I looked up and it was glittering like gold.

The walls were gold.

I don't know how it works,

but it's definitely a place we go.

I heard a voice before I woke up.

I love you.

And I open my eyes and I'm in the emergency room.

I was like, Oh my God, I'm alive.

So first of all, I was so thankful I was alive.

I look around, my mom's there,

she's crying, grabbing my hand, son, you know,

you, you regained consciousness.

And I was still trying to process what happened,

but I just knew I was back on Earth.

They said it took two surgeries to cover

the blood vessels that were cut.

A specialist had to fly in at the last minute,

and if he was late, they told me I would

have been bye, bye forever.

My heart and blood wouldn't go back up.

We just kept sinking, sinking, sinking,

during the whole surgery.

And they said it was a miracle.

Good timing.

I know one thing, we all live once and die once.

And there is judgment after.

Dr. Sabom: I think that there are

a lot of people that do take advantage of this.

The novelty and the fascination

of this experience.

We're all to die and we all want to know

what's going to happen once that happens.

So, I mean,

this is speaking to us all. And of great importance.

That can be abused.

Some of these these cases

are transmitted through

several different people before they get in print.

And they get a lot of attention

because they're fantastic.

But what I've tried to

do is remove some of the subjectivity

to these experiences.

And put data out there

that's been scientifically, rigorously collected.

There's no way you can verify

the transcendental part of the experience.

The person feels like they go

to an otherworldly environment

as opposed to their environment

right there in the room with them.

Mr. Burke: What really convinced me and what convinced

many skeptical doctors, oncologist, cardiologist,

is that when people initially leave their body,

they say that many times

they were in the room

still where they were being resuscitated or worked on

many times up

near the ceiling, looking down, watching.

They felt incredible peace, even though

it was chaotic.

oftentimes in the room

where they were working on their body,

When they would come back,

they were able to give corroborative evidence

that they actually saw

what was going on in the room,

even though they were unconscious

at the time they were worked on.

They shouldn't have been able to see this.

Dr. Sabom: Autoscopic means self-visualization.

They were visualizing themself from the ceiling,

lying in bed, lifeless, or being resuscitated.

That is the verifiable part

of a near-death experience, where you can go back

and either verify what they said they saw

or what actually occurred.

And that's what I wanted.

That was the main thing

that got me hooked on this thing.

And I paid very little attention

to the tunnel, the light, the deceased relatives

and friends, the religious figures.

For me as a cardiologist, scientist,

and a physician,

I wanted some verification,

I wanted some medical records.

I wanted to talk to people who had been there

and seen what had happened in the room.

Dr. Greene: Back in the early 1990s,

when I was a resident training and neurosurgery

at Phoenix and at the Barrow Neurological Institute,

one of the best places to go in the world.

It was a destination center for neurosurgery.

I was on the Chairman Service,

Dr. Robert Spetzler

and Dr. Spetzler is world renowned.

There was a patient who came to him

named Pamela Reynolds,

Dr. Spetzler: What we're looking at is the aneurysm that she had.

Which is at the very base of the brain.

This is the balloon that can burst

and cause this incredible catastrophe.

It's all the way at the very base of the brain.

And that is why it's so

incredibly difficult to get there.

Dr. Greene: The anatomical location of the basal

artery is a neurosurgeons no man's land.

She underwent an operation.

Again,

pretty unusual operation called cardiac standstill.

I came in several times into the operating room

because it's a cardiac

standstill case and they're fascinating.

Dr. Sabom: If you were going to do a laboratory experiment,

this is the perfect experiment.

She was put on the operating room table

and immediately put under general anesthesia.

Dr. Greene: The cardiac standstill operation requires

teams of medical providers, surgical providers,

all of which is designed to:

1. drop the temperature of a person's body.

2. Drain out all the blood out of their body.

3. Keep them in a state of suspended animation,

shut down brain function.

And you've actually stopped the heart.

Dr. Sabom: They had these things in her ears

that emitted 95 to 100 decibel clicks.

If the click went off

and you saw spike on the EEG

that was measuring the brain stem,

then you knew the brainstem was active.

Dr. Greene: No heart that's beating,

a brain that's no longer functioning.

