Near Death Experiences - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 4/8/24

from andover Newton Theological School. He has been an ordained minister for more than forty years, and while serving as an adjunct college professor in the fields of comparative religion and cross culture studies, he was the host of his own program radio show, and upon the retirement, he was determined to confront the essential mystical reality that has inspired humankind since the very beginning of time and started writing

incredible books, including Ancient Gods, Supernatural Gods, Lost Civilizations, and his latest book, Near Death Experiences. Jim, welcome back to the program.

sharp as attack. And she was in the hospital room and I was told by the nurses that she probably wasn't going to come out, so I got into the habit of stopping by seeing her in the hospital. But when I did that, I heard I knew that she liked the old hymns. So I got to started to bring my guitar with me and singing some old hymns, you know, in the Garden and the old Rugged Cross

and all that kind of stuff. And sometimes the other nurses would stick their heads in the room and listen her wheel patients, and it was awful lot of fun. But one day I was in the hospital room with just Hannah, and she asked me who I had brought with her, and I with me, and I looked around. I was the only one in the room and I said, well, I'm the only one. I'm here by myself, and she says, oh, they're out in the hallway. She said, I think they

liked the music. They usually don't come in through the portal until you pass till you leave. And I said, the portal. I looked out at the door. I didn't know what she was talking about. She couldn't even see the door from where she was. There was a curtain hanging there, and there was the corner where the bathroom jutted out, and I looked out, I mean, at the foot of her bed, I could see out hallway and I looked out there and no, there was nobody there.

But I didn't want to, you know, discourage her. I mean, she was obviously confused, you know, telling me these people come after, you know, when I'm there, and the music seems to bring them. Well, I didn't want to disturb her, so I didn't say anything. But on my way out, I stopped by the nurse's station and I said, what's Hannah talking about? People out outside the portal? And the nurse said, oh, she's been talking like that the last couple of days. She said, I think she's out of

her head. Probably won't be long, And sure enough, a couple of days later, Hannah died, and my wife and I sang in the garden at her funeral, and I didn't think much more of it.

didn't bring anybody, mom, It's just me. And she said, oh, no, there are people people with you outside the portal.

open to this. And in the meantime, I had heard, I had heard the stories and talked to dozens of people myself personally who had died and come back with a story, and I was, Oh, God, forgive me. I was all ready to use all of the normal stuff, you know, the blood and the brain is shutting down, or we're reliving our past memories and all this kind of stuff. And I realized toward the end of my ministry, and I retired sixteen years ago, so it was quite

some time. I realized that I had missed a tremendous opportunity to really talk to all those people who claimed that they saw people and claimed that they met with loved ones and came back with stories. And so I was much more open. When a good friend of mine, who was an ex parishoner of mine, my name is Joe, down in Florida, he was in the hospital. He actually worked in the hospital U and he was he had a very technical job. And when he was in the

hospital he had a heart attack. And if you're going to have a heart attack, I guess the place to have it is in the fully equipped hospital with you. But when he told me when I went to visit him. He said, I got a story to tell you if I can find the courage. And I said, well, okay. He said, you know, I'm going home tomorrow. Come on over to the house. I have a cup of coffee in the morning. And I said okay. So I went over and the next morning I could tell you wanted

to talk, but I didn't know what it was. He was hesitant, but he wanted to unburden himself. You know, Joe is a just a great, great guy. He likes to hunt and fish and get out, and he loves his family, and he works in his church and all this kind of it's just a really, you know, super guy. And you wouldn't think that he would have any trouble

sharing his story. But when he shared the story of his near death experience and what he saw when he died, passed over and then came back, I put together Hannah's story, in Eva's story, in Joe's story, and said, I got

to write a book. So it began. I began to start remembering all the people that I had talked to and then getting that up with oh, all the rest of the information that I'd gathered over the years and all the research I'd done and everything else, going up to Monroe Institute, for instance, and studying out of body

experiences with Bill Buhm and other things like that. I began to try to put it all together, and I decided I wanted to write a book that wasn't just fantastic stories, although the stories are fantastic enough to warrant a book. I wanted to tell a story a look about the history about this and how it seems as though, possibly I'm hoping this is the case in our generation.

