SOLDIER: Fire!
WILLIAM SHATNER: Eerie recollections...
of someone else's memories.
Two people who share one mind.
And people who have been able to see their own bodies
while at the point of death.
What happens to us after we die?
Do our memories or our personalities--
everything that makes us who we are--
does it all just... disappear?
Or do we have a consciousness, a-a soul...
that lives on?
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
SHATNER: Lynchburg, Virginia.
November 10, 2008.
Accomplished neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander,
is rushed to the hospital after suffering
from severe back spasms and headaches.
After performing a spinal tap, doctors discover that
his spine and brain are swollen
with a thick, pus-filled liquid--
the sign of a deadly meningitis infection.
Shortly afterward, Dr. Alexander slips into a coma.
His brain begins shutting down.
My brain was being overrun by an extremely primitive,
aggressive bacterial infection.
One that is almost uniformly fatal.
Some of the fundamental brain stem reflexes were absent.
My pupils weren't responding.
My neocortex was horribly damaged.
People just don't come back from this kind of meningitis.
My doctors called my family together,
and they felt that there was no chance for recovery.
SHATNER: As a surgeon, Dr. Alexander helped save the lives
of countless others.
Now he lies helpless, at the mercy
of the killer bacteria that is whittling
his brain function down to nothing.
But then, something remarkable happens.
I was in very deep coma.
My brain was fully inflamed from this.
All eight lobes were involved.
Uh, there was really no place in my brain
for any kind of conscious experience to happen.
SHATNER: After clinging to life by the barest of threads,
Dr. Alexander eventually makes an extraordinary recovery--
one that baffles his physicians.
But perhaps even more baffling is the inexplicable array
of sensations that Dr. Alexander believes he experienced
while in a coma.
I was rescued by this slowly spinning white light
that came packaged with a perfect musical melody.
I felt a sensation of going through a tunnel,
being lifted up out of space and time,
and that opened up into this rich ultra-real valley
that I call the Gateway Valley.
It was an incredible, beautiful scene,
and yet, the most profound mystery.
SHATNER: Did Dr. Alexander experience
a hallucination?
Or was he really given a glimpse
into a life beyond the one we know?
A life beyond death?
If true,
the idea is almost too incredible to comprehend.
But consider this: Dr. Alexander
is just one of millions who, at the point of death,
claim to have taken the same, virtually identical journey--
a journey which is collectively referred to
as a near-death experience.
GREGORY SHUSHAN: A near-death experience is when
somebody dies clinically,
and they come back to life and describe having had
strange experiences,
such as traveling through darkness,
emerging into another realm,
meeting deceased relatives or a being of light,
traveling back to the body,
often being told to go back to the body by this being of light.
Raymond Moody was really the pioneering figure
in the scientific study of near-death experiences,
who wrote a book called Life After Life.
Before Moody came along,
you had descriptions of these accounts,
but nobody called it a near-death experience.
In the United States, about 800 people a day
report that they're having near-death experiences.
And if you think about that over the course of years
and across the whole world,
that's probably millions of people,
which makes me think that this is a real phenomenon.
People are really experiencing this.
They're not making it up.
Before my coma, I fully bought into the, uh, teachings,
uh, that the physical world is all that exists.
That's kind of the conventional scientific model.
But when I first opened my eyes in that ICU bed,
my brain was absolutely wrecked,
and all I remembered was where I'd been,
that extraordinary spiritual journey deep in coma.
That's why near-death experiencers
come back to this world and realize
that we are eternal spiritual beings
and that our physical body is only a vessel
that serves our soul in transition
through this phase of our journey.
SHATNER: The soul?
The intangible essence of who we are that lives on after we die?
If the near-death experiences reported by millions
have, in fact, really happened as described,
then could this be proof
that the soul actually exists,
and that there really is some form of life
beyond death?
The concept of the soul is one of the deepest,
most far-reaching questions in all of science,
and for that matter, in all of human history.
Throughout history, poets, philosophers have tried
to single out what is the soul,
what is the essence of what makes us human?
It speaks to our yearning for more time.
To go beyond the short amount of time
that's been given us as human beings.
If you look to questions about the soul,
you see that these really speak to our fears, our desires,
what we want most and what matters most.
SHATNER: Not surprisingly, not everyone's convinced
that the soul really exists.
As far as many in the scientific community are concerned,
it is little more than a concept brought about
by wishful thinking.
KAKU: There is a theory
that says that people who are prone
to have these near-death experiences are also prone
to have lots of dream activity during REM sleep.
