Dr. Long will present his current groundbreaking investigation of the content of NDEs that address humankind’s ageless questions which include: Is there an afterlife? What is the afterlife like? Is heaven a reality? This is the largest scientific investigation of sequentially shared experiences exploring the nature of the afterlife ever reported. Insights into the afterlife from NDEs do not seem explainable by pre-existing cultural or religious beliefs. The evidence-based and inspiring conclusion of this study is that the afterlife is real.
Jeffrey Long is an American author and researcher into the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs). A physician by training, Long practices radiation oncology at a hospital in Louisiana. Long is the author of Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences, which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 1998, he founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, which is concerned with documenting and researching NDEs.
https://www.nderf.org/
Jeffrey Long is an American author and researcher into the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs). A physician by training, Long practices radiation oncology at a hospital in Louisiana. Long is the author of Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences, which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. In 1998, he founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, which is concerned with documenting and researching NDEs.
https://www.nderf.org/
I think we are always together in our intangible spirits ??
Maybe this is what causes me to wonder about people ??
Nothing in the physical can separate us from our LIFE !!
https://www.nderf.org/Archives/NDERF_NDEs.html
https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1doug_c_nde_9502.html Suddenly I was in an ethereal space, floating without my body. I remember being hyper aware of everything around me and I could see my body on the floor with my brother and our friend shaking me and yelling at me to wake up!
[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist jeffrey mishlov hello and welcome i'm jeffrey mishlov our topic today is near death experience my guest is dr jeffrey long a radiation oncologist who is author of evidence of the afterlife the science of near-death experience as well as god and the afterlife the groundbreaking new evidence for god and near-death experience he is the founder of the near-death experience research foundation once again this interview was recorded in a hotel room in las vegas nevada where both of us were there to attend the bigelow institute award ceremony for their essay competition and now i'll switch over to that video Jeffrey Long welcome jeff well it's a pleasure to be here and thanks for the opportunity you have set up an interesting organization called the near-death experience research foundation and you've been collecting data on thousands of near-death experiences you're absolutely right over 20 years ago i established the website mainly because i was curious i wanted to see from my own personal interest our near-death experience is real so we set up that website and immediately had a detailed questionnaire so that people would not only share a narrative of their near-death experiences but also answer a lot of questions and you're right over the greater than 20 years that we've been doing that we're now over 3 500 near-death experiences that we have collected and posted back on the website anonymously largest publicly accessible collection of near-death experiences anywhere would you say you learned anything surprising yes uh i was amazed i mean i was aware of near-death experiences i knew very little when i set up the website you could say i was a skeptic i it was so unearthly i literally couldn't believe it even after having read some of the good research that was going on in the around circa early 1980s so i in doing that website really wanted to learn for myself with the best evidence available which are the first person accounts from people that actually had near-death experiences so i could resolve that to myself and very quickly as they started flowing in all those years ago i learned very quickly that near-death experiences are in a word real a lot of times the uh thinking is not so NearDeath Experience much that they're not real but that they're not what they purport to be the people that share the near-death experiences come from all walks of life physicians scientists homemakers people of all religious backgrounds and and the a religious so these are all people that are going to share their experience with the website we post it anonymously so it's not like they have any recognition from this we don't pay anybody anything so it's really no incentive for them to either diminish or embellish what they're sharing with us and it's a basic scientific principle that what's real is consistently observed so by the time you get 3500 near death experiences and beyond that you see that remarkable consistency in the elements that's the deeper characteristics you have to really accept that that's a part of the greater reality what they're what they're saying and your background is in medicine my medical background is radiation oncology the use of radiation to treat cancer so i've now been doing that for over 35 years and uh so almost by accident over 20 years ago started doing this but since i started my research on near-death experience it's been literally a labor of love if you will my second full-time job so it's been a lot of fun informative and extremely inspirational to do that kind of research and then have the opportunity to share it with people around the world were you drawn to it through any personal experiences of your Personal Experiences own yeah i first heard about near-death experience completely by accident as i was decades ago in my residency training in radiation ecology i was looking up a cancer-related article in the journal of the american medical association so as i was flipping through the pages totally by accident there was an article with the title near-death