Near Death Experiences and the Continuum of Consciousness

Ky Dickens: Hi everyone. This is Ky Dickens and you're listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast.In season one, nonspeakers showed us that telepathy is possible shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going.

This is The Telepathy Tapes and we're opening up the next channel.

Last season, we met nonspeakers who revealed rich inner lives despite years of being dismissed as incapable. Some shared what few thought possible that telepathy wasn't fantasy, but survival. They connected in a shared mental space called The Hill, and at times with those who had passed on and over the past few months, rigorous scientific testing has begun to confirm what many families have long asserted. 

In tightly controlled double blind telepathy experiments conducted across rooms and even zip codes, independent researchers are now witnessing what families and teachers have clear, repeatable, mind to mind communication that defies chance. That should make everyone out there sit up. Because validating telepathy makes it harder to dismiss other things. nonspeakers have shared, especially their claims of talking to people who've passed. Those claims are just as consequential, as telepathy, maybe even more so, and that's the question that's been tugging at me for months.

When someone says they're receiving messages from beyond the grave, what or who exactly are they connecting with? Is it like recalling a memory or could someone be accessing an informational field, a shared consciousness, the echoes of someone who actually lived on earth? Physicists now believe that the edge of a black hole may store every bit of information that's ever entered it.

What if the boundary between life and death works the same way and consciousness doesn't vanish, but is encoded in some invisible field at the edge of what we can know? Not lost, just transformed. Or what if the nonspeakers were actually talking to a soul, real individuals who lived on earth but without a body?

And so it made me realize that before we return to stories like Amelia's, who in our next episode is overwhelmed by a flood of messages from the beyond, we need to lay a foundation. We need to ask the deeper question, does consciousness survive death? And perhaps the best place to begin. It is with those who've been there and returned.

Dr. Gregory Sushan: He was lying on his deathbed and his soul leaves his body and he goes to the other world and he meets a bing of light in the form of the sun. God, what you're hearing is a near death experience or NDE for short, and then he meets another panel of deities who are also radiating light and they perform a sort of evaluation of his earthly life.

You've probably heard one of these before. But this near death experience is nearly 4,000 years old, and then he meets his deceased relatives. There's a banquet thrown in his honor, and then he's sent back to his body. It's one of the earliest accounts in writing. This is about 1800 BCE from Ancient Sumer.

Ky Dickens: Dr. Gregory Shushan is one of the world's leading authorities in near death experiences and how they shaped ancient civilizations. Dr. Shushan has multiple degrees. He's written seven books and he left no stone unturned. In his research, he compared everything from 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: ancient Egyptian afterlife with Sumerian Vedic period of India, which is the foundational era for all of the later Hindu religions, as well as Buddhism, and then in some African Sub-Saharan African societies, and then the Mesoamerican religions in Aztec and Mayan civilizations.

Ky Dickens: At first near-death experiences weren't on his radar. He was just looking at afterlife beliefs across multiple ancient cultures.

Dr. Gregory Sushan: Specifically at their afterlife beliefs as expressed in their ancient texts that describe journeys to the other world. And they did find the same consistent nine thematic elements that seemed to be imported onto each of these civilizations as a whole, almost. Leaving the body, traveling through darkness, coming into a realm of light, meeting a being of light, meeting the deceased ancestors, a review of the life. But what I didn't expect on top of that was to find actual accounts of near death experiences in all of these ancient civilizations, these narrative accounts of historical people who died, came back to life and talked about the experiences of their consciousness during that period.

That was really surprising to me because again, I just thought I was going to be comparing afterlife beliefs. 

Ky Dickens: Which raises an intriguing question. What if our beliefs about the afterlife aren't just symbolic stories handed down through generations, but records of real human experiences? What if thousands of years ago people weren't simply imagining what happens after death, they were reporting it?

Dr. Gregory Sushan: I did a second study comparing actual near-death experience accounts from Polynesia, Micronesia, Mesia, and Australia, native Americans Sub-Saharan Africa, and they found dozens of accounts of people within these societies actually saying "this specific person died, went to the other world and came back on this particular date.

And the reason we know about the afterlife, the reason we have these beliefs about the afterlife that we have is because of what that person told us." So this whole idea that people's afterlife beliefs, religious beliefs in the afterlife are originating with near-death experience was basically validated by a lot of these cases. 

Ky Dickens: So I wanted to talk with someone who had their own near-death experience that changed the way they thought about the world. And who better than a neurosurgeon? 

Dr. Eben Alexander: I'm Eben Alexander, MD. I taught neurosurgery as an associate professor at Harvard Medical School for more than 15 years.

I had a pretty good idea of brain, mind, consciousness and how all that works.

Ky Dickens: Throughout his career, Dr. Alexander had patients who would describe having their own near-death experience. He would listen politely, but quietly dismiss them as hallucinations or the byproduct of a brain under extreme stress.

He did not see them as evidence of anything beyond this life until he was 55 years old and contracted meningitis. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: My brain was inflamed. It was infected over all lobes my brain, even my brainstem, was badly damaged. 

Ky Dickens: He was put into a medically induced coma, and while he was there, while doctors were trying to dampen his brain swelling and minimize the damage that had already been done, Dr. Alexander had nothing short of a life-changing experience when he traveled to another realm. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: So it was a horrific case, but in many ways that was a gift because if it hadn't been such a severe case of destruction to my near cortex, I wouldn't have had the kind of grounds to make the claims I made about the spiritual journey.