Maybe they were hallucinating, or some people think that, aha,
maybe that could explain near-death experience.
I would maintain, along with virtually everybody
who is engaged in the study of near-death experiences,
that these are not aberrations, these are not hallucinations.
How is it possible that people are having
such rich conscious experiences
when the brain itself is not functioning?
There's a case report in September 2018
in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseaseon my case,
and it makes it clear to anyone in the medical profession
that I was deathly ill and that my brain was terribly devastated
by this infection
and should not have been able to produce
any kind of consciousness.
From my point of view, death of the physical body
is not the end of the conscious awareness.
Near-death experiences are showing us,
in no uncertain fashion, that we are souls
living in a spiritual universe and that all the major factors
involved in the events of our lives
have to do with that soul journey
and with that spiritual nature.
SHATNER: Consciousness in the absence of brain activity?
According to mainstream scientists,
such a thing is not possible.
But what if they're missing the target?
Perhaps the answer can be found
by investigating further evidence that,
not only does a soul exist,
but it might actually be transplanted
from one body to another.
SHATNER: Atlanta, Grgia. December 1992.
17-year-old Amy Tippins is having difficulty breathing.
Suspecting that she has some form of pneumonia,
she makes an appointment with her family doctor.
But the actual diagnosis she receives is,
in a word, shocking.
TIPPINS: My senior year of high school,
I started developing what I thought was pneumonia,
and then when they went in to do some further testing,
they realized I didn't have pneumonia,
it was actually a tumor pushing on my diaphragm
and making it much harder for me to breathe,
and I was in full liver failure.
They said, "She'll," you know, "she needs to have a transplant
or she'll hemorrhage to death."
SHATNER: With time running out,
Amy received her new liver and survived.
But in the months following her transplant,
she found herself exhibiting interests and abilities
that were, not only new to her,
but also surprising.
TIPPINS: Not long after surgery,
some things about myself and some of my traits had changed.
Within a couple of years of my transplant,
I really started to love projects,
like replacing flooring on my own.
I never saw flooring being put in.
I never saw anything like that being done.
What I discovered is it was actually fun
to work with my hands.
Just kind of go, "Huh, that's interesting."
SHATNER: Of course, it isn't surprising that people
who have had lifesaving transplant operations
often report experiencing
-a new outlook on life.
But new interests?
New personality traits?
Is it possible that Amy Tippins was getting these
from somewhere else?
I knew my donor was a male, I knew he was 47
and that he had been killed in a car wreck in Columbus, Georgia.
So I went to the library and I started
looking up obituaries from that time.
And I kind of backed into his obituary,
and backed into figuring out who he was.
What I discovered is he was a police officer.
He was 47 and his name was Mike.
His sister told me that he did a lot of his own home renovation.
He also liked to work with his hands.
He liked to do projects.
When I found out who my donor was, it made a lot more sense
on why some things about myself and some of my traits
had changed after transplant.
SHATNER: Personality traits and even recreational interests
coming from a transplanted organ?
Is such a bizarre notion even scientifically possible?
I've had clients come to the office
who've had organ transplants
who are baffled by what they experience,
and some did have memories that were foreign to them.
And then somehow or other found out what the person was like
whose organ that they now have, and it matches.
It's unusual, and I don't have an explanation for it.
MISHLOVE: They very often report not only the memories of the donor
but sometimes the behavioral patterns of the donor.
It certainly suggests that memory
and-and even behavior patterns can be embedded
in these organs in ways that science has no clue.
GARY SCHWARTZ: After looking at all the cases
that we had access to, I developed a theory about how
if the brain can learn, then other organs
like the heart or the lungs or the liver could learn.
We analyzed ten of the best cases
where the-- it was clear that the individual
had these kinds of personality changes,
and it was only later that they then met family members.
One case in particular was of a young boy
who had been killed in a drive-by shooting,
and his heart was donated
to a foundry worker who was 47 years old.
What happened was he developed a passion for classical music.
And then he subsequently ended up meeting the mother
of this young boy, and he learned that this young man
was taking classical violin lessons
and literally was shot as he was leaving his music lessons.
From my point of view, it simply goes to show
that as much as we want to pretend that things
like mind and consciousness and personality
are all stuck in the brain, um, they're really not.
SHATNER: Could our memories, our identities,
even our consciousness, be stored in not just our brains,
but within each and every part of our bodies?
If that's true, could these traits also be inherited,
just like the color of our eyes or the size of our ears?