experience in it i never heard about it before and it didn't make sense i mean you're either dead or you're not dead what's this near-death stuff so fascinated i read the article and it was immediately struck by heroes of dr sabaam cardiologist in georgia wrote about many many people that had cardiac arrest their heart stopped and yet here they are vividly describing very lucid conscious memories vividly and accurately describing ongoing events while they were by all clinical appearances completely dead so i was so amazed i read some of the references and remember thinking prophetically gee why aren't more people doing research on this fascinating topic so that that piqued my interest a couple years later i had a college friend visiting me i was in iowa at that time and just completely accidentally while we were having dinner the wife of my friend mentioned that she had so many medical allergies that she was undergoing surgery had one of her bad allergic reactions and coded and she said it kind of funny though my physician instinct was i think there's more to the story here so i pursued it and said after thinking about this being the dumbest question i could ever ask i mean she was under anesthesia and her heart stopped but i finally got up nerve because i was just too curious well did something happen while you were under anesthesia and your heart stopped and she said why yes and described to me the first in-person near-death experience i'd ever heard very detailed very dramatic and she had no idea what that experience was and i was able to help her with that but again from that moment on i said i've got to know for sure if this is really happens just like she described there's no medical explanation at all and there's something bigger going on in this universe than i was aware of you use the phrase coded i know that is as a What is Code medical phrase but for our leg listeners what does coded actually mean yeah code means your heart stops so the medical scenario is heart stops patient heart attack if you will is a common generic phrase for it and then in the hospital they call you know typically a code blue or some other type of code alerting the resuscitation team and others to come to very urgently to try to resuscitate the patient and when a person's heart stops that means that her blood isn't going into the brain jeffrey you're absolutely right the moment the heart stops beating of course immediately blood stops flowing to the brain 10 to 20 seconds after that happens the eeg electroencephalogram now that's a measure of brain electrical activity 10 to 20 seconds after your heart stops bleed uh beating it goes totally flat there is no measurable brain electrical activity and yet by the hundreds we have reports of near-death experiences occurring exactly under those circumstances so that might cause some people to think that maybe consciousness isn't related to the electrical activity of the brain as has normally been thought i couldn't agree more that's one of the many lines of evidence one of the major ones that consciousness that consciousness separates from the body during a near-death experience typically going above the body is absolutely not related to physical brain function i mean it can't be when near-death experiences happen and consciousness rises above the body they're hearing and seeing ongoing earthly events about half the time in which the overwhelming majority of time when they come back and check it out it's accurate down to the finest detail so here they are fully functioning if not consciousness if not super normal consciousness and yet there's their physical body coded heart stop beating clinically dead by indications of lack of vital organ function and the intriguing thing is they do report a perspective like Perception hovering above the body and yet and perceiving things hearing seeing and yet without eyes or ears absolutely their physical bodies down there their point of perception is up here in fact we have scores of near-death experiences if not hundreds where that point of conscious reference is not just above the physical body but it can move to areas geographically far from the physical body i mean like outside of the house outside of the hospital room outside the operating room far from any possible physical sensory awareness and yet what they're seeing and hearing far from their physical body when they check it out later almost invariably accurate down to the finest details we actually interviewed a gentleman who once again coded heart stopped during an operation for example consciousness left the operating room theater and went down to the hospital cafeteria where his family was having a meal unaware of his life-threatening crisis in the operating room far away when he came back and and told them exactly what they were doing exactly what they were saying as you would expect absolutely accurate down to the finest detail Who Experiences NearDeath well the intriguing thing to me and maybe you have some insight into this is that oftentimes a person will be coded they'll have cardiac arrest but they won't be able to report a near-death experience that is absolutely correct only about 10 to 20 percent of those people that have that close brush with death have a near-death experience now i co-authored a scholarly book chapter in the handbook of near-death experience and looked at 30 years of research with me and my co-authors we couldn't in our review of the research we couldn't find anything that would predict who would or would not have a near-death experience when they nearly died nor could we predict the content of the near-death experience based on any demographic information i mean you name it gender age pre-existing belief religion lack of religion nothing in prior research gave that prediction at all so i was stumped about this and that's that's you know fascinating why most people don't have a near-death experience but i think sort of if you will the rosetta stone of explanation of that came in a near-death experience that was shared with me several years ago in it this individual was having as so typically