Ky Dickens: Dr. Alexander's experience stands apart from most and is quite consequential because while many near death experiences happen after cardiac arrest where some brain activity still lingers, his cortex was completely shut down, and that's important because by conventional science, his brain shouldn't have been capable of any experience at all.

Dr. Eben Alexander: When I started reviewing my own medical records in the weeks and months after coma, talking over with my doctors, looking at my CT and MRI scans, I was thinking, this doesn't match up. This amount of damage doesn't allow for a dream or hallucination, much less this extraordinary experience I had. And that's when I really had to start looking seriously at models of non-local consciousness. 

Ky Dickens: Dr. Alexander was a materialist through and through. He's a neurosurgeon, a man of science, so he was surprised by how radically his experience changed his views on consciousness and the afterlife. And one of the things that impacted him most wasn't just what he saw is what he didn't know.

Dr. Eben Alexander: I had no memory for Eben Alexander's life. I had no knowledge of Earth, his universe. It really was an empty slate. 

Ky Dickens: And for a neurosurgeon who once dismissed NDEs as brain-based hallucinations, that blank slate made all the difference. He had his near death experience without filters. No expectations, no preconceived narrative.

Dr. Eben Alexander: I had no assumptions or preconceptions for my lifetime and for my work as a scientist. None of my religious beliefs, every bit of it was deleted.

Ky Dickens: Which makes his visit to a seemingly afterlife, something he didn't believe in all that more fascinating.

Dr. Eben Alexander: I went through basically three different phases of, of kind of the afterlife experience.

First was in a very primitive realm. I called it the 'earthworms eye view.' 

Ky Dickens: I read Dr. Alexander's book, and this earthworms eye view is terrifying. He describes it as this dark and murky realm of primitive awareness. He said it's like being underground and trapped in this muddy jello-like darkness with strange mechanical sounds that were echoing around him.

It felt kind of like the most basic level of consciousness, and I don't know why that hit me so hard, but maybe it's just because that's what our consciousness is like when it's trapped in a brain that's slowly shutting down. But then he describes being rescued by this melodic light.

Dr. Eben Alexander: This slowly spinning white light that came towards me, and it had a perfect musical melody associated with it.

I remember that light portal opening up into a higher level, and as I ascended up into that, up into this brilliant ultra reality, it was shocking. It had many Earth-like features, but it was much more like Plato's world of ideals. There was no sign of any death or decay. I just remember the colors beyond the rainbow.

Down below us was a meadow. It was the world of perfection. What I was witnessing, there was all this joy and merriment and children playing, dogs jumping in festivities. I didn't have any body awareness, and that's because our modes of knowing in that realm are so much grander, you know, here, our physical body, our eyes, our ears, our brains, every bit of it conspires to limit our sensory flow to this tiny little trickle that's involved in our survival in the here and now as physical beings.

And yet we have far greater wisdom and access to information about the universe beyond that. 

Ky Dickens: And then there was this third, almost higher realm he'd talk about. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: Angelic choirs provided yet another portal, a light portal up into this brilliant core realm. I witnessed as I ascended to these levels, all of four dimensional space time collapsing down. Time flow in that realm is not identically matched to time flow in this realm.

But bottom line is in the core realm, all paradoxes, all of the dualities of this world, male, female, good, bad, dark, light, et cetera, everything's resolved into pure oneness in that level. And that's where I acknowledged the oneness of my very conscious awareness with that infinitely powerful and loving God force and coming to see as many near-death experiences describe that were never separate from that. But I was always told going into the core, "You're not here to stay. You'll be going back. We'll teach you many things," not in words, because nothing in that realm was words. It was pure conceptual. 

Ky Dickens: In other words, telepathy is the main mode of communication in this realm. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: I would tumble between these various levels over time.

Go back down to that earthworm my view, and it was by remembering the music, these are notes that go far beyond any notes that could ever be put together in music in this world. 

Ky Dickens: And by remembering the notes and thinking of them, he could propel himself back to this realm of ultra beauty and ultra awareness.

So during Dr. Alexander's coma, he would experience three different realms. The first being the earthworms point of view, this dark jello-y underworld, and the highest of these felt like the core of everything, the unification of all that is. But that middle realm, the one described as paradise, is reflective of the place most often described in the near death experiences I've encountered.

Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say that's the realm where we reunite with higher souls, with our higher soul, with our soul group, loved ones who've left the physical plane already. That's where we plan next incarnations and go through life review. That's the most important part., 'cause the life review, which has been talked about going back thousands of years, we relive events in a very detailed fashion. But we're experiencing it from the emotional perspective of those around us who are influenced by our very thoughts and actions. The life review shows us very clearly that if we hurt others, we're hurting ourselves. 

Ky Dickens: And what Dr. Alexander experienced there tracks with so many different NDEs.

And what I love about Dr. Alexander, he wrote everything down about his experience before reading any other accounts of near death experiences, because he didn't wanna be swayed or influenced by what other people had said. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: And the best part about it was I wasn't alone. My primary spirit guide was really that guardian angel. There was a beautiful young woman beside me. She looked at me with a look of pure love and she never uttered a word, but she didn't have to. 

Ky Dickens: And of course I wanted to know if he had any idea who this young woman was, because in doing my research, most people see someone they love or knew in their NDE.

But he didn't recognize this woman.

Dr. Eben Alexander: It was actually identifying her four months after awakening from coma that it was the, "oh my God" moment, about the reality of the whole journey. 

Ky Dickens: This requires a tiny detour into Eben's backstory. 

Dr. Eben Alexander: I was put up for adoption. My birth mother was 16 years old and unwed, 1953.

