TrueLife - Death Bed Experiences & the Afterlife Exploring Truth and Beyond: Conversations W/ Dr. Steve Miller

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Ladies and gentlemen, it is a distinct privilege to introduce Dr. Steve Miller, a luminary in the realms of inquiry, wonder, and profound philosophical exploration. Driven by an innate propensity to question the very fabric of truth claims, Dr. Miller has embarked on a lifelong odyssey into the deepest recesses of thought.As a distinguished writer, erudite professor, and captivating speaker, he offers not just answers but a guiding light for fellow seekers, questioners, and wonderers who, like him, approach every claim with a resounding, “I wonder if it’s true.” Dr. Miller’s intellectual journey has led him through the labyrinthine corridors of belief, skepticism, and unquenchable curiosity.Beyond his academic pursuits, Dr. Miller’s unwavering dedication to unraveling the mysteries of near-death and deathbed experiences is nothing short of awe-inspiring. He is a seeker who has not only read extensively but has also plumbed the depths of these profound phenomena, engaging with the intricate tapestry of human consciousness and spirituality.In a world where certainty often takes precedence, Dr. Miller’s commitment to rigorous inquiry and his unwavering pursuit of truth serve as a beacon of intellectual integrity. His quest extends to the very boundaries of our comprehension, challenging conventions and opening doors to abstract and esoteric realms of thought.Through his work, Dr. Miller bridges the chasm between skepticism and open-minded exploration, offering profound insights into the human condition and the mysteries that lie beyond. His contributions to our understanding of life, death, consciousness, and the afterlife have left an indelible mark on the philosophical landscape.Join us today as we embark on a thought-provoking journey with Dr. Steve Miller, a visionary thinker who reminds us that the pursuit of truth is an eternal endeavor, and that in the quest for answers, we often find even more profound questions. https://jstevemiller.info/deathbed-experiences/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry born from the blaze. The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini, check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day.

I hope everybody is somehow bathing in the warmth that is the beauty of the sunshine. I don't even know if I'm sure if that makes sense, but I hope the birds are singing the wind is at your back. I got a great show for you today. It is a distinct privilege to introduce to you, Dr. Steve Miller, a luminary in the realms of inquiry, wonder, and profound philosophical exploration. Driven by an innate propensity to question the very fabric of truth claims, Dr. Miller has embarked on a lifelong odyssey into the deepest recesses of thought. As a distinguished writer, an erudite professor, and a captivating speaker, he offers not just answers, but a guiding light for fellow seekers,

questioners, and wanderers who, like him, approach every claim with a resounding, I wonder if that's true. Dr. Miller's intellectual journey has led him through the labyrinth corridors of belief, skepticism, and an unquenchable curiosity. Beyond his academic pursuits, Dr. Miller's unwavering dedication to unraveling the mysteries of near-death and deathbed experience is nothing short of awe-inspiring. He's a seeker who has not only read extended but has also plumbed the depths of these profound phenomena engaging with the intricate tapestry of human consciousness and spirituality. Dr. Steve Miller, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. Can you write my next preface? That is wonderful. I should say, though, that it kind of reminds me of a great theologian who was one time introduced and a little bit over the top.

And he prayed opening up his speech by saying, you know, God, you know, forgive him. for exaggerating and forgive me for enjoying it so much. I love it. So I mean, really, truly, the more you study these things, the more you go in depth, the further away you really see you are from getting all the truth of anything. But that's a part of the wonder of the search, isn't it? You know, we're always uncovering new things. We're always challenging, hopefully, our own beliefs and moving further.

and it's really an exciting thing to move forward rather than just be stuck somewhere where you just where you read people who agree with you to get ammunition and you read those who disagree with you to find fault and you're not really moving forward at all. You know, that's the worst position to be in. Yeah, I'm reminded of the great Alan Watts who said there's two kinds of people. There's prickles and goo and they need each other because how do you know your your prickles if you're not goo and the goo needs prickles? We have to have these conversations. We have to have these conversations. in order to really flesh out what we think and bounce ideas off each other. So instead of arguing, we should be thankful that we're disagreeing with people.

True. Now true. So you have written an incredible amount of books. We're probably going to talk about a few ideas in all of them today. Deathbed experiences as evidence for afterlife, near-death experiences as evidence for the existence of God and heaven. There's so many amazing titles that you have been working on and teaching people. I guess a good introductory question is, you know, let me start with this one. In the realm of philosophical inquiry, how do you personally define the concept of truth, especially in the context of your inclination to question the wonder about truth claims?

Good question. I think we come as close to the truth as we can. So I believe in some people talk about, oh, well, you can't be sure of this and you can't be certain. and you can't have a hundred percent certitude. I say, okay, I don't have, I can't have a 100 percent certitude that I'm not caught up in a matrix. And I just think that I'm doing an interview with you, but I'm really, you know, in the matrix. Or that I just, I just appeared yesterday with all these memories as if I know where I've come from. I can't prove for sure that those aren't the case. So logical certitude, like one plus one equals two, I think that's really only achieved in math,

and that's only certain because we define those things in that way. We define one as one plus is plus, equal is equal, and so then we can have 100% certainty. But when it gets to the point where I'm saying, okay, are my kids downstairs or not, I can go downstairs and check and then come back upstairs, but I still can't be 100% certain because one may have left through the window right when I went up the stairs, right? Yeah. So I think when I talk about truth, I talk about getting as close to reality, what's real, what's really out there, what's really going on as possible.