as reported a near-death experience and just an overwhelming sense of peace love emotions that are off the scale unknown on earth because they're so vivid and dramatic that's that's common in near-death experiences this near-death experiencer was actually interacting with what she firmly believed was god and because she was feeling so overwhelmingly at peace love and literally at home in this unearthly realm she asked god directly why me why am i so special that this should happen to me and god's response was love falls on everyone equally this is what you needed to live your earthly life so to the best of my understanding that may well explain why some people have near-death experiences and some don't and i i've neither me or other researchers in the field have a better explanation it's sort of mysterious another feature Returning to Body of the experience i gather since i've never had okay thank goodness thankfully i well you know i'd say thankfully but when i hear the amazing experiences you kind of want to have it i that i could under i would i wish we could have an experience a near-death experience without being near death that would be wonderful but but i know people are often told they have a choice they can return back to their body it may be a body wracked with pain and illness or or they can remain in this heavenly realm right out of the thousands of near-death experience i've studied the significant majority simply return to their body involuntarily they may be told it's not your time you have more to do and boom they go back but a significant minority do indeed have a choice they're often with other spiritual beings there's often a great deal of dialogue going on now here's where it gets very interesting for those having the near-death experience and again they're typically in an unearthly realm as they wrestle with that decision that choice about returning to their earthly body or not even though everything the near-death experiencer knew before friends family loved one their entire life on earth even with all that in consideration the great majority of people having a near-death experience do not want to go back to their body they want to stay in that unearthly realm because of that tremendous sense of peace love belonging they they feel deeply that that's the real home and they don't want to leave and so it's and often there's a very vigorous dialogue with other beings there as the near-death experiencer argues at times forcefully at times that they don't want to be returned but often when that ultimately when that decision is made and they do ultimately decide to be returned uh boom when they recover from that close brush with death they can share their near-death experience but it's always impressed me just a as a vivid reminder just how how wonderful how spectacular that unearthly if you will afterlife realm would be that that they would be so willing to what literally be apart from their friends family and loved one and that's by the way that's difficult for spouses for their loved ones to understand that when they come back when they hear that account i mean you were willing not to come back and return here and all i can say is that's the general choice of people having a near-death experience it shows how engaging how encompassing how uh compelling it is to stay in that and that afterlife so that's actually the norm that people want to stay there and not return to earth and i gather that a small percentage of Hell these experiencers though have a an uncomfortable experience of the afterlife sometimes even one might say hellish now in my over 3500 near-death experiences i've looked very carefully for true hellish near-death experiences they're very rare i have maybe around 22 of them with a fairly high bar of evidentiality part of the problem is studying hellish near-death experiences they're rare they're compounded by other experiences that are not near-death experiences for example car wreck they then have a hellish experience but right at the time that experience is ending they're waking up two weeks later in the intensive care unit that is almost certainly intensive care unit delirium just simply an effect of the brain dealing with the the recovery from that close brush with death and the environment of the intensive care unit fairly common occurrence icu delirium and not a near-death experience and there's uh however if you if you look carefully at the experiences that are truly hellish in in near-death experience they come in sort of two flavors if you will for my investigation one is that you see the hellish realm if you will remotely i mean they're often with another spiritual being and they see a sort of a segregated apart area in that unearthly realm and they know or consents or both or are told you don't want to go there that's that's that realm the other approximate half of the group i've studied actually are there and actually are experiencing a hellish realm the most scary experiences i've ever heard are not in fiction books or in movies but in some of the graphic description of hell from near-death experiences i it is hellish in every sense of the word uh however there's a silver lining to that dark cloud of the hellish realm first of all many of them they find that if they ask to leave they may pray they may just simply seek to leave and they leave and so i think it seems to be like it's a choice to be there secondly when people have even these hellish experiences they very often come back and will realize later that they needed to have an experience so vividly uncomfortable to allow them to confront in their own life issues of anger guilt uh negative emotions that they are able to better confront because of that experience and they live their lives better they may actually feel that that hellish experience while it sounds awful and it is was actually in the long run a gift it helped them to be a better person and as they will admit they needed that kick in the tail there wasn't any other way they were going to really come to think about things and grow like that i think me and and other near-death experience