So social services took me away from her at age 11 days for failure to thrive. Now, I'm not looking for sympathy because I was adopted into a wonderful, loving family, but there was this big smoking crater in my life that had to do with my ability to trust others. I had finally met my birth family one year before my coma.

I knew by that time that I'd had another sister. And that she had passed and my family was still kind of grieving her loss. But there was always that kind of dark left out peace that there was a sister who I would never meet. 

But it turns out I would never meet her in this world because four months after my coma, I received a picture in the mail from my birth sister Kathy, and that was the picture of the lost sister.

And when I saw that everything came together. And I went, "Oh my God." 

Ky Dickens: The beautiful spirit guide who was by his side during his near death experience who he didn't recognize was his late sister.

Dr. Eben Alexander: Like so many others, I made the mistake of thinking that science was materialism and it's not. 

Ky Dickens: Dr. Alexander studied his own case closely. Both as a neurosurgeon and as an experiencer who simply did not believe in this type of thing, and he found no medical explanation. For him, the only answer is that his consciousness truly left his body and what he experienced was undeniably real.

Dr. Eben Alexander: That ultra reality, everything is so detailed and sharp. It's more real than lived events, and that was absolutely the case for me. 

Ky Dickens: "More real than lived events." This is something I've heard over and over from people who have a near death experience. That their time there, wherever it was, felt more real than their time here.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: The majority of people having a near-death experience will say that it is more real, they're more conscious than they were during their earthly everyday life. 

Ky Dickens: That's Dr. Jeffrey Long. He's a radiation oncologist who became fascinated with near-death experiences. He started the Near Death Experience Research Foundation and has collected thousands of firsthand accounts.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: I've asked hundreds and hundreds of near death experiencers in a survey question about their degree of consciousness and alertness. About three-fourths say that it's greater than their earthly everyday consciousness. 

Ky Dickens: There's several other commonalities researchers have found, regardless of the culture or country where the experience occurs.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: While no two near-death experiences are the same, a typical, detailed, near-death experience would be like this: boom. There's that life-threatening event. They're unconscious or clinically dead. Element number one, first thing that happens about 45% of the time, consciousness separates from the body and goes above the body.

From that vantage point, they can see ongoing earthly events, including possibly people struggling to bring them back to life. They then may pass into or through a tunnel variably described at the end of the tunnel, there may be a beautiful mystical, uh, typically called an 'unearthly light' beyond anything they knew on earth. When they pass through that they may be in an unearthly, often called a 'heavenly realm.'

And a heavenly realm is a very reasonable description for this, because in that realm, there may be buildings, there may be landscapes, there may be plants, flowers, for example, people have described the flowers in the afterlife realm of the near death experiences as having colors that are so beautiful there's no earthly correl, that they're nothing like they could have even conceived of on earth. There may be music in that realm beyond anything they've ever heard possible overwhelmingly beautiful. In this afterlife, if you will. They may encounter deceased loved ones, these are joyous reunions. 

In fact, they've encountered deceased pets. I mean, you name it, cat's, dogs, bird horses. We've heard it all. Again, just like deceased human loved ones, joyous reunions, and the beings, the humans or the pets are always in picture perfect health, even if they died of advanced illness or very up in age. So it is around that time too, they may have that life review that's commonplace for that to occur, and that's a fairly detailed near death experience right there.

Ky Dickens: Here's Dr. Gregory Shushan again. 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: With NDEs, there is a base experience that everyone's having, but they kind of overlay their symbols onto it in order to understand it. It's a difficult thing to try to put into words, but I see it almost as like that experience is only experienceable by our capacity to project our cultural forms and symbols onto it.

So just to give one example, like the being of light, which lots and lots of people talk about it a near death experience. Some people will come back and say, I saw Jesus. Some people say, I saw the Buddha. Some people say, I saw Muhammad or Krishna. Some people will just say, I saw a being of light, and they won't ascribe any kind of personality to it.

So, whether that is like the same being of light for everybody and everyone's just projecting their symbol onto it or whether everyone is seeing their favored entity, I think is unresolved. But to me it makes a lot more sense that it's the same type of manifestation or illusion, or however you wanna look at it, that we're ascribing our cultural identities onto. 

Dr. Jan Holden: Because of advances in resuscitative medicine during the 20th century, people were being brought back from the brink of death in unprecedented numbers. 

Ky Dickens: That's Dr. Jan Holden, she's a professor emeritus at the University of North Texas and has been studying near death experiences for decades. 

Dr. Jan Holden: And that's probably why we started to see so many cases and started to see all the, the similarities between these different cases.

Um, but we also know that these experiences have been reported throughout history and across cultures.

Ky Dickens: As you've already heard. Another commonality in NDEs is that they're so profoundly beautiful that they're impossible to describe. It almost makes you wonder if it's a hallucination or even a dream, and that's the obvious thing a skeptic would point to.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: Are they different from dreams? The very first version of the survey I put up on the website asking near death experiencers about what happened. I asked them directly, was your experience dreamlike in any way? And boy, did I get a lesson right off the bat? Over and over I heard, "No," "No way," "Absolutely not." And they were so adamant and so clear that their experience had nothing to do with dreams.

I was literally embarrassed by overwhelming consistency and how adamant they were. 

Ky Dickens: That's Dr. Jeffrey Long again, the radiation oncologist and founder of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation. 

Dr. Jeffrey Long: I learned quickly, there are nothing like dreams and that's continued in my research today. 