Dr. Sabom: And what they had to do is get it

so that those clicks were eliciting no

brainstem reactivity, i.e.

it was flatlined.

So was pretty much totally isolated

from the environment physically.

And medically, she was in a--

that's why they call procedure standstill.

Everything was at a standstill.

Tom Wilkinson: She would be clinically dead

for a whole hour of the operation.

Dr. Sabom: She had a three part near-death experience.

The first part was out-of-body,

autoscopic part,

When Spetzler first started up the brain saw

she heard the conversation between Spetzler and

the surgeon

about the artery being too small

in her right femoral artery,

and they had to switch over to the left.

The visual part.

She saw the bone saw, which I didn't even know

what it looked like myself as a cardiologist.

And I was then looking down at the body.

I knew it was my body, but I didn't care.

My vantage point was sort of

sitting on the doctor's shoulder.

I remember the instrument in his hand.

It looked like the handle of my electric toothbrush.

Dr. Sabom: And then she said that there was this tray

of instruments to the right of Spetzler,

that it looked like the socket wrench set that

her father used to have.

And then the other stuff was the same autoscopic.

And in between those two experiences,

which she relates

the experience as a continuous experience,

she had the transcendental experience.

I felt a presence.

I sort of turned around

to look at a pin-point of light.

Dr. Sabom: Well, how do you know the transcendental

experience happened

when the blood was drained out of her head?

Well, you don't.

All you can do is infer it.

You can't prove it.

The other two are time anchored.

The middle is not.

Dr. Greene: Pam came back,

I believe, the following day.

As with every patient, I'm rounding on her

in the intensive care unit before the chairman rounds

and she's awake talking with me.

You know, usually ask the

typical questions How are you feeling?

after that tube was removed from her by extubation

and she was able to control her airway

and she was becoming more lucid?

Well, she had a lot to talk about.

She began to

describe some details about her operation.

And as she spoke,

I became spooked.

She talked about her blood vessels and her

groin, being canulated and being too small.

She talked about her heart being shocked twice.

Giving me details that she just shouldn't know.

I sort of put the kibosh on the conversation.

"Pam, you need to get some rest.

I'll come back later."

I went to my chairman

and told Dr. Spetzler,

"You need to talk with Pam Reynolds.

She's describing stuff that she just shouldn't know.

This ain't right."

Functionally speaking,

Pam, was dead.

Dr. Moody: Typically, when people are coming out of a dream

in the morning,

they feel like they're coming back to reality.

But people who have a near-death experience

say that is they go into that experience,

it's this life that becomes dreamlike.

People feel that when they, from the world's

point of view, are dying, they actually are waking up

to a reality that this state of existence

that we're in now seemed like a dream or

as though you're asleep.

Dr. Sabom: I think the near-death

experience is where science meets religion.

There is a big difference between proof and evidence.

This is all evidence,

but enough evidence at some point

makes it so close to proof that most people would say

it's right,

it's real.

I got to watch what I say because I don't want to

unnecessarily alienate people.

I think skepticism is good

skepticism, true skepticism.

But rigidity is not.

In other words, if you have an

ideological opposition to something

and you fight tooth and nail to support it,

or at least advocate it

and refuse to look at the other side,

that's not being objective.

Dr. Long: There's a lot about the afterlife

that we don't know for sure.

We'll all know for real only after we die.

And not completely before then.

Mr. Burke: There have been lots of alternate theories

fighter pilots syndrome.

You're pulling G's,

It feels like you're going through a tunnel.

Some say

psychedelic drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline,

vibrant colors and, and,

maybe going to another place,

Dr. Long: You name it, DMT, Ketamine, LSD,

those are

generally illicit substances that produce

hallucinatory effects.

And in fact, many people

that take these illicit substances

and the difference between the experience they have

and the typical near-death experience

is very striking.

Mr. Burke: The problem is that

all of those might describe one aspect.

You have people and we're talking thousands

and thousands of people all around the globe, old,

young, sighted people, blind people.

And they're saying the same thing,

though on the other side, blind people can see

they have to adjust to it, to describing things

that they see, but they see the same things.

And there was one study done with 23 blind people,

14 of them blind from birth,

two of them that I report

about describe the light coming out of everything.

Dr. Long: There's the near-death experience of Marta.

She was a five-year-old girl and totally blind.