researchers i'm aware of do not believe that there is a permanent involuntary hell we are far more convinced with the dominant uh attribute infusion of love throughout the afterlife my best guess as to why hellish near-death experiences occur why there is that realm is that there are beings who through probably a series of very poor decisions ultimately decide to be with others like them unloving angry hateful and ultimately end up in a segregated area of the afterlife in that hellish realm paradoxically since they're they want to be there they they chose to be there by their uh angry evil intent to them that's their heaven because that's where they're feel the most comfortable of course in the afterlife you're generally known immediately for who you are and everything you are so you can imagine how uncomfortable that would be for somebody who retains that angry vengeful belief system in the afterlife another silver lining about hellish realms in near-death experiences is that is an extremely precise line of evidence that even in the afterlife we all have a choice and some people even just like in earth have the ability in the afterlife to make choices that ultimately result in them being in that hellish realm Early stages now i've heard it said that what the near-death experience is revealing to us are the early stages of the afterlife and i wonder if you have any sense from the people who report to you about you know some of the later stages that's great that's some of the deeper wisdom of near-death experience research and not a lot of people know about that so it's my honor and privilege to talk about that perspective what i've seen as amazing as these near-death experiences are these unearthly if you will heavenly realms they may hear music that is beautiful beyond anything they knew on earth they may see plants with colors that are beautiful beyond any experience or description possible on earth i mean this is literally a you know paradise times a thousand and yet over and over in near-death experiences even while they're in this realm of overwhelming bliss they may see over a fence across a chasm uh beyond a creek in a forest they may see an even brighter light and may have a sense that there's something even greater even beyond what they're at now and over and over i think this is sort of as far as people can experience the afterlife i think that as as amazing as glorious as it is those near-death experiences that are not unusual lead me to think that there is indeed that realm even beyond that is so beyond anything we could imagine in in our earthly life even in a near-death experience that it's that hint that it's it's glorious and it's wonderful but probably beyond anything we could imagine or even comprehend if we experienced it The afterlife i practiced back when i lived in california as a clinical psychologist and have dealt with a few people who have had near-death experiences and and what i discovered was that it's not always easy for them to reintegrate oh that's true i mean just imagine here you are you have that life-threatening event these people nearly die or actually do clinically die so here they are while they're trying to recover from often some serious accident or illness and yet they've had this amazing near-death experience it's almost certainly something they didn't think could ever happen to them they're often exposed to unearthly concepts beyond anything they could have imagined i mean over and over we use the word unearthly but but that's significant that means it's not part of or even conceivable in their prior earthly life and yet that's so much a part of the near-death experience so here they are aware that there's an afterlife even if they didn't believe in it uh here they are may have encountered deceased loved ones these are joyous reunions even deceased pets may appear in this earthly room so all of this and and then near-death experience even though in earthly life they may have been unconscious or clinically dead for minutes in in the afterlife in near-death experience they almost always say time is either radically different or more commonly doesn't even exist at all so there may be a profound amount of experience it would be hours in our earthly time in this heavenly realm and they've had so much experiments to think about so much apart from their earthly pain and misery i mean it's a lot to conceptualize and radically different from what they ever thought could occur so boom now they're back in their earthly body they have to recover from that accident or illness that nearly killed them they have to integrate many of these new found concepts the importance of love the concept that we're all connected and unified i mean you go from not believing how important that is to boom you have an experience and now that's deeply felt in the core of their being that it is a part of the greater reality and to integrate that and you can imagine trying to explain that to people you know while you're recovering from what nearly killed you i mean it's difficult so to it to integrate an experience like that commonly can take years it takes a long time for them to think of it i mean normally it's normal to say this couldn't have happened how could it not what was happened but but as time goes on the vividness of the memory remains far more so than memories that occurred around that time they realized it was a special type of consciousness where the memory is retained at a much higher level than other earthly events and as time goes on they they start to realize well that that is real that those were some important messages and then the hard part change so even after you get all that information that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to change to be a better person then is the hard stuff the work of integrating that becoming a more loving person becoming perhaps leaving unloving relationships that's hard and and growing into with their newfound belief decreased materialism uh increased belief in an afterlife and increased awareness of of the importance of love not only in their love in their life but but for