According to a groundbreaking study conducted
at the Icahn School of Medicine
at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City,
the answer might just be a resounding yes.
About 25 years ago, we began studying the adult children
of Holocaust survivors.
And what we learned was that Holocaust offspring
were more likely to have been diagnosed
with mood and anxiety disorders.
And we were able to observe epigenetic changes
on, actually, two small segments of two stress-related genes,
which really captured our attention.
Then you start to wonder why a child of a trauma survivor
would have such a change on their DNA.
Is there a way that information somehow stays with us,
maybe in our germ cells,
maybe in other places, and then somehow, they are passed?
SCHWARTZ: The findings about the cross-generational
parent transfer from Holocaust survivors to their children,
is evidence that the, uh, the body itself
is a much more exquisite system
for storing energy information about our lives.
And that that information could not only be transferred
in the case of an organ transplant,
but it also could be transferred
and continued across generations.
KINSELLA: Studies like this are suggesting
that we really don't know how mind, how memory,
how experience work, we don't know how that resonates
with us in body.
HAWKES: I think it's very clear that there's something
about us as beings that's beyond the brain,
and people have used the word soul or spirit.
It's one of those very curious and unexplained mysteries
of who are we
and what comes and goes with our bodies,
our cells, our organs.
His DNA is still in my bloodstream,
and they say that DNA carries memories.
To this day, I still continue to find out information about him.
I'd go, "Huh, that's interesting
in how it relates to me."
Can transplanted organs really contain
some part of the donor's identity?
Conventional medicine believes the notion is far-fetched.
So how do you explain what we just saw?
Is our life experience encoded not just in our brain
but throughout our entire body?
Perhaps the answer can be found by examining
whether such a connection exists between two people
who are physically identical in every way.
Twins.
SHATNER: Los Angeles, California.
March 2004.
Linda Jamison is out for a romantic evening
when she becomes struck by a strange
and overpowering sensation.
Something in her tells her that her identical twin sister Terry
is in mortal danger.
LINDA: While I was on a date with a guy,
in the middle of the dinner, I said, "Oh, my gosh,
"I... I have this horrible feeling.
"I have to get home to see if Terry's okay,
'cause I don't feel she's okay."
And when I went home, I went up to our apartment,
and Terry was lying in bed, unable to speak or hear.
And, I mean, it was so terrifying.
It was kind of like a weird virus that had taken me over...
-It was a virus. -...like, very quickly.
And she got me to the ER just in time and they said, "Wow,
you could have died."
SHATNER: Faced with what could have been a fatal viral infection,
Terry was saved in the nick of time.
But was Linda's belief that her sister was in danger
merely a coincidence, or was it something more?
Twins share more than genes.
They've shared an intrauterine environment.
They've shared a set of early experiences together.
They have been there with each other through early attachments
and early developmental milestones.
So the idea that twins feel really connected to each other
is not very surprising.
LINDA: It's a weird thing to describe to singletons,
but we've always had that mysterious bond,
that special bond twins have
where they can feel each other's pain
or they can determine what's gonna happen next
-with the other twin. -We're just always intuiting
what the other wants or what the other twin needs
or, you know, helping each other constantly.
SHATNER: Twins,
each one constantly in sync
with what the other wants or needs?
It is often said that the bond between twins is so strong,
they can actually read each other's minds.
But is that just an expression,
or could it be true?
Studies that were done in Copenhagen and in London
took monozygotic pairs--
so really, really twins, absolute identical DNA--
isolated them, and then,
for one of them, uh, was subjected
to different kinds of shocks.
The distant twin was wired up with polygraph equipment.
So these were designed to see
what was happening in the distant twin.
But one shock would have been literally an electric shock,
another would be that, at a time that they didn't know,
somebody behind them would drop a whole bunch of plates,
make a big racket.
So they found roughly eight to ten percent
of the twins that were tested showed that there was
some kind of a correlation between one person
getting a shock and the other person responding.
30% of twins report a telepathic connection with their twin,
and it is because they're sharing a similar genetic code
on some level, but on another level,
they're also connected on a soul level
that allows them to stay in this telepathic communication
at all times.
But we also called it "twin tuition,"
because there was no word to describe that weird,
you know, mysterious feeling where your twin is suffering
somewhere, and you pick up on it somehow and even feel
the physical pain that that twin is feeling.
It's very eerie.