Marta went into a lake and drowned,

and her consciousness rose above her body.

She described vividly details of birds' feathers,

birds' eyes, details on telephone poles.

It's remarkable to me how someone totally blind

can be fascinated

by mundane things that you and I

would not consider to be so exciting.

Seeing this for the first time

while she's unconscious

and below the surface of the water

and yet having a near-death experience.

Mr. Burke: So how do you get a lucid experience

that happens both for people who have had

hallucinogenic

drugs potentially in the hospital or,

you know, anesthesia,

But they're saying

the same things as those who have had no anesthesia

and the same things that little kids say,

the same things that people from different

religious backgrounds and cultures

say you don't have mass hallucinations.

The moment the truck struck me,

I was standing at the gates of Heaven.

And it was magnificent.

It was like the inside of an oyster.

It was pearl and dazzling,

almost like it was living.

It just looked that way because of the light

reflecting off the gate.

Heaven is light.

God is light.

It's... it's astounding.

One of the most difficult things

about talking about heaven

is that you have to do it with earthly words,

and there are no earthly words that do it justice.

Mr. Black: I did think for a moment, okay, I died.

Okay, I'm gone.

And was I sad?

No, not at all.

I wasn't worried

about my mom or dad

or what they would think or my--, nothing.

I was only looking forward to where I was going

and it was nothing but joy and peace, love and unity.

I was surrounded by people I knew and loved in life.

The first person I saw was my grandfather.

I was very close to my grandfather.

The last time I saw him, he was in a casket.

At his funeral, he did not look good.

Now I'm standing at the gates of Heaven,

and there he is to greet me.

And he looked really good.

He extended his hands to me

and spoke a language I've never heard before,

but fully understood and said, Welcome home, Donnie.

Mr. Black: I recognized this group of people.

These people are looking at me with such love.

They're all seemingly at the prime of their life.

And these people

were greeting me and they were so delighted

that I was there,

Dr. Neal: And I knew that they were there for me,

to welcome me, to greet me, to to love me,

to make me feel known.

And I knew that they had known loved me

as long as I've existed.

The music was phenomenal.

Thousands of songs at the same time without chaos,

all manner of music,

instrumental,

choruses,

Astoundingly, they just invade you.

I mean, you're permeated by the music.

My senses were incredibly vivid,

you know, touch and taste and feel and hearing.

It was just all.

It's just the most real thing

that's ever happened to me.

After I greeted the people, they parted

and I could see through the gate.

There was a long boulevard that

really bisects the city

and it appears to be constructed of gold.

So many of the things that we experience here

are there, but much infinitely

more glorious and perfect.

I wanted to climb that hill

and fall at the feet of the great

God of all creation and say,

"Thank you for letting me come."

That was my objective.

Mr. Burke: Not every near-death experience is a good one.

23% of those who come forward talking about them

talk about how they had hellish experiences.

At that time,

I, I felt really empty.

It just seemed like the best thing to do

was just to die at that point.

If I die, then it's game over.

And if I die, then the pain and the suffering,

the depression,

the darkness, all this is going to stop.

Well, if I do enough cocaine,

then maybe my heart will stop beating

because it feels like it's racing out of my chest.

And I didn't see a bright light.

I saw a black tunnel.

It felt like somebody grabbed me and dropped me

in this outer darkness.

As I started racing down this tunnel,

it seemed like infinity.

It was like a bottomless pit.

I don't know how, but I was no longer high.

All my senses were at 1,000.

I knew that I had died,

and it was one of the scariest moments

in my entire life.

And I'm racing down this tunnel

that seems like forever,

like a thousand miles an hour

as I'm just freefalling.

If I'm going to hell, there's got to be a mistake

because I never killed anybody.

I didn't rob a bank.

I mean, I'm a good person.

I'm not a bad guy.

The only person I hurt was myself.

When I began to justify how good I was,

it went faster

like 2,000 miles an hour.

It speeded up the process.

Like, now you're really going to Hell.

I remember at that point I cried out

with all desperation.

I said, "God, you need to come help me right now.

because I need you.

If you really exist, I need your help.

So you got to come help me.

Please, God, I need your help."

Mr. Storm: In the bed

that I had been in was this big slab of meat.