all of humanity and that just takes time in terms of people i've dealt with the Habits issue i think was habits they they returned to their old habits and for example people who are in business have i think it's normal for people in business to fudge things here and there for their own personal advantage uh in small ways typically as maybe for some people in big ways but but the average business person i think is accustomed to taking advantage in small ways whenever they can and uh that uh is not necessarily an easy habit to break especially when uh everyone in your environment is doing the same thing you are absolutely right on on that i mean just put yourselves in there in their position of a near-death experience they understand the profound importance of love of not taking advantage of other people and they understand that that's not part of the greater reality and so here they are they made a comfortable living that's their identity this is their vocation other people recognize like oh hey you're the businessman that's that's part of who they are and very deeply so to let go of all that and to go to a different vocation to you know if you will start over to carry those newfound beliefs and move forward with your life in a different direction that's difficult that's work people wonder what's going on uh you know you often when you change vocations following a near-death experience you're going to get paid less and so that makes may make the family unhappy because they didn't have a near-death experience and they may not share those values so it's a huge adjustment and my hats off to the near-death experiencers that have heroically successfully made that change expressed those values of love and compassion at a level that they never knew before or people around them were not aware of them expressing before and they simply live their life better people and ultimately in spite of the great changes in the long run i'm confident the great majority of them are are much happier than they were before their near-death experience Divorce another issue i gather has to do with divorce a fairly significant percentage of people following a near-death experience as they incorporate the the importance of loving relationships if they're in an unloving relationship an abusive relationship there are much more likely to get out of it and it's not just the understanding of the importance of loving their life i think the near-death experience gives them the courage the awareness that there's a bigger picture there's a a bigger thing to think about reduce their fear of death reduce their fear in other ways of living their earthly life such that they can get out of these unloving relationships and they feel that it's important enough for them to seek a loving relationship i think the great majority of them find them again part of that change in their life that was a lot of transition a lot of work ultimately at the end of the day the years later they're going to end up being happier better relationships uh happier more loving relationships more positive relationships and and hopefully in a vocation where they can express these very important values of compassion and love how about the skeptics i know Skeptics in your community the medical community there are many people who are trying to explain the near-death experience in conventional mechanistic terms ever since near-death experience was first described by dr raymond moody in 1975 we have had skeptics just about every conceivable physiological cultural psychological explanation had been brought up by skeptics to try to explain this phenomena of near-death experience at the current time there are well over 20 skeptical explanations floating around now the reason there's so many is very simple even among the skeptics themselves they cannot as a group come up with any one or several of their own skeptical explanations that explain any part of near-death experience let alone the totality of all that is observed in a near-death experience so that's why there's so many different skeptical explanations it's like the skeptics are saying yeah my my explanation is right and you other 19 are wrong i mean sheesh give me a break so that's why you keep having new explanations every year or two because nothing that they're coming up with explains any part of a near-death experience and let alone this totality of all the evidence skeptics can't even come close to explaining it Popular Media i know that in the popular media you usually see these articles saying finally science now has the answer yeah that that and that's you know sadly in this uh commercial economically oriented society we're in if somebody even does rat research and found they had a little burst of electrical activity after they thought they should have died that and and maybe this has something to do with near-death experience the media will glamorize that as as exactly like you're saying gee we found the explanation for near-death experience here it is and it's only when cooler mines look at the skeptical explanation we're up to 21 22 23 so the list goes on so it's only after you look at that you realize that doesn't really have anything to do with near-death experience it is absolutely impossible to explain near-death experience by any function of the physical brain given the fact that they occur when the heart stopped beating when there is no electrical activity in the brain when you have normal typical near-death experiences which i found in my research time scores when they're under general anesthesia and their heart stops which is of course very carefully monitored under general anesthesia there is no possible explanation for physical brain function creating near-death experiences under this just with those two lines of evidence out of many other lines of evidence i have Psychedelics now another area that intrigues me quite a bit uh it's related to the near-death experience at least slightly which is psychedelic experience uh do you have any opinion about that have you surveyed psychedelic users to see if if there are similarities uh yes i am been very