SHATNER: Despite the claims of Linda and Terry Jamison,
and thousands more like them,
skeptics often argue that what is interpreted
as a psychic connection between twins
is merely a misinterpretation
of the fondness they have for each other.
But if identical twins really do share
an inexplicable attachment,
then perhaps evidence of this link can be found
in cases of twins who have remarkable similarities,
even though they were raised separately.
So I've been working with twins raised apart for many years.
And we find that identical twins do show many traits in common,
even after years of separation.
So for example, the Jim twins, Jim Lewis and Jim Springer,
grew up in Ohio about 30 or 40 miles apart.
And they had a long list of similarities.
For one thing, they both had woodworking benches
in their houses; they both loved to do woodwork.
They both had dogs named Toy, and they both had older sons
that they named James Allen.
Both of them worked part-time as sheriffs,
both drove light blue Chevrolets, and they both
used to vacation on the same three-block strip
of beach in Florida.
We don't know the reason for that, but the point is
that when you see these similarities repeated
in identical twins raised apart, and not in fraternals,
it creates a whole new set of hypotheses
that you can begin to explore.
TERRY: Whether people want to look at the evidence,
that's up to them.
And we're not trying to convince anyone, but it's a weird thing.
It's like we're two wings of a bird.
We believe that we were bifurcated--
a bifurcated soul-- which means one soul with two bodies.
SHATNER: If one soul can be shared between two people,
as Linda and Terry Jamison believe, could it also explain
how twins appear to communicate with each other telepathically?
And if so, does this shared consciousness
simply go away after one of them dies?
Perhaps the answer can be found by hearing the story of a man
who believes his soul doesn't just serve onebody...
...but several.
SHATNER: Sharpsburg, Maryland.
May 1991.
Connecticut fire chief, Jeffrey Keene,
is on a road trip with his wife
when suddenly he feels a strange urge
to make a detour.
My wife and I, uh, like to go antique hunting,
and we had been through Pennsylvania
and headed down into Maryland.
We were very near where the Battle of Antietam
had been fought,
and I was always impressed
with the bravery of the men that fought in the Civil War.
It strikes a chord in you.
So I asked my wife if it was okay if we, uh,
take a little side trip to go see the battlefield.
SOLDIER: Fire!
SHATNER: On September 17, 1862,
Union forces cornered Confederate troops
near Antietam Creek as they attempted an incursion
into Maryland.
It was the first major battle of the Civil War
to take place on Union soil.
All told, almost 125,000 soldiers took part
in the fighting.
And by day's end,
the battlefield was soaked with the blood
of more than 22,000 souls.
Now, nearly 130 years later,
Jeffrey Keene and his wife arrived at the battlefield,
hoping to experience a bit of this history.
But while visiting the site,
Jeffrey had a very different experience,
one that would prove to be far more personal
than he could ever have imagined.
KEENE: Well, we went to the battlefield, and all of a sudden
I couldn't breathe.
I started crying, uh, I had burning tears
running down my cheek, I didn't know what was going on.
And, uh, I literally crawled up to the side of the road
and, uh, got myself together, went back to the car.
On the, uh, way home, we stopped at a gift store, and, uh,
there was a magazine there.
The whole magazine was done on Antietam.
And when we got home, I was reading through,
and came across a full-figure picture
of General John B. Gordon.
He was a colonel at the battle,
and he'd been wounded five times, but he-he survived.
And I looked at the face, and I told people
I know the face very well.
I shave it every morning.
SHATNER: Jeffrey Keene.
Confederate General John B. Gordon.
The resemblance is, in a word, uncanny.
So much so that Jeffrey began to wonder...
...could the strange reaction he experienced
while visiting Antietam
be some sort of emotional echo?
A connection that suggests that Jeffrey Keene
is actually John B. Gordon reincarnated?
Reincarnation is the process that allows your soul
to take on a new life, a new body.
In other words, you are born in a human body,
you finish that cycle, you are deceased, then you
continue to recycle that soul from one body to the next while
being within the same Earth plane.
KEENE: A lot of people say to me,
"Why don't I remember lifetimes?"
I say, "You do, you just don't realize that you do."
There'll be haunting songs,
a desire to go to certain places, countries and things.
The furniture that you use to decorate your house,
your hobbies, the clothes you wear, and so on.
SHATNER: Can departed souls really pass into new bodies?
And if so, what evidence might there be
to support such an incredible claim?
According to Jeffrey Keene, there are signs
that can be found once you know where to look for them.
KEENE: In Antietam, where Gordon was wounded,
he described that he had been shot through the right calf,
higher up on the same leg,
and the left arm.
