Name: What REALLY Happens During a Near-Death Experience
Uploaded: 2024-01-23T22:02:18.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What REALLY Happens During a Near-Death Experience' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What REALLY Happens During a Near-Death Experience' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-23. Transcript available.

I want to start this by asking, 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.
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. 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, it's 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 the earthly life
and that body struggling to
survive. 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
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 here or perceive in any way
with your normal
sensory function. So people leaving their physical realm, right? You leave, you
ask, 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. Ah, so that's a common thing that people say, oh, this felt
all 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 asked 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. 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. 10 to 20 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. 20 seconds after the heart stops? After the heart stop
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. 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,
I got more and more experiences shared with me, near-death experiences are, in
a word, real.
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.
Wow. 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 would be that you would ask to somebody? Sure. Well, first, of course, we
have them give the
narrative of their experience. We don't want any leading questions prior to
that time. Right off the bat,
I realized there was overwhelming consistency even in the first few dozen near-death
experiences I saw.
Yeah. What were some of the things that made you, 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. So,
with that huge data set,
Really moitering around there. Yeah. It's kept me busy. It's my second full-time
job. Yeah, dude. Wow.
St. Peter over here, 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, I mean, just imagine that.
Here you are, unconscious or
clinically dead, and yet about a fifth of people have a life review, or they
may see part, or even all,
of their prior life. Here they are, unconscious, just for often minutes,
certainly, you know, less
than 30 minutes, almost always. And yet, at that time, they're reliving,
viewing all that went on in
their prior life. An amazing demonstration of just how rapid consciousness can
be during a near-death
experience. But what's, how do you know something is not just a dream? How do
you, or I'm trying
to think of another word for a dream, but I don't know another word for it.
Yeah. Well, that's a good
one. I mean, in all of our lives, we typically have dreams. That's very common.
Near-death experiences
are nothing like dreams. Theo, at the risk of embarrassment, I'm going to share
with you how I
found out about that. At the very dawn of putting a survey up on the website, I
asked the question,
"Was your experience dreamlike in any way?" And oh, I was embarrassed at the
responses. No way, no chance,
absolutely not. Emphatic over and over again for people having near-death
experiences, emphasizing
this had nothing to do with dreams. So I quickly let go of that line of
questioning. So again, you know,
when you hear about a near-death experience that seems so unearthly, people
normally would think,
gosh, isn't that like a dream that I'm familiar with? Nothing, absolutely
nothing like a dream. It's
far more lucid and conscious. Were there other choices that came up? Yeah, I'll
tell you the most
poignant choice that we encounter in near-death experiences, and that is a
choice to stay in that
unearthly, beautiful realm, in the environment they're in, off of their spirits,
or the choice to return to
their earthly life and struggle to overcome that life-threatening event that
they caused the near-death
experience. Oh, I see. And this is where it gets really interesting, Theo, at
that moment of decision,
even though people having the near-death experience, everything that they knew
up to that time, friends,
family, loved ones, decades of their life often is their earthly life. And yet,
what they're experiencing
in this unearthly realm, overwhelming sense of peace and love, those are about
the two most common words
used. And they often describe that they feel this unearthly, beautiful realm is
their real home,
their true home. But the great majority of people that are in that unearthly,
heavenly realm that make a
decision, they're asked to make a decision, want to stay there. They want to
leave their earthly life and not
come back. And believe me, that is a difficult decision. They will often argue
with the beings
there. Oh, yeah. That's like when you go to Destin for the first time. You've
been in Destin?
Oh, yeah. So that's really interesting. I never want to live there. That's just
how compelling and beautiful
and what the sense is like in this unearthly, beautiful realm that they're in
of near-death experience.
Is it mostly, is it more women that fill them out than men? Because women, I
think,
low-key, want to die all the time, I feel like. Well, because they love dateline,
you know what I'm saying? They're always like, oh, you know, they're always
leaving a window open.
It's, that's a great question. It's probably pretty close to 50-50, but I'll
tell you why.
I think, Theo, guys like us are just a little more inclined than women to drive
the car fast,
to go do risky things, you know, swim in places we shouldn't swim. We've all
been, I mean, it's a guy
thing. So we may be a little more predisposed to have fun in some risky way.
Women, I think, are a
little less inclined to do that. So I think that may help explain why it's
about 50-50. Have you ever had
a near-death experience? No, I haven't, thank goodness. Now, have you, is there
a part of you that,
because at some point you got to, you know, put your muffins where the oven is.
You know what I'm
saying, bro? Like that. And like, you know what I'm saying? At some point,
people were going to,
you know what I'm saying? If you want to write the third book, you got to have
to go over there.
But let me tell you how it works in the real world here, Theo. People that have
had a near-death
experience in general, typically are not near-death experience researchers. And
I think the reason for
that is they know about near-death experience. It is grippingly real. They
understand it.
They understand its implications in their life. And so as a result of that,
they're not asking
questions like me and so many other people that do research in this area that
want to know,
is it real? What happens? So again, a near-death experience cures any near-death
experience
disbelief. That's for sure. Does part of you ever wish like, you know, and it's
not,
nobody wants to, because near-death experience, you got to, death is in the
middle of it. That's
the tricky part of the rest of it you can handle. But death is the part you got
to risk, you know?
But is any part of you ever like, you know, where like, oh, where if you say
you've ever been skiing
and then you fall and you're like, oh, this could be it. Let's see what happens
here.
Yeah. I'll tell you, I have so many irons in the fire in my life. I've got a
full-time medical practice.
I love doing research and sharing about near-death experience. I've got so much
going on. I'm very
careful not to get into a life-threatening event. You know, I mean, I get what
you're coming from.
Sure. At one level, it'd be, I think, an adjunct to my research to say, this is
what I experienced
and here's what happened. But don't you think that might lead to, you get a
little confirmation bias,
and then I'd start to see other near-death experiences through the filter of my
own experience.
Dude, I can't believe earlier, I was like, don't you think there's a lot of
confirmation bias?
And then I just try to talk you into confirmation bias.
Oh, well.