aware of the more recent buzz in the media and other sources and and some to some extent scholarly literature about the possibility that psychedelic medications reproduce some aspects or perhaps even all of what's observed in a near-death experience so here's my response to that there is a website where people share their first-hand experiences with an unbelievable array of psychotropic or brain acting drugs that website is arrowwood.org e-r-o-w-i-d dot org if you go there you can look up pretty much any psychedelic substance you want the most common one in the media these days is dmt so if you go there you will as i have you will literally find hundreds and hundreds of people sharing their dmt experiences i would encourage anybody that wants to really know the truth about dmt in its relation to near-death experience please go to that website please do exactly what i did go to that listing of first person dmt experiences and you know what you don't even have to read more than 10 but you'll if you want to really dig into it read 20 read 30 but even after 10 you will as i've noticed see there's dramatically difference in dmt experiences as there are near-death experiences i mean on my website these are people sharing their first-hand near-death experiences in their own language in their own way exactly the same thing on arrowwood.org these are people sharing their dmt and other psychedelic experiences exactly in their words they have no incentive to embellish or falsify it they're posted anonymously and yet very quickly you can see the dramatic difference in dmt it's almost like an urban legend where people believe that dmt can reproduce a lot of or even most of what's observed in near-death experience and i don't want to minimize some of the scholarly work being done with dmt such as you know patients in hospice that dmt may be used appropriately non-abusively legally in a way that may create some positive emotional effects may create some possible experiences that will help ease people into their afterlife as as they're approaching death on hospice but that is radically different from dnt or any other psychedelic drug that's taken as an abuse what would be some of the Difference between the two significant distinctions between the two yeah again as you if you go to the arrowwood.org you'll see what i've observed and what's actually been well well described and that is certainly the psychotropic experiences are much more likely to be frightening they're much more likely to skip around like dreams they're much more likely to be literally hallucinatory that means they're aware of unreal events they they may you know see things hear things smell things that are simply not real and of course that can be frightening to them and so it's no wonder that they're much more likely to be frightening so you see that over and over it's just the the gripping reality of near-death experiences flowing typically very consistently and logically step by step by step in in a in an order versus the psychotropic drug experiences uh very very different in so many different ways i mean it's literally medically speaking it's it's recreating a hallucination which by its very definition is unreal but above and beyond that we ask in our survey of near-death experiences a critical question has anything in your life reproduced any part of the near-death experience we ask it very open-ended like that so that if anybody's encountered anything including psychotropic drugs they're going to expect to say yes yeah here it is and it is vanishingly rare that anybody feels that any psychotropic drug that they've used or any illicit drug for any purpose reproduced any aspect of the near-death experience about the only time we see a consistent yes to that question are people that very uncommon group that had a second near-death experience and then why yes that's similar to the the first one they're describing but both through actual first-person uh psychotropic psychedelic drug accounts and through that key survey question on our website times now thousands that have responded to it i am absolutely convinced that psychedelic drugs and any psychotropic drug especially of abuse can't consistently reproduce any aspect of near-death experience let alone the totality of the experience i have interviewed a buddhist meditator who is also a Similarities between the two psychological researcher who tells me that advanced buddhist meditators can enter into a state of consciousness which according to the uh grace and scale for near-death experiences almost identical have you looked into that at all well jeffrey matter of fact i have we keep talking about near-death experience but i actually have two other websites one devoted to after death communication the other devoted to out-of-body experiences and related experiences we actually encourage the submission of meditation or prayer experiences so just exactly like the buddhist monk you know we are both me and my wife jody who's instrumental in getting keeping this going here we're in awe at the overlap in the content that can happen in these occasional meditation or prayer experiences some of them uncommonly but certainly from time to time absolutely identical in the content of near-death experiences that brings up a very important point near-death experiences i believe are part of a spectrum of spiritual experiences so it's not just you know you have a near-death experience and that's the only way to have that kind of insider experience we see that in meditation we see that in death bed visions we see that in even people that are around the dying that may actually share the experiencing the deceased their initial transition into the afterlife we see that occasionally certainly in spontaneous out-of-body experiences so over and over we're seeing some very similar types of experiences uh you don't really have to to die to have a near-death experience necessarily but you know in the the occasional experience like that there there certainly does point to human consciousness uh expressing itself in an unearthly manner like near-death experience potentially