Maybe the doctors and the scientists and the people who are often called metaphysical and everything else, maybe we're all getting down in the same track and understanding that this is not just some kind of a supernatural woo woo thing, but a real bona fide leap forward in human existence. And this seems to be happening on so many levels that I'm just I'm almost encouraged. Now. It seems as though science and religion and spirituality are coming together and

maybe we're beginning to share the same highway again. So that was the that was the basis of the book.

even now into what he calls shared death experience. I've had that experience too, being around a hospital bed when somebody dies and three or four of us standing around the bed and we all have the same experience of feeling or seeing something happened somebody in the room, something the spirit depart or the soul depart or whatever we want to call it. It's a really moving experience. And I'm just one of the good things about writing this book.

It was just wonderful to hear it, not only these stories, but to hear how people are so their lives are changed. Any of them don't want to say anything because they're afraid of being ridiculed by friends and family. You know, they're all poo poo it, you know, that kind of thing. And so they actually hold on and they don't tell the stories for a long period of time, and when they do, you can tell the story. It's just as

vivid and new as it was when it happened. So it was very encouraging to me, to tell you the honest truth. I really it was a positive, positive book, and I really enjoyed it.

this is a real, bona fide scientific thing. Still though there is a public perception out there. I think people there are some people who just plane, don't want to believe, and so they'll and when that happens, it's so easy. Instead of attacking the facts, you attack somebody's personality. You know, they don't want to believe, and so they'll just ridicule the person or the doctor who does it. And it's it's just a shame. I'm sure you see the same

thing when you're talking about alien encounters. There are people who just plane, don't want to believe it, and so they won't follow the facts. They just they just gather the facts that substantiate their own belief which they've come to beforehand. Well that's not science. I mean, I want to throw the roof off this. I want to look at the science of it and really really see what's going on because if if this is real, and I'm

sure it is, it can change everything. It can change the way we live, it can change the way we live with each other, it can change the history of the planet about how we're going to adapt as a species. And it's almost as if we're coming to a place, I think, where in a number of different fields where we either have to make these tough decisions and follow the facts and understand that we are not alone and there's something much bigger than us going on, or we

could destroy ourselves, you know, who knows. I think it's that important.

it is. I think that the old containers, the old wine skins, so to speak, of thought that we have lived with maybe for too long, they simply won't handle the new science of NDEs. We're going to have to have new ways of thinking and new ways of of of understanding, perhaps beginning to understand that maybe there's places where where science can't go. Maybe science only works in the material universe, and as soon as we leave that material universe, uh, maybe there we need other kinds of

ways of of of knowing. And so I think, not only are we're pouring a bunch of new yeastie working wine of spirituality into this thing. I think we have to have new containers for it so that we can handle it and work with it.

something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And I chose that metaphor because I wanted to celebrate the marriage of old metaphysics and old wisdom that people have known about for thousands and thousands of years, and marry that to new science that can now measure, for instance, as you said, when actual people die, and all this

kind of stuff. And so I started with something old, and I began to use a lot of the old stories that have been around forever, the Apostle Paul's near death experience, going back to the time of Plato and Socrates and near death experiences there. But then I wanted to transfer to the idea of something new, So I went to new stories of death when people are hooked up to modern equipment that actually says, yeah, they're dead,

no question about the equipment can measure that. But then I went into something borrowed, and it began to occur to me that really we need to cross polony in academic studies. We need to cross disciplines. People are getting to be such specialists in one area that they don't know how to converse or compare with people in different fields,

and so we need to borrow from academic disciplines. We need to take the field of medicine and has to get into the field of religion and the field of spirituality, and then it has to get into the field of science such as Edgar Mitchell's Institute of no Edic Research and that kind of thing. And then when a came time to the last one, something I got as I had something old, something new, and something borrowed. I needed

something blue. And it occurred to me how many times I've heard people say this knowledge just came to me right out of the blue, and visions that unexpected, you know, right out of the blue. It just popped into my and which seemed to be the way that people communicated on the other side.