What REALLY Happens During a Near-Death Experience

I want to start this by asking, 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.
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. 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, it's 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 the earthly life
and that body struggling to
survive. 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
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 here or perceive in any way
with your normal
sensory function. So people leaving their physical realm, right? You leave, you
ask, 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. Ah, so that's a common thing that people say, oh, this felt
all 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 asked 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. 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. 10 to 20 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. 20 seconds after the heart stops? After the heart stop
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. 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,
I got more and more experiences shared with me, near-death experiences are, in
a word, real.
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.
Wow. 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 would be that you would ask to somebody? Sure. Well, first, of course, we
have them give the
narrative of their experience. We don't want any leading questions prior to
that time. Right off the bat,
I realized there was overwhelming consistency even in the first few dozen near-death
experiences I saw.
Yeah. What were some of the things that made you, 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. So,
with that huge data set,
Really moitering around there. Yeah. It's kept me busy. It's my second full-time
job. Yeah, dude. Wow.
St. Peter over here, 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, I mean, just imagine that.
Here you are, unconscious or
clinically dead, and yet about a fifth of people have a life review, or they
may see part, or even all,
of their prior life. Here they are, unconscious, just for often minutes,
certainly, you know, less
than 30 minutes, almost always. And yet, at that time, they're reliving,
viewing all that went on in
their prior life. An amazing demonstration of just how rapid consciousness can
be during a near-death
experience. But what's, how do you know something is not just a dream? How do
you, or I'm trying
to think of another word for a dream, but I don't know another word for it.
Yeah. Well, that's a good
one. I mean, in all of our lives, we typically have dreams. That's very common.
Near-death experiences
are nothing like dreams. Theo, at the risk of embarrassment, I'm going to share
with you how I
found out about that. At the very dawn of putting a survey up on the website, I
asked the question,
"Was your experience dreamlike in any way?" And oh, I was embarrassed at the
responses. No way, no chance,
absolutely not. Emphatic over and over again for people having near-death
experiences, emphasizing
this had nothing to do with dreams. So I quickly let go of that line of
questioning. So again, you know,
when you hear about a near-death experience that seems so unearthly, people
normally would think,
gosh, isn't that like a dream that I'm familiar with? Nothing, absolutely
nothing like a dream. It's
far more lucid and conscious. Were there other choices that came up? Yeah, I'll
tell you the most
poignant choice that we encounter in near-death experiences, and that is a
choice to stay in that
unearthly, beautiful realm, in the environment they're in, off of their spirits,
or the choice to return to
their earthly life and struggle to overcome that life-threatening event that
they caused the near-death
experience. Oh, I see. And this is where it gets really interesting, Theo, at
that moment of decision,
even though people having the near-death experience, everything that they knew
up to that time, friends,
family, loved ones, decades of their life often is their earthly life. And yet,
what they're experiencing
in this unearthly realm, overwhelming sense of peace and love, those are about
the two most common words
used. And they often describe that they feel this unea