And when I looked at the face,

it bore an amazing resemblance to me.

And I could not understand

how that could resemble me.

But I was perfectly well standing there,

perfectly alive, looking at this,

hunk of meat.

The other thing that bothered me was that

my wife would not respond to me.

Well, at first I started talking in a nice voice,

and then I started yelling at her, like, you know,

what the hell is going on here?

Look at me. Talk to me.

You know, I'm all better.

You know, what's that thing in the bed?

How did it get there?

I was very upset, very distressed.

And then I heard people out in the hallway

outside the well-lit room

in the darkish-gray, hazy hallway.

And there was a group of people standing

outside the light of the room in the hallway.

I said, "I'm sick.

I need a doctor."

And they said, "We know.

We know all about you.

It's time for you to come with us."

So I thought that they were

hospital personnel to take me to a doctor.

When I left the room

and went into the hall,

I can't explain how I knew,

I couldn't go back into the room.

The door didn't close,

but I knew that it was impossible

for me to go back into the light of the room.

So I hesitated and the people became very...

Hurry up, Let's go. Let's go.

We can't wait anymore. You know.

We've been here a long time waiting for you.

Hurry up.

So I gave in and went with them

and they immediately surrounded me

and moved me forward into that greyness.

As we moved along, I could not perceive walls,

ceiling, any feature at all.

And we walked and walked and walked.

And after a while I was like, okay,

this hospital's not that big, you know?

I mean, we walked miles now, and it's like,

where's the stairs?

You know, where's the up and down?

Where's the walls? And there was nothing.

We just walked and walked.

So I was asking the people

around me like, this isn't the hospital,

This isn't right, you know, where are we?

Stuff like that, and,

their response was, "Shut up, be quiet.

Keep moving.

Move, move, move!"

They'd say, "You're going to find out.

You'll find out.

You're going to get there."

There was a lot of people around us,

possibly hundreds,

I don't know. They were

being very vulgar, very threatening, very scary.

I'm in abject darkness.

I have absolutely no idea which way

is forward, backward. I mean,

all I knew was I wanted to get away from them.

They said, "No, you've got further to go."

And they started to push and shove me.

And I fought back.

They began by punching, shoving, kicking.

And then they started biting, scratching

and tearing me apart, literally.

disemboweling me, gouging my eyes.

And it was all accompanied

with a great deal of laughter and joy.

I thought about

my whole life and everything seemed like

what was the point.

And I realized that my relationships

with my mother and father were a disaster.

My relationship with my sisters wasn't good.

My relationship with my wife was very troubled.

I was not proud or pleased

with my relationship with my two children.

I sank into

a pit of despair and hopelessness

that I can't begin to describe.

My mind offered up a memory of myself as a little boy

going to a Sunday school singing "Jesus Loves Me"

When I was a little boy

and I was afraid, like having nightmares

at night or whatever, I would pray to Him and

He would chase the lions and tigers.

and bears away.

And as a child, it was, like, mostly

in the image of like a superhero.

Jesus was like a superhero.

And so...

that's it.

That was all I knew.

So I called out to him in complete desperation,

A tiny little star appeared in the sky,

and very rapidly it got brighter

and brighter and brighter.

Mr. Black: I started moving

helplessly without direction.

I had nothing to do with this.

I started moving out of the room.

I next realized that

I have left the hospital and now I'm traveling

almost like a rocket ship, just moving

out of this atmosphere.

As if in deep space.

Mr. Storm: I realized we were not on the ground anymore.

We were moving upward, straight upwards.

So I've got my face buried in His chest

hanging on to Him.

I'm like, I don't want to let me go because I,

I'm afraid if I let go,

or if he lets go, I'm going to fall back

into that horrible place again.

Mr. Black: And there was a beam of light that was lighting

the pathway of where I was going.

My whole life flashed in front of me

as big as the sky,

Mr. Black: Tiny spheres of light.

They weren't planets, they weren't stars.

These were beings going to Earth

Mr. Storm: Where we were going is what I first thought

was a galaxy. A huge world of light.

Mr. Black: The light that I'm looking at,

is coming from none other than God Himself.

Inside the light was life,

And inside that light was love.

And my body is still on Earth.

My brain and eyeballs are back there.