So I had a pretty good picture of where he'd been wounded.
Now, on my right leg,
I have, uh, I guess you would call them varicose veins.
I only have them in two places: on my right calf,
higher up on the same leg.
My left arm, I had a blood clot removed
when I was in my 20s.
It seems to me that, uh,
could have been one of the places Gordon had been wounded.
But you use the word "coincidence,"
it can apply in some cases,
uh, but there are small coincidences
and then there's big coincidences.
What I have is evidence.
I have very strong evidence.
SHATNER: Are Jeffrey Keene's scars
evidence that our souls are recycled back into this world
after we die?
According to some researchers, the answer is yes.
And they argue that further proof can be found
not only in physical scars...
but also in mental ones.
There's been substantial research done
at the University of Virginia with children,
showing that a subset of these children
remember times before they were born
that are then confirmed by historical records.
And those data are very consistent with the idea
that reincarnation is a real phenomenon.
COREY: The reason why it is significant
to study children, it is because their memories
are still fresh-- they haven't been
on the Earth for a very long time, so...
they still have that remembrance of the past life
very vividly in their mind.
For example, one of the most famous reincarnation stories
is that of Shanti Devi.
Shanti, since the age of four, kept telling her parents
that she came from another town called Mathura.
After being interviewed by her teachers,
she gives them the name of her husband, who was still alive
and lived in Mathura at that time.
They end up locating a merchant in Mathura
whose wife had died ten days after giving birth to their son.
Shanti recognizes him and says,
"This is my husband, Kedar Nath."
She even says that he neglected to carry out the promises
that he made on her deathbed.
KINSELLA: Ultimately, Mahatma Gandhi set up a commission
to determine whether or not this story was accurate,
and the committee members decided that this was, in fact,
proof of reincarnation.
KEENE: I don't think anybody should be forced
to believe anything.
But I know it's true to me.
You have to make up your own mind.
All I ask is you keep an open mind.
If our souls can, in fact, be recycled,
I hope mine doesn't get put in the shredder.
But if, as many believe,
we're locked in a never-ending cycle of life and rebirth,
what happens when that cycle gets interrupted
and we're literally brought back from the dead?
Perhaps the answer can be found by meeting people
who not only returned,
but have come back
with extraordinary abilities.
SHATNER: Seattle, Washington.
December 1976.
Research biologist, Joyce Hawkes,
is spending a quiet Saturday at home.
But on this particular day,
something happens that will alter
the course of her entire life.
HAWKES: I was vacuuming
right in front of my fireplace, and up on the ledge
on the fireplace was a large, beautiful leaded glass window
that I'd purchased in an antique store.
All of a sudden, this leaded glass window is coming at me.
And I like, "Ah," boom and it hits me.
And all I remember then is just, all of a sudden,
in front of me was a long, dark tunnel,
and at the end was this bright light.
And I was drawn to it.
Then I passed through the entrance to the light
and I was in a place of rolling hills
and beautiful color.
And then, bang, I'm back,
all of a sudden, on the floor in my living room.
SHATNER: In the months after her near-death experience,
Joyce hoped to return to normalcy
and resume her scientific work in the lab.
But she soon realized that, after her brush
with the afterlife, nothing would be the same.
Because Joyce now had the ability
to see things that no one else could.
What I noticed is I could see inside people's bodies,
I could read their bodies.
And there are times when I actually can look
into people's bodies and see something going on
that hasn't been diagnosed.
I resigned my position at the lab
and I started seeing individuals in the basement of my house.
One time, a woman came to me and was on the treatment table
and, all of a sudden, her abdomen opened up
and I saw a small tumor in a very precise location.
And I said, "Please go to your doctor and have it checked out."
She had to have surgery, and it saved her
from having a very serious kind of uterine cancer.
KINSELLA: In the case of near-death experiences,
a number of people report developing heightened intuition,
gaining some kind of psychic ability.
They report manifestations of the paranormal that seem to be
much more common after these kinds of experiences.
MISHLOVE: A materialistic scientist would say, "How can that be?
These things don't exist at all,"
but, in fact, they're reported hundreds and hundreds of times.
HAWKES: There's something beyond the neurons,
the astrocytes, the glial cells, in our brain
going "jun, jun, jun, jun."
Something beyond that which we have awareness of.
SHATNER: The power to see through flesh
and diagnose ailments might seem preposterous.
But could it be true?