under a lot of other circumstances uh i would think mystical experiences would also Mystical experiences be quite similar there's a very nice scholarly literature on mystical experiences and and i i love reading them uh jeffrey because over and over you see the same kind of phenomena that we see in near-death experiences i mean gosh if i had a nickel for every mystical experience that said yeah i felt that sense of unity or oneness of all and connection i had that sense of overwhelming love that transcends anything i was ever aware of or you know just realization of of a greater realm of dementia a you know uniqueness of consciousness i mean absolutely the mystical experience is very much in form and and are part of the what we can learn with near-death experiences and once again all part of that spectrum of experiences all of which from interestingly from multiple multiple sources all converging on the obvious conclusion that our consciousness is far more than just our physical brain i guess it would be fair Greater reality to say that from your point of view the near-death experience the mystical experience are pointing us towards a greater reality absolutely there's no question about that it's just amazing to me as i see these experiences from so many different sources from so many pre-existing events again from people all around the world with huge variety of prior belief systems and yet when it comes to that time that they they transcend their earthly consciousness and and enter the realm of the mystical over and over there it is again that awareness of an afterlife a wonderful afterlife not anything to be afraid of but simply something that is beyond earthly consciousness that realm where communication is telepathic that realm where all the miseries and anxieties we have on earth cannot do not exist that sense of profound love that presence of of profound connection unity with all of us uh it's really extremely impressive to me and actually helps i think in in a very significant way validate what we're seeing in near-death experiences because it's not unique and i wouldn't want it to be either the consciousness that we have the the evidence that it can transcend functioning of our physical brain is found in many many different lines of evidence and it's just a never-ending amazement and frankly a joy to me to see all those lines of evidence converging down to that reality we're much more in terms of consciousness than what we ever thought in our daily functioning physical brain and it's much more dramatic much accelerated uh it it's uh it's not diminished but our real consciousness and certainly in near-death experience and other mystical experiences it's actually an accelerated type of consciousness do you have a feeling for where this research is leading how Impact on culture is it impacting our culture that's a great question now more more and more people are becoming aware of near-death experiences and accepting them mystical experiences people now more than ever i believe have the courage to share them because they're sometimes called nde likes experiences but they're really mystical they're all labels don't count what really matters is what happened they had that first person experience that is shared by so many people and so many different types of experiences spiritual for lack of a better word in other words they're aware of that that afterlife that acceleration of consciousness they may be aware of a mystical unearthly light they may be vividly aware themselves through their own personal experience that their consciousness has transcended the limitations of their physical brain and so i think as more and more people are willing to share that more and more investigators go out and do the research and look at that spectrum of the type of conscious experiences i think as time goes on we may be at a threshold in society where that body of research is going to be even more convincing than we have now more and more people accepting it i'm hoping we're going to see more and more researchers especially young researchers starting out their career and having that research encouraged so they can continue to share these remarkable findings with with the rest of the world Impact on society it sounds like you're suggesting our society as a whole could be in the process of becoming more spiritualized i think there's no question about that i think the powerful impact of people being aware of near-death experiences and other experiences i think at a significant level is impacting huge numbers of people throughout society to understand there really is an afterlife there is an end to our earthly misery there is a consciousness that survives it's who they are everything that they are and more with consciousness accelerated in a wonderful afterlife that is for everybody there's no step children in the afterlife we're all a part of the one we're all part of that which is connected in the afterlife so i think as much of this research is getting out through scholarly research the publications and media presentations and increased openness of people regardless of their pre-existing belief systems i think this is really helping in a very important way helping people to understand that who we are we think we are is far beyond the physical brain and that consciousness is the cornerstone dr jeffrey long this has been a delightful conversation it's so exciting for me to be able to share your passion for this work with the new thinking aloud audience thank you for being with me thank you for the opportunity jeffrey fantastic interview this was great thanks again and for those of you listening or watching thank you for being with us [Music] [Music]
stay in the flow where waveforms go
with infinite awareness of infinite stuff
the going is smooth but stopping is rough
being a human is never enough
stay in the flow where waveforms go
when days become seconds and time doesn't know
when or where the waveforms go
Near-Death Experience with Jeffrey Long
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Note: The transcript below is a copy of the YouTube transcript: