Near Death Experiences

A conversation with NDE researcher Dr. Jeffrey Long

Jeffrey Long is a medical doctor specializing in the practice of radiation oncology, using radiation to treat cancer in London, Kentucky.

As a scientist, Jeff founded NDERF in 1998. He wanted to know if NDEs were real by directly asking the NDErs themselves. The answer is a resounding YES! As a result of his research, he is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, "Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences."

As a leading NDE researcher and a medical doctor, Jeff has appeared on national media including O'Reilly Factor, NBC Today, ABC with Peter Jennings, the Dr. Oz Show, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and National Geographic. He has also appeared on Fox News Houston and at the New York Academy of Sciences, and was an NDE expert in the movie "After Death."

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Transcript

Adam Jacobs: So to start, just a word. We were discussing this with some of the folks when they first arrived, but the reason I discovered Dr. Long was my father passed away in 2017. And like many people at the time of starting to really wrestle with what is this all about? And even if you believe as I did that there is a transcendent order, you still have to sort of struggle with pinning it down and understanding it in a more concrete way.

And so going online, I discovered his work. I read a book called Evidence of the Afterlife, which I highly recommend. And it was the first time I started really considering these ideas of near-death experience. And he mapped it out very sequentially in 12 different hallmarks of the experience and started showing in case after case why we should take it seriously. I ended up on his website and I started looking at case after case on probably hundreds of cases. And at a certain point, you just start saying to yourself, there's something here. Welcome. We've had a couple of conversations before. I always really enjoyed them and appreciated them. And it's wonderful to meet you in person for the first time.

Jeffrey Long: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. We've got a lot to talk about.

Adam Jacobs: We do, we do. And I have a whole new set of questions. Okay. There's a painting by, I believe his name is Hieronymus Bosch. And what it seems to depict is this tunnel of light and beings at the end of this tunnel, a horizontal tunnel. And that was an old example of this phenomenon unless he was just painting something for the sake of it. But my question for you is when did this notion enter the public consciousness? We've all heard this idea of my life flash before my eyes. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, and so on and so forth. How long have we known about this?

Jeffrey Long: Yeah, that's an interesting question. The concept of our life flashing before our eyes and we have a life-threatening event like Hieronymus Bosch, the concept, the painting depicts what many people think is a tunnel so commonly described in near-death experience. Here's a being going through that other beings around the periphery of the tunnel, a very beautiful painting that I think captures in some ways sort of the beauty and the mystery of tunnels described in near-death experiences. So we've known about this kind of thing for a long time, but it was only in 1975 when Dr. Raymond Moody published his famous book, Life After Life, that for the first time, the word phrase near death experience became a household term. And that really set off literally several generations of researchers into the topic.

Adam Jacobs: So really it's pretty recent. Yeah. Okay. But there are cases, are there cases that are ancient? Are there any or has it increased over time for any particular reason?

Jeffrey Long: Probably the first known near-death experience was described in the time of Plato. Plato wrote about a soldier named Er. He was believed to have been killed in battle and as was the custom at that time, they put him on top of a wooden funeral pyre and were about ready to light it. And Er suddenly recovered and recounted an amazing journey into the afterlife. And that's considered to be likely the very first near-death experience several thousand years ago.

Adam Jacobs: Okay, so it's old, but the frequency seems to have picked up in recent times. Does that have to do with the resuscitation technology? Are we getting better at saving people and therefore there are more reports or is there some other reason?

Jeffrey Long: I think it's multifactorial. You're right. I think we're seeing more and more near-death experiences. I think first of all, people are more aware of it and people are more open and accepting of near-death experiences. For instance, in 2021, a Pew Forum survey found that 72% of American adults believed that a near-death experience was an actual visualization of a soul leaving the physical body. So people are open to that, accepting it, and I think that really encourages more and more people to share their experiences where they would otherwise be reluctant to share such an amazingly unworldly experience. And also resuscitation techniques have improved dramatically. We're now saving more people than was ever possible before. And that also allows more people to come back from that brink of death and a significant percentage of them will have a near-death experience to share when they recover.

Adam Jacobs: So a lot of people ask, is this truly a scientific exploration? And one of the things I wanted to ask you about was the concept of subjectivity within science. All the people that you've interviewed and all the submissions to your website, thousands. How many do you have?

Jeffrey Long: Over 4,000.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah, thousands. Okay. They're all subjective, right? So this is someone reporting an experience that happens to them. Is subjectivity an impediment to a scientific conclusion? Is it outside the realm of what is considered normative science? And then as an addendum to that, I guess I'd ask the question, is psychology in the same camp? Because I don't know that someone is depressed. I don't know that someone is anxious and we're relying on their reports to say, so is there an equivalence in those two arenas or is this scientific to begin with?

