Name: Near-Death Experience Expert Dr. Jeffrey Long | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #479
Uploaded: 2024-01-23T16:00:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Near-Death Experience Expert Dr. Jeffrey Long | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #479' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Near-Death Experience Expert Dr. Jeffrey Long | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #479' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-23. Transcript available.

Near-Death Experience Expert Dr. Jeffrey Long | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #479

Today's guest is a practicing physician. He's an author, and he's a researcher
into the phenomenon of near-death experiences.
He has done the largest case study, over 5,000 cases of near-death experiences,
and he wrote the book, Evidence of the Afterlife, The Science of Near-Death
Experiences, which is a New York Times bestseller.
I'm grateful to be able to spend time with him today and get to learn about
what's right on the cusp of the afterlife.
Today's guest is Dr. Jeffrey Long.
I'm sitting here with Dr. Jeffrey Long, and you had the New York Times bestseller,
like you were just saying, The Evidence of the Afterlife, The Science of Near-Death
Experiences.
And that term is fascinating to people. You know, you hear near-death, it's
like, because that's what we're, everybody's so afraid of that line, you know,
and the finality of it.
I want to start this by asking, what is, what quantifies near-death experience?
Sure. Now, different researchers have different concepts, but the research
definition that I've always used is exactly what the name implies.
You're near-death. In other words, you're so physically compromised, you're
unconscious, or you may be clinically dead with absent heartbeat.
Okay.
Now, at that time, it should be impossible to have any lucid, conscious
remembrance, and yet people do have that remembrance at that time, and that's
the experience part of a near-death experience.
Okay. And why is it at that time that you shouldn't be able to have any lucid,
like, brain activity? Why is that?
Sure. Let's talk about what happens to the brain after a cardiac arrest, which
means the heart stops beating.
Okay.
The moment the heart stops beating, Theo, obviously, blood immediately stops
flowing to the brain.
Ten to twenty seconds after that event, the EEG, which is electroencephalogram,
a measure of brain electrical activity, goes absolutely flat.
There's no measurable cortical brain activity.
Twenty seconds after the heart stops.
After the heart stops and after blood stops going to the brain.
It should be impossible to have any remembrance at that time, let alone the
highly lucid and organized near-death experience.
So you started to kind of quantify or collect the experiences people were
having at that point?
Absolutely.
Okay.
I've been researching and gathering near-death experiences for over 25 years.
Okay.
I was so fascinated when I first heard about near-death experiences that I
really wanted to study them, but with the best methodology possible.
Okay.
And that being people that actually had near-death experiences sharing their
first-person experience.
Right.
So over 25 years ago, I established the Near-Death Experience Research
Foundation, a research website which encouraged people to share a narrative of
their experience,
but also had a scientifically designed huge number of questions, actually, as a
survey, so that not only were we getting large numbers of near-death
experiences,
but we were learning about them from all those survey questions at a depth that
heretofore had been impossible.
Okay.
So you create a website where people would go that had had near-death
experiences, and they would start to just list out the information, write.
Like, what were kind of some of the questions that you would ask to somebody?
Sure.
Well, first, of course, we have them give the narrative of their experience.
Okay.
We don't want any leading questions prior to that time.
But then once we start, and currently the website survey has over 80 different
questions.
Some of the questions include the leading research tool called the NDE scale,
which is a series of 16 questions that are sort of different degrees of
expressing that particular element or not expressing it at all.
But in addition to that, we have dozens of other questions that help establish
basically demographic questions, male, female, where do you live, when did the
experience occur, also content questions, which is a very strong focus of the
survey.
And then finally, importantly, after effects, how did their life change after
that?
How did their life change in response to that amazing near-death experience?
Wow.
So 25 years ago, you start the website.
People start reporting what's happening, and you start collecting this data.
Were you surprised at the number of people?
Were you like, yeah, what are some things that kind of shocked you out of the
gate?
Right off the bat, I realized there was overwhelming consistency even in the
first few dozen near-death experiences I saw.
Everything I knew as a physician told me, this is not possible.
You can't have highly lucid, conscious experiences when you're unconscious or
clinically dead.
And yet here, the very first few dozens of people sharing with me very clearly,
and what was very impressive is the remarkable consistency of the elements they
were describing.
What happened during the experience, the elements, or if you will,
characteristics, not only were they very consistently seen across many, many
near-death experiences,
but they typically occurred in a very consistent and logical order.
This is nothing like dreams or hallucinations or any other type of pathologically
altered consciousness.
I realized very, very quickly, and as I was to learn even more and more with it,
I got more and more experiences shared with me,
near-death experiences are, in a word, real.
What were some of the things that led you to believe that they were real?
Oh, absolutely.
The overwhelming consistency.
Now, while no two near-death experiences are the same, if you study a lot of
them, and Theo, I've studied over 4,000.
Oh, wow.