But, I'm sensing and discerning

all of these things.

When you leave this earth

and you step into the eternity,

everything is crystal clear.

Mr. Black: I knew I was coming to this holy area

and obviously

it took another second to connect the dots.

This is Heaven.

Mr. Storm: And he spoke to me

for the first time in his voice,

but it was telepathic but it wasn't

a thought of mine.

It was his voice in my head.

And then he said, I've got some people

that I want you to meet.

They've recorded your life

and they want show you your life.

So they proceeded to

show me my life in chronological order.

What I saw, to summarize it, was

happy youth

pretty much

going to adolescence, everything going sour,

particularly with my relationship

with my father.

Because of my father's cruelty to me,

I was cruel back.

My father was physically and emotionally abusive

every day to my mother, my sisters and to me.

I mean, it never stopped.

The only way that I could deal with it

was to try and not feel anything.

And all he wanted for me

was to be a little duplicate of him,

you know, just be subservient to him.

You know, being being disobedient

had immediate physical consequences

of being kicked or punched or hit.

And I saw myself striving

to become emotionless and feeling-less,

which was a way for me to protect myself

from being hurt.

As I became more manipulative

and successful,

the more the angels and Jesus expressed

their disappointment

and sadness with me and my life.

And it really hurt to disappoint them

because I here

I have these newfound friends, my big rescuer,

you know, best friend I ever had.

And I'm-- and I'm looking at my life

and I'm a big, huge disappointment.

and you should put me back.

I don't belong here.

You know, you've made a mistake.

I don't belong here.

And he said, "We don't make mistakes.

You do belong here."

Dr. Neal: At this point.

I had had

a number of operations and

I was finally able to be upright instead of

wheelchair bound.

But I,

wasn't able to walk very well.

When I was sent back to my body,

I knew that sharing my experiences

with other people was part of the deal.

I knew that part of that was writing about them.

And so I woke up

and I spent the next week or so

getting up at three or four in the morning and

writing for a few hours before the morning routine.

And so I, you know, made my final revisions.

And when I hit the save button,

I took my youngest son, who was still living at home

into town to get ice cream so we could celebrate.

And so as we were driving into town

to celebrate, I called my older boys

because my oldest son and his brother

were at the time living in Maine.

They were ski training.

And I called them

to share this great news.

And the coach answered the phone

and told me that Willie had just been hit

by a car and killed.

and um,

I mean,

I reacted

like any mother would.

The depth of my spiritual knowledge,

does not protect me from grief.

It doesn't protect me from

sorrow or any of those things.

The depth of pain,

of losing a child is,

I don't think, a

pain that can be replicated by

any other human experience.

I mean, I was devastated

And it all stopped

just as quickly I arrived.

That accident happened at 11:45 in the morning.

I arrived at Hermann Memorial Hospital

at like 6:15 that night.

So they went and got my wife out of her classroom,

brought it down to the office

and told her the news.

And I walked down the hall and into the office,

and our assistant principal

came out from around her desk

and just wrapped me in this hug.

And she says, "Don's been in an accident."

And that's all that we knew.

I was taken into surgery that evening

and was in surgery for 12 hours.

The next day

was when I realized I was in the recovery room.

The emergency room had called

and the nurse said, he can't hold the phone,

but I'm going to put it next to his ear

so he can hear you.

And I started with the questions,

"Are you okay? What happened?

Do I need to come out there?"

just, you know, rambling sort of things.

And all I could hear him say was,

"I just want to go home.

I just want to go home."

Later, I understood

that he meant his Heavenly home.

Had I had a choice,

I would not have come back here.

I mean, I've had 30 wonderful years here,

but I would still rather be there.

I know what happens next,

and it's it's always better there

than it will ever be here.

So I didn't really want to come back, but

I didn't get a choice.

He went into a deep depression.

And I would go in, and he would just lay there.

He wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't acknowledge me.

I would bring papers to grade.

I would sit over in the corner and grade

and stay there till about 11:00

almost every night.

And then I'd tell him goodnight,

and I'd leave.

And it was hurtful, because I thought, you're alive.

You know, you're alive. You're back with us.

Don't you love us enough to

be glad to be back with us?

And to me, that was harder to deal with.

The depression was harder to deal with

than the physical injuries, which were massive.