Ky Dickens: So these experiences might be more vivid or real than dreams, but some scientists think that near-death experiences can be chalked up to a chemical reaction in the brain.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: We have over 60 near-death experiences that occurred under general anesthesia. Under general anesthesia, you should have no consciousness at all. It should be impossible. That's what general anesthesia is all about. And amazingly, their level of consciousness and alertness is typically even greater than Earthly everyday consciousness.

Those lines of evidence single handedly refute any skeptical argument that near death experiences are due to physical brain function. And there, believe me, there's a lot more counter arguments than just those. 

Ky Dickens: I wanted to find someone else beyond Dr. Alexander, who had a powerful experience under anesthesia. And who better than Martha Beck. She's a bestselling author with three degrees from Harvard. And what happened to her, while under anesthesia completely changed the course of her life. 

Martha Beck: I left academia because I had an experience during a surgery where I became very sharply aware and cognizant and could visually see everything that was happening in the operating room.

I watched the surgeons operating on me and then realized I was watching my body from a distance. I actually sat up out of it and it was still lying on its back. With its eyes closed. So then I was very perplexed and I lay back down into my body and thought, what is happening? And I was looking straight up at these surgical lamps, which are extremely bright and right in the center of them, another light appeared.

It was like the size of a golf ball, but the most brilliantly radiant thing I had ever seen in my life. It's like trying to draw the galaxy with a box of crayons. To use words to describe this light. And then it started to expand in all directions and eventually it touched me, my body and this sensation of absolute love and warmth and home flooded through me and the light was conscious and it was laughing, and I started to laugh out of pure joy.

You know when you see little kids who just, they can't contain their joy and they're just laughing? It was just like being held by something that knew me intimately. It kept saying, "You said you wouldn't forget this, but you did." And I was like, "I know. How could I have forgotten?" And then it just said, "Life is not always gonna be easy for you, but I want you to remember that you don't wait until you die to feel this way. Your task in life. Is to feel the way you feel right now without being able to see it." 

And then I was awake, sobbing, sobbing with joy and all the nurses trying to comfort me. So I asked to see the anesthesiologist because drug effects, I mean, I hadn't lost my mind just because I saw this light and they brought him in and he sat down by me and he was just chalk white with fear. And I couldn't figure it out, I was like, just asking him, "What did you give me? What happened?" And finally he said, "Look, please, please just tell me what happened in there." Because when the light touched me, I started to cry and I, I was face up so the tears were running down the sides of my face, and the surgeons who were operating thought I could feel what they were doing.

So they said to the anesthesiologist, "You've gotta, there's something wrong. She can feel this." So he went to increase the anesthesia, and then he told me, he said a voice inside his head that was very clear, something he'd never heard before said, "Don't, she's crying because she's happy. She's happy. And he looked at me and said, with these pleading eyes and said, "Did I do the wrong thing, did I?"

And I said, "No, you did the right thing." And I told him a little bit about what had happened. And he said, "Do you know how many times this has happened to me in 30 years of practicing medicine?" I said, "N no." He said "Once." And then he kissed me on the head and walked away. And that reassured me because he'd given a lot of people anesthesia, and that only happened once.

Dr. Gregory Sushan: From my perspective, from what I can tell, the materialist argument for NDEs has not really advanced very much since the seventies or eighties. 

Ky Dickens: Here's Dr. Shushan again, 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: And it's essentially that it's kind of special effects of a dying brain, that it's the brain shutting down. Each element of the experience might have a particular explanation associated with it.

So lack of oxygen might cause the tunnel experience. That burst of brain activity might cause the panoramic life review. But once you start taking apart each one of them, you find that they just don't really hold up. Partly because if you don't have two people who are both having a life review, or two people who are both going through a dark tunnel, then how can you say it's the brain shutting down, creating the phenomenon.

Ky Dickens: Like from Martha Beck, there was no tunnel or life review. She seemingly went out of body, but what really makes her case stand apart is that the tears of joy she was experiencing under anesthesia were verified by the anesthesiologist himself, a man visibly shaken, who understood through no rational explanation, that her tears should not be misinterpreted as pain.

That kind of validation makes the hallucination theory much harder to stand behind. And it's not just anecdotal scientists have been studying just this. Comparing hallucinations to near death experiences to see if the brain alone can really explain what's happening. I'll let one of the studies co-authors take it from here.

She's a researcher at the Coma Science Group in Belgium. 

Dr. Charlotte Martial: I am a researcher there and I lead all study on near death experiment there. 

Ky Dickens: That's Dr. Charlotte Martial, 

Dr. Charlotte Martial: and 10 years ago we started to conduct rigorous research on the topic. Of course, as a researcher, I am not there when people do experience near this experience, so I have to find a way to understand it to study it. And so one of the methods that we can use is to use psychedelic to compare the phenomenology, the impact, and potentially the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying both experience. 

Ky Dickens: So the researchers wanted to compare a near-death experience to a psychedelic experience. 

Dr. Charlotte Martial: And so first we wanted to just like interview people who did experience both type of experience and then they are able to compare it directly since the they did experience both.

We found significant overlap in terms of mystical like effects in both experience. But when we study specifically the sensory effect, we found a difference. 

Ky Dickens: Dr. Martial and her colleagues actually found a lot of overlap between psychedelic experiences and near death experiences, but they also found one big difference.

Dr. Charlotte Martial: Near death experience were most often associated with disembodiment, where people can also be fully dissociated from the physical body.

Ky Dickens: Dr. Martial explains that the biggest difference reported between psychedelic experiences and near death experiences was the out of body experience. Many near-death experiencers have them, and in some cases, can accurately describe events or people or objects that they saw while outside of their body, while under anesthesia in a coma or even flatlined.