With that huge data set, it's kept me busy.
It's my second full-time job.
Wow.
St. Peter up here.
Well, milling around.
Yeah.
It's tough to be a full-time doctor, which I'm trying to do while doing that as
my other full-time job.
But what I have observed, and other near-death experience researchers see, is
that very consistent pattern of what happens when you have a near-death
experience.
Well, of course, there's that life-threatening event.
They're unconscious or clinically dead.
No heartbeat.
But at that time, a very common first element is what's called an out-of-body
experience.
Consciousness separates from the physical body and goes above the body.
Now, from that vantage point, they can see ongoing earthly events, often
including people frantically trying to bring them back to life.
They may then go into or through a tunnel, variably described.
Often at the end of the tunnel, there's a beautiful, unearthly, they emphasize,
light.
In that, after passing through the tunnel, then at that time, they may be in an
unearthly, what some call a heavenly realm, aptly described.
It's very different from what we've known everywhere on our earthly life.
It's literally a non-physical realm.
Movement is non-physical.
Communication is essentially always telepathic.
Time is almost invariably described as either radically different from earthly
time or not existing at all.
In this realm, this unearthly, beautiful, heavenly realm, there can be
encounters with deceased loved ones.
There can be a review of a part or all of their prior life called a life review.
At this point, they can be colors, like in plants and landscape, that are so
beautiful that there are no earthly words that they have to describe them.
There can be buildings.
Around this time, there's often a decision that they make as they interact with
other beings about whether to stay in this beautiful unearthly realm or return
to their earthly life and that body struggling to survive.
Okay, so those are the most common characteristics of the near-death
experiences.
And what would be like your strongest evidence that this actually happens?
Because anybody can kind of go on a website, you know, any naysayer would be
like, anybody can go on a website and fill it out, right?
Sure, there's been a ton of people that have done it.
But what's the most common evidence that you believe that this has happened,
that you believe?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, Theo, we talked earlier about that out-of-body experience where
consciousness goes above the body, above the unconscious or comatose physical
body below.
What I and other researchers have investigated is how accurate are those
observations in that out-of-body state?
And amazingly, in my study, over 98% of what people are seeing and hearing with
their physical body unconscious down below is accurate down to the finest
detail.
And in fact, they can make these observations in that out-of-body state
geographically far from their physical body, far outside of any possible
physical sensory awareness.
For example, what do you mean when you say that?
Just before you get to the example, like geographically, what do you, I'm a
little, sorry, I got confused there.
Yeah, let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
We had one relatively recent near-death experience.
Lady was riding a horse and was out, you know, basically breaking in the horse
and the horse threw her off and she hit her head.
Very severe head injury, immediately unconscious.
She had that out-of-body experience, consciousness above her body, saw her body
lying on the ground,
saw the horse heading back to home, but then her consciousness went to where
she had started prior to her journey.
The barn, and she was able to hear other people talking, aware of what they
were saying, doing.
They didn't know that she was fighting for her life over a mile away because
they weren't aware of that.
They only were aware of that when the horse arrived without her.
And again, she was able to see and bring back all that information verified
down to the finest details of what she was seeing.
And a mile away, obviously, there's no way you're going to see, hear, or
perceive in any way with your normal sensory function.
And so that's a common thing.
People like, so hovering kind of outside of themselves.
So people leaving their physical realm, right?
You leave, you escape.
And I guess, do they feel okay being away from themselves?
Do they feel like, jeepers, I got to get back into myself?
Like when you lost your phone or something, you know?
Or does it feel like, that's what I would be like, gosh, because if I'm just
milling around, it's almost like you're just naked.
Like you're as naked as you could be.
You're naked down to your soul.
You know, that's a good assumption.
And I kind of wondered about that too early in my research.
But amazingly, even though these people are unconscious or clinically dead and
may have had, you know, severe trauma or illness problems that led to that
episode of unconsciousness.
When that consciousness separates from their physical body, they essentially
never describe any pain.
It's unusual for them to feel fear about consciousness apart from their body.
Far more commonly described is a sense of calm, a sense of peace, a sense,
amazingly, that this is actually their real conscious self.
That being non-physical and apart from their body down below.
So that's a common thing that people say, oh, this felt, that felt a lot more
real than the existence I've been having in my body.
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, we have a survey question and we ask people, you know, about what they
said or what they ultimately decided about the reality of their experience.
And in our survey of 834 people that had a near-death experience where we asked
that question, 93.8% said their experience was definitely real.
And over and over as part of that, they were saying it was more real than
anything they'd known in their earthly life.
They typically have acceleration of consciousness.
Amazingly, the substantial majority, even though they're physically unconscious
or clinically dead, are actually thinking, processing at a speed they simply
couldn't have done in their earthly life.
Wow.
A good example of that is we talked briefly about the life review.
I mean, just imagine that here you are unconscious or clinically dead, and yet
about a fifth