Is it possible that when Joyce Hawkes nearly died,
she came back with psychic abilities that defy explanation?
Perhaps the answers can be found by examining cases
in which people claim to not only see someone's ailment,
but also heal it.
Richmond, Virginia.
September 5, 2005.
David Schwartz goes to the hospital to be treated
for what he believes is a nagging ear infection.
But in fact, his illness is much, much worse.
DAVID SCHWARTZ: I checked myself into the emergency room.
That was Monday afternoon.
And by Tuesday afternoon, I was in a coma.
My kidneys were shut down,
all of my organs were failing and the blood flow was lost
in my brain stem as well, which would have meant brain death.
They told my mom and my dad that,
really, that I had a limited amount of time left.
SHATNER: With their son facing certain death due to kidney failure,
David's parents were willing to try anything
that might help him.
So they reached out to Scarlett Heinbuch, a woman who,
after having a near-death experience in childhood,
claimed to be gifted with incredible healing powers.
SCARLETT HEINBUCH: When I walked in David's hospital room
for the first time, I knew he was near death.
He was unconscious and I took his hand
and I'm standing right by his bedside when, all of a sudden,
I was out of my body, in another realm.
And he was hovering there and there was soul connection
and I felt him with every fiber of my being,
and he made a decision at that point to come back.
SCHWARTZ: When I first awoke and saw Scarlett,
I had the sense that I knew who she was,
and I knew everything about her.
HEINBUCH: David looked up at me and, all of a sudden,
the next thing I was aware of was that I was
seeing four beings.
They were tall and they were colored blue.
I saw them manifesting a set of kidneys, if you will.
I saw the kidneys being dropped into his body.
David's recovery after that was so stunning that the doctors
and nurses at this hospital called him "miracle boy."
SCHWARTZ: When I came out of the coma,
it was absolutely because we had an experience.
I don't know what happened there,
but I do know that it happened,
because the doctors told me that they didn't have an explanation
as to why I was making the recovery that I was making.
SHATNER: Today, David Schwartz has two fully functioning kidneys,
and both he and Scarlett Heinbuch have no doubt
in their minds that it was the powerful connection
between their souls that saved David's life.
Are stories like those of Joyce Hawkes and Scarlett Heinbuch
evidence that the soul is real,
and can actually become empowered
with strange and otherworldly abilities?
According to people who study near-death experiences,
the answer is a profound yes.
And they also insist that these tales of strange coincidences
and psychic connections are really meant to assure us
that we are all very much connected,
and not only in the ways we've been taught to imagine.
SHATNER: Everything that lives must also eventually die.
And yet, for people who believe they've touched or been touched
by what they refer to as the other side,
death is not an ending,
but a gateway toward a new beginning.
They live with a certainty that the rest of us will never have.
That is, until we die.
KINSELLA: I think near-death experiences and related phenomena
are so fascinating, frustrating and mysterious
because the footprints they leave behind are very muddied.
And what I mean by that is there seems to be enough proof,
enough anecdotal evidence, to where if people really want
to believe these stories, they want to believe this phenomena,
they certainly can.
But for those that are absolutely certain
that these experiences are, by and large, byproducts
of naturalistic phenomena, like, maybe biological stress,
then there certainly is not enough compelling evidence
that would be able to-to shift them over.
HAWKES: I've heard that near-death experiences
are really some kind of vision or sleep experience.
For myself, I know it wasn't, because I know
what my dreams were like, and this was so different than that.
It's far beyond a dream state, or a state
where there's no oxygen to the brain
and you have some kind of weird thing that lasts.
Now, before my coma, I thought, well, it's just a hallucination.
It's a trick of the dying brain.
So, in many ways, it was very refreshing to me
as I came out of this experience,
and-and especially in those months after my coma.
I came to realize that there are a number of scientists,
literally hundreds of scientists around the world,
who have been studying these problems
very diligently for decades,
and they're actually making tremendous progress.
BERLIN: It's that there might be energies, forces,
things that we haven't yet discovered
that we may never discover.
And however you want to fill in that gap,
whether it's mysticism, spirituality, religion,
I think that's left to each individual person.
SHATNER: Near-death experiences,
the psychic connections between identical twins
and tales of reincarnation.
Are these all evidence that there really is a soul?
Or is it that we're all so desperate to believe
in our own immortality
that we look for evidence to reassure ourselves
that death is not really the end?
Well, when that day comes,
we will not only learn the truth, but also the answers
to all the other mysteries that are, until then,
The UnXplained.