Jeffrey Long: Let's talk about near-death experiences. Is that an appropriate scientific area of investigation? Well, a basic principle of science that encompasses all of scientific investigation is the concept that what is real is consistently observed. And that's an important thing to bear in mind as you see near-death experiences. I mean, you yourself have read hundreds of these experiences and you as so many other people around the world are very clear of the overwhelming consistency in what's described in near-death experiences, the elements or characteristics, what happens during a near-death experience, very consistent in how they occur and typically in a very consistent order.

So that bespeaks right off the bat that this is an appropriate scientific area of scientific study and that separates them from like dreams, and hallucinations. Well, we don't believe those are real or part of the bigger picture of reality because they have unreal content because they aren't consistent among many different people having them. So near-death experiences are in a completely unique class. We certainly can scientifically investigate them. In fact, there have been literally hundreds of scientific investigations published in some of the world's leading medical and scientific journals. So it's well established as being a reasonable and appropriate scholarly and scientific pursuit.

Adam Jacobs: Okay. I agree. I just wanted to draw it out. Let's proceed down the proof avenue for a moment, right, because I think a lot of people at the end of the day, are like show me the money, prove it. So if you were Atticus Finch and you were trying this in a court of law, how do you prove it? What are the areas that you would highlight to demonstrate that this is beyond a reasonable doubt? This is real.

Jeffrey Long: That is a great question. I sure didn't start my research embracing the reality of near-death experiences. I as a physician looked at near-death experiences like I do medical research. In other words, prove it. It's important. What's the evidence? What underlies the treatment of patients? What underlies the belief and the reality of near-death experiences? And so I've done, out of the thousands of near-death experiences, I found a number of lines of evidence all converging on that conclusion that near-death experiences are in a word real. We'll just give you one example. A fairly common first characteristic of a near-death experience is what's called an out-of-body experience. There's that life-threatening event. There's so physically compromised that they're unconscious or clinically dead with an absent heartbeat at that time. Many people describe consciousness separating from the body, typically going above the physical body. And from that vantage point, they can see and hear ongoing earthly events down below.

Often frantic efforts of people trying to bring them back to life when they come back and try to investigate what they saw or heard. Almost invariably over 95% accuracy in my studies, what they saw and heard, even though their body was unconscious or dead down below was absolutely accurate down to the fine details. And in fact, even if their consciousness left the area of their physical body and moved away hundreds of yards over a mile away, and we have many, many near-death experience reports that describe that even with their consciousness far from the physical body, far beyond any physical sensory awareness, what they're seeing, what they're hearing when they check it out later, almost invariably accurate, down to the finest details that is absolutely medically inexplicable by any possible physical brain function.

Adam Jacobs: I recall you talking about the concept of people who are blind, for instance, who report sight during these experiences. Could you talk about that for a second as well?

Jeffrey Long: Absolutely. One of the most dramatic interviews I ever did with a near-death experiencer was Vicky. Vicky was born totally blind. As we all know, sight was unknown and unknowable. You cannot describe vision in terms of the remaining four physical senses, I tried. It is just impossible. Vicky was a professional singer and then she was singing at a bar one night and then, unfortunately, an inebriated patron was driving her home and they had a very bad car accident for the very first time in her life that Vicky saw things and had vision, she was having that out of body experience. Her consciousness was above looking down at a body on a gurney in the emergency room, and she didn't even know who it was down there because again, this was her first time that she was seeing things. It was only after Vicky correlated a ring that her father had given her that she only knew by touch up until that time and sort of felt her long hair.

She put two and two together and realized that was her down there and here was her consciousness up here. Vicky went on to have a very detailed near-death experience, went through a tunnel, had a life review, met deceased loved ones, and had vision. Interestingly, like many near-death experiencers describe what we call 360-degree vision. In other words, Vicki was simultaneously aware of and processing visual awareness during her near-death experience in front of her, behind her right, left up, and down—technically spherical vision. When I told Vicky that all the rest of us in the world have pie-shaped vision because of the location of her eyes and her skull, Vicky laughed at me. She couldn't believe it because her only life experience was vision 360 degrees like that, like many other near-death experiencers describe.

Adam Jacobs: So this opens up a bigger can of worms, which is why is our consciousness so limited most of the time? It seems to me that there are quite a few experiences that people can go through that seem to liberate their consciousness. I think near-death experience being the most extreme of them because you're totally offline when it's occurring. But there's a famous case of a brain researcher who lost 50% of her brain and had an extremely expansive experience. I know you're not a big fan of psychedelics, but there are those who use them and feel that they are having also out-of-body experiences or expansive consciousness, and so on and so forth. But would you agree with me that it certainly seems that the brain—exactly the opposite of what people think—the brain is not producing any consciousness, it's actually inhibiting it and filtering out a larger consciousness. Would you agree with that assessment?

Jeffrey Long: Absolutely, and that's a very good point. We're going to talk about near-death experiences as being dramatic evidence that consciousness can exist apart from the physical body, but you have a very good point there. Near-death experiences are just a subset of many other types of experiences. They've been described in meditation experiences and prayer experiences. I think I agree with you very rarely in psychedelic experiences, but there's a whole host of human experiences that can lead to awareness and even evidential awareness that our consciousness and our physical body can be two separate things and that consciousness can exist apart from our physical brain function.

Adam Jacobs: So there was a film in the nineties called Flatliners, you're familiar with it, which if anyone didn't see that, that's about a group of medical students who want to have this experience. And so they almost kill themselves trying to have it as opposed to something like a psychedelic or meditation or holotropic breathing where people try to induce this greater sense of consciousness. Do you envision a time, and this might be a crazy question, where it might be possible in a controlled environment for people to have near-death experiences at will and therefore prove it to themselves and not have to rely on the testimony of others who have gone through it?

Jeffrey Long: Well, speaking medically and ethically and morally, it would be highly immoral to induce a life-threatening event with the hopes of having a near-death experience. So you're never going to see that. That's not anything that any doctor scientist, anybody really wants to get a part of. But again, as you said earlier, there are other experiences that have the potential to allow awareness of consciousness functioning apart from the physical body. It's sort of, if you will, a higher level of consciousness. And so certainly as we continue to learn more about meditation experiences, and I'll say it, psychedelics or other ways that we can induce, if you will, expanding our minds, I'm hopeful that as time goes on, humanity in the future is going to be able to achieve experiences like near-death experiences and yet safely and allow people to try it for themselves to really open up their understanding based on personal experience, which is the most powerful persuader that our mind and our consciousness is really a couple of different things that were much, much more everybody, all of us were much more than just our physical brain.

Adam Jacobs: I've asked you this kind of question before, but I like to highlight it and it's that so many of the cases that you describe have the same emotional hallmarks. Most people experience a profound sense of love. Most people have a sense of oneness or wholeness. They sense that they're not just part of something greater, but that everyone is linked together in some kind of grand chain and find it to be enormously pleasurable, which is the opposite of what you might think if someone had just gone through a traumatic death experience, if someone was just killed in a car accident, if someone had a terrible fall or if someone had a terrible disease, you would think the last thing their mind would be focused on is feeling anything positive. And I would think that they would be in terror and fear and very upset. So my overall question is why the consistency? What does it mean? I know there are some exceptions, but yeah…

Jeffrey Long: You make an excellent point. Near-death experiences are precipitated by a close brush with death, and they're literally fighting for their lives. They're unconscious. They may be clinically dead. And yet among the most common things they talk about is like you were alluding to that overwhelming sense of peace and love, extremely positive emotions, in fact, so strongly positive emotions during their near-death experience that they say it's unearthly. It's beyond anything that they've ever known on Earth or thought would ever be possible on Earth. So no doubt about that. And yet, as you also said, one of the most common descriptors used by people having these experiences is love is peace. And we ask a very direct survey question about their awareness of unity or oneness of all. And nearly half of the people who have near-death experiences said yes to that question that they're aware of.

There's that connection, that unity, that oneness of everyone and everything. And that's exciting because that's for literally thousands of years. Some of the great religions and the mystics have talked about that here. We see that over and over with huge numbers of near-death experiences describing that. Again, that's literally an understanding outside of our earthly everyday thinking. I mean in our earthly life, we are much more aware of separation from others of our apartness. And yet here during near-death experiences dramatically in a very exciting insight is that oneness, that connection, that unity. I mean, just think what if everybody in the world understood we're all one,

Adam Jacobs: The world would be a better place, I think much better.

Jeffrey Long: Yes.

Adam Jacobs: Yeah. People often report seeing spiritual beings, and deities sometimes people name deities by name. Do you think that, I mean they can't all be accurate, it seems to me that sometimes there are contradictions between different faith traditions and approaches. We've talked about this also, but mostly it's monotheistic versus polytheistic, but some people do experience multiple deities. My question is do you think that people are actually experiencing a particular deity when they're there or is that a label that they give based on an assumption that they have about the nature of the spiritual world?

Jeffrey Long: That's a great question. The most recent version I have of our survey of people who had near-death experiences goes right after that. We ask, during your experience, did you encounter any information or awareness that there exists God or a supreme being as a good example of a deity? And remarkably, once again, nearly half of people having near-death experiences say yes. And the narrative descriptions are very revealing that follow that question, which we request in there, you hear over and over concepts of like God is an earthly word. What I encountered in my near-death experience is far beyond earthly language, far beyond anything I could have conceived of, could have known. It was something that you almost hate to use the word God, because God, as soon as you use that word, is limiting. And you hear that a lot from near-death experiencers, and yet they have to describe their experience in language. And so God is the best word in the English language, but it is very, very incomplete for that awareness, that entity that they encounter on the other side, that profound loving being often described as being a being of light.

Adam Jacobs: And so if people describe it as Ganesha or Allah or any other specific deity, Krishna, would you say that they're describing, everyone's talking about the exact same thing?

Jeffrey Long: Yeah, and that's another good question. Even in our study of non-Western near-death experiences, we have many scores of them. We don't have hundreds of them. They don't describe the deity specific to their religion nearly as often as the monotheistic religions do. I don't fully understand that, except that when they have a near-death experience, I think if it's co-created or if it's partly influenced by some overwhelming, loving divine God if you will, I think it's going to be an experience that's going to be life-enhancing to them. I mean, wouldn't that be a part of love? And so I think that may be what's going on here. So it wouldn't be, I mean if you were with a religious, particular religious belief and you encounter a religious being that is completely different from your religious belief. I mean you've spent the rest of your life confused, puzzled, wondering.

Again, we're back to that concept that we're all one, we're all unified. And I think under that sort of global picture of understanding near-death experiences, it's not terrifically confusing to me that different religious backgrounds are going to discover during their near-death experience religious figures that are more specific to their religion. It sort of in some way would help validate their beliefs. But interestingly, we've had a near-death experiencer ask very directly when they were in that unearthly heavenly realm, well, what is the best religion on earth? And the entity they believed was God answered the best religion is that which brings you closer to God. And I think that may vary depending on people's faith background.

Adam Jacobs: I've got a couple more questions and then we'll open it up to the audience. A lot of skeptics, and I've spoken to a bunch of them online especially where they're sometimes a little aggressive, say that there is some kind of chemical that is released near the time of death for whatever reason, I forget what it's called, but it's supposed to ease the death process perhaps. Or there are those who say that this is all a chemical hallucination that's taking place for whatever reason it happens, or it's a bunch of the neurons that are firing wildly at the end of life trying to hang on to something and the person is having a fantasy. I won't begrudge them that they're having some type of experience, but it's obviously not based in reality. It's either based on chemicals or based in neurons. How would you answer such people?

Jeffrey Long: Sure. I'm pretty sure the chemical you're talking about is what's called endorphins. Those are the naturally occurring narcotic-like substances. You've heard of the runner's high—people run and have a great deal of stress. And the body, the brain actually naturally releases endorphins as a way to, if you will, ease the pain. So the concept that endorphins have anything to do with near-death experiences, I mean, heck, narcotics can produce alterations of brain function. So skeptics have brought up the possibility of endorphins, but wait a minute, endorphins, when you stop running, can still be effective for a good 20 or 30 minutes with a near-death experience when you're done with your experience and boom, you go back in your physical body immediately, there are no described effects that would be typical of endorphins. They don't have that runner's high, they don't believe me, they don't have that relief of pain.

We hear that over and over. So there's really nothing that we observe that would support that relatively long-lasting endorphin effect in the body. And getting back to skeptics in general, over the years they've proposed over 30 different explanations for near-death experience. Why so many? Well, the answer's very simple. There's really no one or several skeptical explanations for near-death experience. That makes sense, even to the skeptics as a group. I mean, think about it. If there was any one or several of those explanations and I've heard 'em all, then you wouldn't need to have over 30 floating around. The bottom line is skeptical explanations, chemicals, electrical activities, can't explain anything that we observe in a near-death experience, let alone the totality of all the evidence converging on the reality of near-death experience.

Adam Jacobs: Thorough. Good answer. And I'm inclined to accept that. So this is really my last question for today, which is if this is all as you say, and again, I am inclined to accept it, why aren't people running in the streets with joy, with the profound realization that the most important piece of information that they could possibly have has been shown to exist? That they don't lose their loved ones when they pass, that they themselves will not just vanish when their time is up, and that the world, the foundation of the entire universe is love, peace, and harmony. What better news could you possibly have? Where is everyone at? Why are people so slow to pick this up? And even when they hear about it, it doesn't seem to necessarily affect them unless they have the experience themselves.

Jeffrey Long: Good point. I think the answer is that near-death experiences aren't that common. There's probably only a few percent of people in the world that have had a near-death experience. So as a result of that, people don't have that most convincing piece of evidence. But the more detailed ones are so unworldly in so many different ways. I mean, think about that consciousness apart from the body time, radically different or doesn't exist. Communication, nonphysical, movement, nonphysical, I mean a completely different realm, radically different from that physical three-dimensional realm that we all live in. So I think it's just a big bite for people to grasp and accept because it is so different from everything that they've experienced in their entire earthly life. Now, the near-death experiencers, that's another matter I asked in a survey question for people that had a near death experience. How do you currently accept, what do you think about the reality of your experience? 93.8% said definitely real. So having a near-death experience cures near-death experience, disbelief. It's a very small percentage of the population.