And I remember one night,

I thought, you know what?

I'm going to go home early tonight,

and I'm going to take a warm shower,

and I'm going to crawl in the bed,

and get a good night's sleep.

So I gathered up all my stuff,

and I just said,

well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow.

No response.

That night, something

clicked inside of me, and I had had it.

And I dropped that book bag,

and I stomped my way over to the side of the bed,

and I let him have it.

What is wrong with you?

Why aren't you glad to see us?

Why aren't you glad that you're back with us?

It was just-- it just tumbled out.

And so I grabbed my stuff up,

and I'm walking out the door.

And there was a big mirror next to his bed.

And I looked over there, and he was crying.

Just tears.

So I walked myself back over, and I kind of had to-

he had so many metal things that we had kind of

got my way in and I just wrapped him in my arms.

And I said, It's going to be okay.

And I realized then that

I had to accept that sometimes

he was going through things I didn't understand.

Mr. Storm: Finally,

I got through it.

Jesus said, "Do you have any questions?"

I said, "I've got a million questions."

He said, "What do you want to know?"

So I asked him everything that

I could think of to know,

And if we went through that,

it would take us several years.

And He gave me a whole

new understanding of everything.

I said, "Great,

Now that I understand, I want to go to heaven."

He said, "um um,

You're not ready for Heaven yet."

Finally, I said, "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to love the person

that you're with."

I said, "Okay, yeah, but then what

do you want me to do after I do that?"

And He said, "No, that's what I want you to do."

I said, you know, "What good is that going to do?"

He said, "It's going to change the world."

And I said, "That's going to change the world?

I don't think so, no."

I said, "You don't understand.

The world is like a terrible, cruel place.

Even if I love someone, they're just going to go

get beat up somewhere else and not going to--"

He said, "No, if you love someone,

they'll take that love out into the world

and maybe they'll love somebody and it'll

grow and grow and grow."

I said, "It's not going to work."

And He said, "It's God's plan.

It's going to work."

Well, when he pulls out the God's plan work,

you know,

I mean, like, what can you say?

And so finally I conceded.

and I said, "Okay, I'll go back."

And with that, bang,

I'm in the body, I'm in the bed.

The nurse who'd been in the room

comes in and says,

a doctor has arrived at the hospital and

we're going to prepare you for surgery.

When I awoke,

I knew that what had happened to me

was the most important thing in my life.

Because now my life had real meaning and purpose.

I was very, very weak.

I had been in surgery for hours.

I'd spent most of the morning

trying to think of how I was going

to tell my wife what had happened.

I said to her, "It's all love."

She said, "I love you."

And I said, "I know you love me, but it's all love."

She said, "What are you talking about?"

And I said, "It's an ocean of love.

And you have to just go in

into that ocean of love and be a part of it."

And she said, "Okay, honey,

Try to get some rest."

Here I am. I'm I' giv--

I'm giving her the abbreviated

wisdom of God.

And she's basically telling me,

you know, you're making no sense.

It's crazy talk.

From that day forward,

I tried to tell people about God, Heaven, Hell,

what I'd experienced, and nobody,

nobody took me seriously at all.

I was a zealot.

I was a complete zealot.

And it was

not good for my relationship

with my kids because the more that they

did not respect what I was trying to tell them

and the more they told me I was nuts and crazy

and stuff like that, the more...

it totally alienated them

from the Bible, from God, from me.

I mean, it was completely counterproductive.

It was a disaster.

My wife left me.

She poisoned the kids against me.

They've rejected me.

They don't want anything to do with me.

They think I'm a crazy man.

It's all going to work out.

I know that God works stuff out.

It just doesn't happen on our time frame.

I mean, I'd like it now.

It's not happening right now,

but it could happen tomorrow.

It might take a long time.

I don't know,

A couple of years down the road

when I found out

about the Heaven experience,

people have asked me,

"Aren't you mad that he didn't tell you?"

Not really.

I was relieved because now I understand.

You know, if you've been to Heaven,

why would you want to be back in the pain

that he was in?

I found myself on a daily basis

with all these devices attached to me

and unable to move at all.

I couldn't do a single solitary thing

for myself at all.

38 and then 39 year old man

who was completely helpless.

Why?

You let me see that,

And you brought me back to this.

What is going on here?

What was the purpose of this?

Dr. Moody: In my studies of psychiatry,

I quickly realized that practically

everybody is chasing something.

Some chase fame or money or power.

But what I quickly realized in talking with people

who had near-death experiences

is that whatever they were chasing

before this experience, convinced them that

what life is all about is learning to love.

Mr. Burke: And they all come back all around the globe

with the same "aha". That God is love.

And that how we treat and love one another

is what matters most to God.

You have people

who have these experiences and come back

and their life is radically changed.

Mr. Storm: When I came back

one of the things I knew I wanted

to make friends with my dad.

Not only was I able to forgive my father

because I understood that he was just messed up

because of his messed up childhood.

All my father really wanted to do

was to be loved but he

didn't know how to do that in an appropriate way.

So he tried to be loved in inappropriate ways.

He thought obedience and discipline.

And my mother and my sisters

were really angry with me

because they all told me several times

"You and Dad hated each other

and now you're his best friend. Why?"

And I'd say, "Because he's my dad."

Grace is passed along and passed along

and passed along. And it's powerful.

It's powerful because people change lives

for the good.

They find hope, peace, love, joy, contentment.

You know.

And they also find

God and eternal life.

Dr. Neal: When I was being shown

the ripple effect of my own actions

and my own words, I was able to see this

20, 25, 35 times removed from me.

That's

a big distance.

I understood all the hurts and sorrows and dreams.

Everything that had brought me to that point in time

when I may have hurt someone else.

I also had this complete understanding

of the back story

or the, you know, the life story

of the other people involved

and everything that had brought them

to that moment in time where they hurt me

or they hurt someone I loved

What we each say and what we

each do and the choices we make matter.

They really do.

Dr. Neal: When I talk about my son's death,

I know that he went home,

and I'm sure that he didn't want to come back either.

I'm sure he was reassured that we would be fine.

When my time on earth is done,

my oldest son will be there to greet me,

my father, my stepfather.

I now know

other people who have died, people who I love, people

who are important in my life.

I don't see

us here on Earth, and God's world is over here.

I think we exist in the midst of it.

I had the most

overwhelming sense of being home,

of being where I really belong,

where we really belong, all of us.

It took about a few months to recover fully.

I was still feeling the pain,

feeling a little down, depressed. Seeing Hell

and Heaven, changed me to kind of prioritize others.

So at the age of 35, I joined the Army Reserves.

I became a chaplain.

People just came back from war

and you could tell that they had

a very heartbroken experience

or a psychological damage, or the atrocities of war.

So we did a lot of counseling.

We would pick up phone calls at two,

three in the morning,

go with them to training, hang out with them.

I would tell them that there's hope.

I would tell them that depression is not forever.

I believe all over the world,

there are so many unique

NDEs, near-death experiences,

and so many cultures

and backgrounds, American or not,

all types of religions, because

death is as real as life.

And I believe God in his mercy,

no matter what religious background

you are, allows you to go through that

so that you can seek Him in the process.

I don't know why some people survive

and some people don't.

I wish.

I wouldn't have survived.

I've had some very real things

happen to me on Earth.

The birth of five grandchildren,

seeing my children all graduate.

I mean, it's been glorious in many ways,

but nothing compares to Heaven.

It's just, that's the most real thing.

That is my reality.

This is not.

Mr. Burke: What do we have

more in common as humanity than death?

And to know that there is hope beyond this life,

that there truly is beauty,

and relationship and love

and adventure ahead.

You know, that

all of our our history and our memories,

they don't end and we don't become something else.

It goes on.

Dr. Sabom: People ought to keep an open mind

to what's going on,

not accept everything they hear

from people, from me, from anybody.

Be skeptical, ask questions,

think about it.

There are things that we can't explain, and I think

it needs to be documented as much as we can.

Documentation's important. Without that,

it's an interesting story, and that's it.

We can only do so much.

You know, we're human beings

and we do the best we can.

I think most people really do.

We don't have all the answers,

and I don't think we ever will have all the answers.

In the scientific realm.

What is a human soul? Is a human soul?

does it live after death?

I don't think science is going

to answer those questions.

I think all of these near-death experiences

suggest that that's possible.