This is a hallmark of many NDEs, and it even has a formal name, "vertical perception." 

Dr. Jeffrey Long: They see ongoing earthly events, but it's veritical. That means it's verifiable. That means what they see, what they hear during their near death experience at that time is real. And if they go back and check it out, absolutely real.

And in fact, we have a whole series of near death experiences that when they have that vertical perception, it doesn't necessarily have to be geographically close to their physical body. We have probably hundreds of experiences where what they're seeing, what they're hearing is far, maybe even over a mile away from their physical body, far outside of any possible physical sensory awareness.

And yet, what they see, what they hear when they check it out later accurate, down to the most minute details. There's several ways they could check it out. They can either go ask people who are there, ask the people who are doing CPR applying the defibrillator or in the operating room, and try to validate their experience.

And indeed, like I said, essentially always what they saw, what they heard when they talked to another person is real. Others, when they have that vertical perception, they're simply seeing. Other objects, they may see a building, they may see the top of a roof, they may see a shoe out on the hospital ledge.

Ky Dickens: And that shoe reference he's talking about is one of the first near death experience encounters that actually made me pay attention. It's the story of a woman named Maria, a patient at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle who went into cardiac arrest while she was being resuscitated. She described floating out of her body and seeing a single worn blue tennis shoe sitting on a ledge outside of the hospital.

After she was revived, she told the hospital social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, exactly what she saw. 

Kimberly Clark Sharp: My name is Kimberly Clark Sharp. The initials after my name are LCSW for licensed clinical social worker. But at the time I found a shoe on ledge. I was a young social worker, uh, fresh out of graduate school, and I was on the floor when someone was flatlining.

It turned out to be Maria. The next day I was paged by one of the nurses on the coronary care unit to say that Maria was awake and really agitated. English was not her first language, it was Spanish. So first I had to find a translator that worked fine. First, she said that she was up in the corner of her hospital room looking down, and she pointed to where it was, and I was skeptical.

Then she said without any idea how she got there? She found herself above the emergency room exit and then Maria said that she, I ball a large tennis shoe, dark blue on a ledge of the hospital. She was sure. Didn't know where. She had no orientation. She thinks she was three or four stories about the ground, and that's why she was agitated.

She wasn't unhappy, she was excited. She knew that she was there. So I started to look and it didn't go well. I went outside looking up at all the stories, and that was nine floors, but I couldn't see anything. So I thought I'll just go inside. And I started out on the third floor. I worked my way from the east side where I'd found nothing to the west side and about midway west side, not in the same part of the hospital where Maria was, by the way, whole different wing, in fact looked down and the shoe was there. It was large, it was dark blue. I mean, it was, as she described, it's just that it was such a shock. The room spun in a way. I thought it was gonna fade, and I found out what it's like to not be able to support my own body weight.

I remember the fog of my breath momentarily on the glass, and it was like. And now everything I've ever clung to as a belief is going away with the moisture from my breath, because I reached down and picked up the shoe.

Ky Dickens: Kimberly went looking and found the shoe exactly as Maria described it, perch outside out of sight on a ledge, on a different side of the hospital from where Maria was located. And for me, this really caused me to pause and wonder how on earth could she have known about this unless she truly did leave her body.

Here's Dr. Jan Holden again, professor Emeritus at the University of North Texas. 

Dr. Jan Holden: The person may or may not. Perceive their consciousness to be leaving their body. Sometimes people actually feel it. Sometimes they're just suddenly aware that they're outside of their body. They can also move to other locations at what we call the speed of thought.

They think of something and then boom, they're there. And they can both see and see through things that we normally can't see through. 

Ky Dickens: Of the thousands of near death experiences that Dr. Long has documented, there's one woman's experience with vertical perception that truly blew his mind. It's the story of a woman who was blind and she describes seeing for the first time during her near death experience.

Dr. Jeffrey Long: Her name was Vicki and she was legally blind, and she was involved in a severe auto accident in her early twenties. The first time Vicki saw herself, her consciousness was over her body and she was in the emergency room. She was initially horrified because vision was so unknown to her completely. There she was over her body horrified. When she calmed down. She finally recognized herself by her long hair that she previously only knew by the sense of touch. And interestingly, her father had given her a ring. She only knew it by the sense of touch, but boom, she now correlated what she saw in vision with what she'd known by the sense of feel.

Vicki went on to have a stunningly detailed visual near-death experience and Vicki described what many other near-death experiencers describe and that's 360 degree vision for Vicki. Her vision was simultaneously aware and processing visual awareness in front of her back or of her right, left up, down.

Technically that's spherical 360 degree vision, I told Vicki, that those of us in our earthly life with normal vision, we have like pie shaped visual fields because of the way our eyes are located in the sockets. And Vicki literally laughed at me. She said, well, no, that that can't be. She says, why would you have your vision so constrained?

Because her entire life experience, the vision during her near death experience was that spherical vision that she had. So yet another nail in the coffin of any skeptical concern that near death experiences are due to brain function. 

Ky Dickens: I dug into Vicki's story and learned that she was blind from birth, which makes her account even more compelling.

But as remarkable as her out-of-body perception was there seems to be a myriad of ways to validate a near-death experience. For instance, when Dr. Shushan looked at historical accounts, he found a fascinating way that most ancient cultures seem to validate these experiences. 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: Throughout history and around the world, they found cross-culturally these narrative accounts of meeting people not known to have died in the other world.

It's essentially when the near death experience or travels to the other world, they meet somebody who they didn't know had died, and when they come back to life, they, that, that person's death is, is verified. 

Ky Dickens: These ancient accounts studied by Dr. Shushan are from eras long before there were telegrams or phones or even mail service.

So news of a death might take weeks or even months to reach someone. So for our ancestors around the world, you can see why this would be an extremely compelling way to validate a near death experience. 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: There's a really interesting account from Ancient China from around 750 BCE. Um, there is a man named Jin Xi who lying there on his deathbed, he goes to the other world.

And he meets the emperor of Heaven, and he says, once he comes back to life, he says that he spent this joyous time with this emperor of heaven having just a wonderful time with music and dancing and deceased relatives and all the rest of it. While he's there, he sees that standing next to this emperor is a little boy.

So then at a certain point, the emperor of heaven sends him back to his body. Fast forward a number of years, and Jin Xi is walking down a street in a totally different province than his own home and blocking his path on the street, there's, there's a man who he kind of vaguely recognizes and the man's like making eye contact with him.

But he won't move out of his way. He's kind of forcing this encounter and Jin Xi's looking at him and he says, "Do I know you from somewhere? You look really familiar. This is, why are you being so, so strange?" And the man says, on this particular date, a number of years ago, you died. You went to the other world and you met the emperor of heaven.

And he describes all these things that happened in the NDE. And Jin Xi says, "That's amazing, how did you know that?" And he says, "I was the little boy who was standing next to that emperor of heaven." He had had an NDE, came back to life, and then Jin Xi met him all those years later. So this is a, an example of he didn't even know this person, and then it's later verified in his life years later.

Ky Dickens: Can that be verified just beyond this man's incredible story? 

It was recorded as like an official government document. 

Dr. Gregory Sushan: They, they sent people to interview people who were involved in it, recorded the date and the time and the village and all that sort of stuff. There are quite a lot from China. In fact, there there's a 19th Century book by a Dutch scholar named De Groot who called the Religious Systems of China, and he referenced entire books, collections of near death experiences that just have not been translated into English. I don't know if they ever, ever will be, unfortunately. But yeah, they were very much focused on on near death experiences. 

Ky Dickens: So there are some pretty convincing ways to validate a near death experience, but perhaps the most compelling evidence lies in the transformation itself.

We know from psychology how difficult it is to truly change our behaviors and beliefs, but after a near death experience, people often come back transformed. More compassionate, less afraid of death, and that kind of evidence is just hard to dismiss. 

Dr. Charlotte Martial: Usually they change their behavior, their beliefs, uh, and this really changed the meaning they have about life, about humans.

Dr. Jan Holden: They become more compassionate, less competitive, more concerned about others, and more interested in expressing love to people. 

Ky Dickens: Which is what happened to Randy Schaeffer. He's a dad, a husband, a veteran. And had a near death experience that rocked his world. 

Randy Schaeffer: I spent 20 years in the military as a special agent in the Office of Special Investigations. I specialized in forensic science. That's what my master's degree is in, and I was in charge of, uh, crime scene investigation, specializing in death investigation. Now religiously. I was a bit of a skeptic my whole life because. My whole world when I dealt with death involved physical evidence, physical proof of things, my world was intangible physical evidence.

Ky Dickens: Randy got COVID in March of 2020, back when the entire world stood still, and we were all terrified as hospitals were being overrun and doctors didn't have the tools to understand or treat COVID.

Randy Schaeffer: I was pretty sick. They put me into a coma, medically induced coma intubated me. So I was basically living by machine 'cause my heart had enlarged course.

I was in respiratory failure. Got a collapsed lung kidney failure. I went on dialysis. I was losing blood internally, and they gave me about a 3% chance of living, and really started to prepare my family for my demise. I spent six weeks in a bed.

Ky Dickens: And during those six weeks, Randy had a series of near death experiences, but before those, somehow his consciousness also traveled kind of nearby.

Watching his family from their homes and intimately witnessing them, being worried and accounting for him. 

Randy Schaeffer: I traveled to my house and I was up in the corner of our living room looking down, and my middle daughter was sitting on the couch, computer on her lap, and she was typing away and my wife was standing at our French doors looking out onto the patio.

I remember thinking of how peaceful they were.

Ky Dickens: After he came out of his coma. 

Randy Schaeffer: I told him where they were, what they were doing, where they were standing. 

Ky Dickens: Randy verified what he saw when he was watching them, and even things like this very special little COVID detail, 

Randy Schaeffer: everybody was isolated, 

Ky Dickens: but as Randy slipped to the edge of death, he traveled much further than his family's living room.

Randy Schaeffer: I remember my consciousness awakening. I was in this long, slender tube of some sort, and I remember passing through it very slowly. I remember consciously saying to myself, "Okay, you died. You're dead, but where are we going?" And I remember the tunnel being surrounded by light, and I could feel it, it felt warm.

I traveled through this too, and I came to the end of it and my consciousness was standing inside a beautiful room, absolutely gorgeous structure, with this light that I felt penetrating through the stained glass windows. I was standing there like on a mezzanine, looking down on this gorgeous room of gold and opaque colors.

So vivid and so real. I just felt peace and very calm. This human form came up to me. And you don't talk, it's telepathic. You just know what either each one is thinking and and are saying by communicating with him how beautiful this room was. And he goes, "yes. It's one of those loved rooms that people love coming into this room."

He said, "but you don't belong here. He said, you have to leave." And he pointed to these giant oak doors. And I remember pushing open these doors and I was standing in the middle of a beautiful city. Now, there wasn't any cars, buses, or anything, but I call it a city. The roadways were an opaque color, and I remember traveling down through the city and off to my both of my sides, I encountered these beautiful parks, beautiful green grass.

There is nothing to compare with the beauty that I saw, but suddenly I got scared. I was lost, and I started to panic and I sat down. And I could feel others around me. I was aware of other beads around me and I was yelling out for help, but nobody would talk to me. Nobody would encounter me, so I looked off, behind me, look over my left shoulder, and here behind me was this beautiful staircase going up as far as I could see. And I said, "If I can get to that staircase, maybe someone will recognize and find me. And help me get back." I knew I was dead. I just didn't know how I was gonna get back or what I was gonna experience, uh, next.

But I remember going up the staircase and suddenly somebody yelled out, "There's Randy, get him." And it was like somebody grabbed me by the scuff of the collar and whisked me right off of that steps, and I was back in my little dark sedated world. Everything went black.

Ky Dickens: Just like Dr. Alexander's experience that we heard about in the beginning of the episode, Randy would go from what seemed to be the dark consciousness of his still body back into this other place more than once. 

Randy Schaeffer: I experienced that city for a second time, 

Ky Dickens: and each time the same elements were familiar, the staircase, the beautiful city, and sometimes new discoveries were made like 

Randy Schaeffer: a dirt pathway lined with these beautiful flowers and beautiful trees, colors that I've never even experienced before. And again, I felt so safe and so calm and so peaceful. 

Ky Dickens: And usually there was someone who would find him and tell him it wasn't his time that he had to go back home. And just like most near death experiences, that is not welcome news.

Most people don't want to go back to their earthly life. 

Randy Schaeffer: And I said, "I don't wanna leave. I said, I love it here and I am home." 

Ky Dickens: But every time he was sent back, 

Randy Schaeffer: I was back in my little dark sedated world until my consciousness awoke another time right at the end of that tunnel that I was talking about earlier.

I was right at the end of it, and I came out into like a void. It was very late dusk. It was dark, but you could still see things. And these orbs of light were coming past me, zooming past me, and this spirit guide came up next to me and again indicated that I needed to follow him. So I started to follow him deeper into this void when suddenly way off in the distance behind me, this orb of light catches my attention. And he came up very fast and he stopped. It almost felt like inches in front of me. He was very close. His face materialized just for the quickest second, and he tells me, telepathically tell "Madison at the salon, her grandfather is okay," and the word "veteran" perpetrated me.

I tasted the word. I felt the word veteran, veteran, veteran, over and over and over again, and he moved onto a white porch and he started making red, white, and blue ribbons and American flags. And then suddenly my spirit guide said "you have to leave and go," and I was going into my dark sedated world and that was the last time my consciousness came alive like that.

When I came out of my coma, I started to tell my daughter these stories. And I told her Madison's story and she says, "who's Madison?" I said, I don't know him. I'm Madison. You know? And she goes, "and you don't use the word salon. You've always said, I'm going get my hair cut and gonna the barbershop." So then none of that made sense.

And she goes, "who's the man that you saw?" And I said, "no clue. I don't know who it was." I came home from the hospital and I had to learn to walk again. I was so weak and things that I was in a wheelchair and for some reason something pulled me over to a junk drawer in a bedroom, and I started rummaging through this junk drawer and I found a business card to a local barber shop here in town, and I took it out and I said, Hey. I said, could you call them and see what they're doing for haircuts? COVID was very ongoing, so my daughter starts to interrogate me about this card. "Where did I get the card? Where did I find the card? How long have I had the card?" And I kept telling her, I said, "I don't know, I just found it in my drawer."

She goes, "dad, have you looked at this card?" And she handed me the back of the card and on the back of the card was written, "Madison." And I said,

Ky Dickens: at this point in our conversation, Randy starts to get emotional remembering this part of his experience. 

Randy Schaeffer: Um. So I told my daughter, I said, call, call and make me an appointment with Madison. So we go down and there was uh, maybe four ladies cutting hair, and my daughter said, "Dad, do you recognize any of them?"

A few minutes later, this girl walks out and she said, "Hi." She goes, "I'm Madison." She goes, "I think you're not, I think you're my next client." So she takes me back. And she's cutting my hair. And I said, "Madison," I said, "would you mind if I ask you some personal questions?" And she says, "no, no, go ahead." And I said, "are both of your grandfathers still living?"

And she said, "no." She said, um, "the one grandfather that I was closest with passed away less than a year ago." I said, um, "was he a veteran?" And she goes, "oh yeah," she said "he was a veteran." She goes, "I think he was in the army. He talked about Vietnam and things like that." And I said, "oh." So I felt that I had the right girl.

And I said, "well, Madison," I said, "um, I, your grandfather came to me." She kind of looks at me and I said "I was very sick and I said I was very near death." And I said, "I believe your grandfather came to me and he has a message for you." And I told her exactly what he said. "Tell Madison that the salon, her grandfather is okay."

And I said, "So, he wants you to know he is okay, that he's safe, that he's, he's well." So she's crying. I'm crying. You know, people in the barber shop are looking at us like, what's going on over there? So I said, "Madison, I said he moved onto a white porch. Is that somehow significant to you?" And she says, "well, that would've been his porch in Iowa. Love sitting on his porch and talking to people as they went by." And I said, "oh." I said, "well, he was making red, white, and blue ribbons in American flags. Is that connected somehow?" Ky, she took a step back and she looks at me like I came from a third world. She said through tears, "he belonged to the American Legion" and every Veteran's Day, her whole family would go down and make red, white, and blue ribbons, American flags for their veterans graves.

So not only did he give me a message, he told me how I could find Madison. And he gave me information that only her family would know to validate that it came from him. 

