[musical swirl]
[water drop]
[crackle]
[rockslide]
[musical tone]
[music]
[music continues]
[doors opening]
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.
[Engine rumbling]
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.
[intense music boom]
You have one engine at higher rpm,
another low rpm.
Now that can happen with an engine failure.
[intense music boom]
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
[trees hitting the plane]
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.
[intense music]
[crash]
[soft music start]
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.
[picture click]
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.
[low rumbling]
[music]
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.
[music and rumbling]
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.
[building music and rumbling]
You're experiencing things
you've never experienced before,
even though you can see your world
is contained within this world,
[music]
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?
[dramatic music]
[music continues]
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.
[button click, reel stops]
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.
[low music]
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.
[pages turning]
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.
Anchor: 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."
[music]
So I was very skeptical
that these things were even occurring.
And if they were occurring,
they were either hallucinations
or delusions or whatever.
[music continues]
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.
[typewriter clicks]
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
[music]
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.
[music continues]
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.
[rumbling]
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.
[rumbling]
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.
[liquid explosion]
Without exaggeration,
what it felt like was fire.
[fire explosion]
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
[emergency sirens]
they confirmed basically,
if I didn't have the surgery in an hour,
I would die.
[squeaky wheel]
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.
[moaning and yelling]
I begged, I screamed,
I yelled,
[intense music]
and my wife begged
and yelled and screamed,
Beverly: Nurse, can someone please come in here?
[intense music]
Mr. Storm: Sorry.
We need a doctor to prescribe something
Beverly: Can you please talk to someone who can help us?
There has to be somebody,
how can there not be someone here?
[intense music]
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.
[clock ticking]
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.
[women crying and pleading]
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.
[flat-line tone]
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.
[music building]
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.
[music and waves]
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
[emergency sirens]
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.
[music and sirens]
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.
[backround conversation] [medical equipment beeping]
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.
[backround conversation] [medical equipment sounds]
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.
[breathe sound]
Dr. Sabom: The whole experience is
very calm, it's very peaceful.
Some people don't want to come back.
[music and whooshing]
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.
[violin music]
- 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.
[music]
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.
[click and rolling]
[Historic illustrations of the afterlife]
[music]
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
[music]
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.
[button clicks and machine starts]
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.
[music and pictures moving]
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.
[music and low rumble]
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?
[music]
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.
[rolling thunder and raindrops]
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.
Anita: It was foggy and a slight rain.
It was wet
Don: and I knew I would have to cross some bridges.
[thunder and rain]
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.
[gears engaging]
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.
[Crash]
[Thunder]
Anita: 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.
Don: 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.
Anita: 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.
[music]
Don: You could see from this wrecking yard picture that
the trajectory of the truck as it went over.
[music]
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.
[bird song]
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
[water splashing]
and the front end of my boat
became pinned
[waterfall sounds] [music intensifying]
and the boat and I were then
completely submerged under 8 to 10 feet of water.
[waterfall sounds]
I recognized that I was probably going to drown.
[waterfall sounds]
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.
Jeremain: 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.
Kristen: The knife had gone all the way through my liver.
I had a punctured lung and I started feeling myself
leave my body.
Oprah: 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 ...
Peter: and I could see in every direction.
Barbara: Up on the ceiling looking down.
There was this feeling of a presence. It felt like God
David: Not like this guy up in the sky.
Anne: And that was God.
I just know it was God
Hila: The meaning of life, of everything,
Johnnie: It was unlike anything I've ever experienced.
David: I have no fear of death.
Tom:...it's with total knowledge and unconditional love...
Hila: It was all the love that is in the universe.
Kirat: Death is not the end. It's probably the beginning.
Dean: 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.
Hillary: You know, people don't believe you
when you say the story, but it's just so real.
[music]
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?
[music]
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.
[music]
So that left us with
the rare recording of the human brain
that went from a life to death.
[flatline tone]
CBS: 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. - Zemmar: 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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
[pages turn]
[music]
Kang: 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.
[music]
Kang: 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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[slow rumbling]
I know one thing, we all live once and die once.
And there is judgment after.
[low rumbles]
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.
[light music]
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.
[backround noises and conversations]
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.
[music]
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.
Pam: 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.
Pam: 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.
[medical equipment beeping]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[crash]
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.
[music]
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
[rumbling]
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.
[music]
Don: The moment the truck struck me,
I was standing at the gates of Heaven.
[wind blowing] [waves crashing]
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.
[music]
Don: 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.
[wind blowing]
Mr. Black: I did think for a moment, okay, I died.
Okay, I'm gone.
And was I sad?
No, not at all.
[music]
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.
[water sounds and music]
Don: I was surrounded by people I knew and loved in life.
[backround video conversations]
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.
[music]
Mr. Black: I recognized this group of people.
These people are looking at me with such love.
[music]
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.
[music and wind]
Don: 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.
[waves of water and 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.
[loud closing sound]
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.
[TV Static]
Paul: 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.
[heartbeats] [heartbeats stop]
[whooshing]
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.
[low violin tones]
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."
[low tones]
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.
[music]
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.
[low tones]
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.
[dramatic music]
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!"
[dramatic music]
They'd say, "You're going to find out.
You'll find out.
You're going to get there."
[low background voices]
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.
[music and crackling]
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
[sinister laughter]
and tearing me apart, literally.
disemboweling me, gouging my eyes.
And it was all accompanied
with a great deal of laughter and joy.
[dark noises] [backround laughter]
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.
[music]
I was not proud or pleased
with my relationship with my two children.
[music]
I sank into
a pit of despair and hopelessness
that I can't begin to describe.
[crackling]
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,
[thunder rumbling]
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.
[boom and rumbling]
As if in deep space.
Mr. Storm: I realized we were not on the ground anymore.
We were moving upward, straight upwards.
[thunder rumbling]
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.
[music]
Paul: 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.
[music]
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.
Paul: When you leave this earth
and you step into the eternity,
everything is crystal clear.
[music]
Mr. Black: I knew I was coming to this holy area
and obviously
it took another second to connect the dots.
This is Heaven.
[music playing]
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.
[movie reel clicks]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
and you should put me back.
I don't belong here.
[crying and music]
You know, you've made a mistake.
I don't belong here.
And he said, "We don't make mistakes.
You do belong here."
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[holding back tears]
and um,
[music]
I mean,
I reacted
like any mother would.
[emergency sirens]
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
[music playing]
[rain falling]
[distant thunder]
Don: And it all stopped
just as quickly I arrived.
[emergency sirens]
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.
Eva: 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.
Don: 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.
Eva: 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."
[hospital machine sounds] [wheezing breaths]
Later, I understood
that he meant his Heavenly home.
Don: 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.
Eva: 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.
[music] [deep crying breaths]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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."
[music]
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?
[dramatic music]
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.
[dramatic music]
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.
[music]
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."
[music]
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."
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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,
[music]
Eva: 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?
[musical tones]
Don: 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.
[low piano chord]
Why?
You let me see that,
And you brought me back to this.
What is going on here?
What was the purpose of this?
[piano music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music]
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.
[music] [video conversations]
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.
[music]
I had the most
overwhelming sense of being home,
of being where I really belong,
where we really belong, all of us.
Kang: 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.
Don: 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.
[music]
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.
[somber music]
[Clicking of machine]