Ky Dickens: I wanted to hop on the phone with Madison's grandmother, the woman who loved John the longest and the most. To see how on earth this story resonated with her.

Kathy: He was the love of my life. You know, we grew up together, our lives inter intertwined since seventh grade until we actually did become partners. 

Ky Dickens: So, Kathy, tell me what happened when Madison called you. I mean, what on earth did she say to you after that encounter, the first time?

Kathy: She just said, "grandma, I have something to tell you."

And she just started out telling me about. Randy, she said it was really sentimental. She said he got to some points, she goes, where I, I had to believe him. So then I had asked her if there was any way of getting in touch with him. So, um, the first phone call that I got was Randy telling me his stories and when he got to the part about John, I was just kind of, flabbergasted. And I believed him, but you know how you're skeptical about certain things, you know? 

Randy Schaeffer: And she said, did you see his face? And I said, yes. Just oh, so briefly. And I described it. I said it was kind of a long face, olive skin, dark hair. Maybe in his early twenties, mid twenties, somewhere in that area.

And I said, I think he had a mustache. 

Kathy: And then I had sent him a picture of John in the military, young, you know, hair, everything. 

Randy Schaeffer: She sent me this picture and I looked at it and I called her back and I said, Kathy, that's who I saw. That's who I saw. That's the face and that's the ritual that I saw. 

Kathy: So it became very believable, and Randy and I have talked several times from then till now. 

Ky Dickens: What makes this account so astounding is John himself. He was so persistent, so devoted to letting his family know that he was okay and out there somewhere that he actually reached out to Kathy before, through another person during their near death experience.

Kathy: A few days after John passed. I was still dealing with the paperwork and I was calling Modern Woodsman, which is like an insurance company here, and I dialed the wrong number I guess. And this man answered the phone and I said, is this Modern Woodsman? And he goes, no. He says, where are you? And I said, I'm in Iowa.

And he goes, well, I'm in California. I said, oh, I'm sorry. I said, I was trying to get ahold of him to talk to him about insurance. And he goes. Are you married? Has someone passed in your, in your household? You know, he started asking me these questions, so I said, yes, my significant other just passed. And he said, you know, he says, I just got out of the hospital.

He said, I had a near death experience. He said, and, and the only thing I can remember is I met a gentleman from Iowa. He had been in the military. And he says, I just want you to know that if. If this is your loved one, he said he's fine. He's, he's okay. So we ended the conversation and I hung up, and to this day, I cannot find that phone number.

It's like it vanished from my phone. So I had had this man from California. He told me he was okay and then, and then Randy through Madison that he was okay. So it makes you feel good, you know, to know that he reached out to all these people, just to let us all know that he was fine.

Ky Dickens: What was your emotional state when he passed? I mean, 'cause it really seems like he was trying to reach you. 

Kathy: When he got sick. He would always say, don't leave me. He, he didn't wanna be alone, you know, that was his big thing. Just don't leave me. 

Ky Dickens: And he died when he was, yep. Alone. 

Kathy: And that bothered me for a long time that I had left him.

Randy Schaeffer: I truly believe now that you can come down and see your loved ones here on earth, how else would John know where Madison worked? He knew that I was in heaven and that we had a remote connection simply through location and he selected me because of that to get the message to Madison and then on to Madison's family.

Kathy: When you come on an experience like this, you know that there is life after death and that you will see your loved ones. 

Ky Dickens: It's just another remarkable story about a near-death experience, creating connections and lasting impact for people. And scientists who want to understand consciousness are taking note.

Dr. Charlotte Martial: I have even more question than 10 years ago on this, on life. Personally. I think this also influenced the way I see consciousness, I the way I reflect on mind and death. Of course. 

Dr. Jeffrey Long: I'll say for me personally, that which I took on faith for most of my life, now I have a mountain of evidence. Knowing that there's an afterlife and I know something about it, I know that it's infused with love.

I know that it's non-physical in every sense of the way. I know time is either radically different or doesn't exist. I know that there's a God there. I know that it's a part of a realm of me, you and every single person. It's literally the heritage of where we came from and the destiny of where we go.

Ky Dickens: And in the end, it's the experiencers, not the experts who can interpret meaning the best. 

Randy Schaeffer: There's been so many times afterwards that I will see somebody and quickly learn that they are struggling because of someone's demise or a close friend passed away and I tell 'em my story and it always brings them some sort of peace.

There is an afterlife and we should look forward to going there. And that's my message, and I believe that I was selected to pass on this message. 

Ky Dickens: Near death experiencers describe reunions lessons, life reviews. A place that feels more vivid and real than here, and a love and peace and acceptance so big that it defies words if their stories are even partly true, it suggests our minds aren't just biological machines, but they're part of something vast. And if consciousness can survive the body, could it also communicate across that divide? 

Next time on The Telepathy Tapes, we'll explore one of the most controversial frontiers of all mediumship. Almost no group in history has faced more accusations of fraud and deception.

But what if there truly are gifted mediums among us? And what if they have to say, doesn't just validate near death experiences, but informs them and us about what it really means to be alive and to die? If you wanna go deeper, ask me anything or get ad free episodes, subscribe at TheTelepathyTapes.supercast.com or tap the super cast link in the show notes.

Thank you to my amazing collaborators original music by Rachael Cantu. Logo and cover art by Ben Kandora design. Audio mix and finishing by Michael Rubino, contributing producer Lori Rubin and our incredible hardworking podcast staff Jil  Pasiecnik, Katherine Ellis and Solina Kennedy. And I'm Ky Dickens, creator and host.

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