And I believe we approach that in this life. And unfortunately, we can get close enough to make decisions in life. Where do I go to college? Never have 100% certainty on that. Who do I marry? You'll never have 100% certainty. get enough evidence, an accumulation of enough evidence to make decisions and move forward. Does that help? Yeah, that helps immensely. I love that definition. And I might have to go back,

record it and start using it as my own definition. Thank you very much. A little long-winded. I'm sure if I were writing, I could consolidate that. When I'm talking, I have to work around it. Yeah, I'll go with Samuel Clemens and say that the written word is the, what the written word is the bones of the spoken word or the carcass of the spoken word. So I like the spoken word. I like the way in which you threw that out there for everybody to embrace. I think it's wonderful. And it kind of brings up this next question is that in a world where belief often comes easily to many, can you share what first sparked your inclination to question and wonder about truth claims? Well, I suppose I've just always been a questioner. When I was in the first grade, I started

realizing that I learned differently than a lot of people. My earliest recollection of life is in the first grade, looking around wondering, why is it that they can all remember my name and I can't remember their names? Now, being a young philosopher, I worked it through and thought, oh, well, there's a whole bunch of them, but there's only one of me. So they can remember one name, but I have to remember all their names. So my critical thinking wasn't developed that well yet, but I can remember the wondering why it is that sometimes I think differently.

And so many academic things came harder to me because so much of intellectual life is memorizing. Just spit back what the teacher, the textbook says, you'll do great. I wasn't that kind of person. I was the type who was always thinking, why, what if, or how do I know that's true? And so as a sophomore in high school, I went on a retreat because a girl I like was going. Nice. And that's where I made a commitment to go. within the Christian faith.

I really didn't question that at that point. I had not had enough information to question it. But after that, when people began bringing up problems with my faith, I was not the type who could just say, okay, well, it's all faith anyway, I just believe. I'd have to work through each question, each attack. And I would go through periods of personal doubt and questioning, reading both sides of issues or multiple sides of issues.

And so I think I've just always been that way to where I was a questioner. And I wasn't, and since these are really, really important matters, I felt like I've got to get answers to these. It has relevance to how I live my life, to who I'm Mary, what I do with my life. Am I going to end up being a Buddhist monk? Am I going to be, you know, in some kind of business? What do I do? It all goes back to what's the most important thing in life. And I felt like I had to think those through.

Yeah. I love it. I think that finding out some of the foundational questions about what you believe are imperative for you to radiate out any other decisions. Like, how can you know about your relationships? How can you know what you're doing is right? How can you, you know, do these things unless you have this foundation of like, okay, well, what am I doing is right? And I found in my life, too, it had often taken me a lot of time to make decisions and people are like, what's taking you so long? I'm like, I don't know if this is the right thing to do. I've got to think about this for a little bit, you know?

And so it's, yeah, it's interesting to, I guess it, which leads me to this is that when contemplating the profound questions about life, death, and the afterlife, have you ever encountered ideas or concepts that push the boundaries of our comprehension and challenge the very nature of reality? Well, I think that's what near death and deathbed experiences and such visionary experiences have done for me. They've really taken my assurance on certain things that I've studied through lifelong in many areas. And in my academic study, I went to three different colleges, diverse colleges, three different graduate schools. And that's where I was studying out a lot of these things, but just on my own, of course. But once I hit this thing just a decade ago, once I became acquainted with near-death experiences and deathbed experiences, I thought, wow, this ad. a layer of evidence that I was not even aware of. I really just thought that such experiences were personal things.

You've just got to believe people in what they say. But since I, if I've not experienced it myself, it really doesn't give any evidence. But once I began looking at it, not just for the research, but saying, what evidence does this research give for things like God in an afterlife? Then I thought, wow, this. And certain researchers like Dr. Long said the same thing. They thought, this could tell me about why we're here. The very, you know, the seven, one of the big self-help books during my generation coming up was seven habits of highly successful people, you know. And one of his big things was begin with the end in mind.

So let's say you're wanting to be successful in your business. Okay, well, that should impact my short-term goals, my long-term goals. If I'm saying, well, I want to be happy. Well, okay, well, that impacts them in a different way. Maybe I don't want to spend all my time working, but begin with the end of mind. But to me, what near death and death bit experience did is they kind of took that end and spread it out a lot further and said, okay, what if there is an afterlife? What if there actually are objective good and bad things that I'm supposed to be living for this instead of this? In other words, goals are not just something I make up on my own, but there is objective, you know, like love proceeds, especially from these experiences.

I think that's objective now that I've understood near death and deathbed experiences that, okay, that's something in the life, that it counts not only for this life, but eternity. and wow, this has just put me in the last decade in a whole new realm of evidence that I never knew existed. Yeah, it's fascinating. I was speaking recently with some death doulas, and they had spoken to me about holding the hands of people who were knocking on heaven's door in some ways or getting close to death. And, you know, some of the things they had mentioned is that they could see the unrealized dreams on the face of the people. And another thing is that people in that state, they don't ever say things. Like, I wish I would work more. I wish I would have, you know, spent more time in the office. Like, it's always, I wish I would have been a better father.

I wish I would have been a better son or a better mother or they're not talking about Costco or buying a Tesla. They're talking about really profound things. Maybe this is a good introduction. Maybe you can talk about a little bit of your research. way into some of the experiences that you've had with people in your research. Well, number one, I've spent a lot of time around dying folks and the elderly, as we mentioned before we were talking in my, I was living in Slovakia at the time, doing ministry work there. My wife was diagnosed with cancer. We had to come back.

We had just in, my twins were born in Austria while we were there. They were about six months old. we had to come back. Well, you know, my whole dream of the work we were trying to do there was, was gone. And the whole marriage that we had was, was vanishing as, as her health went down, and she would die three years later. So, um, so when that happens to a lot of people, it seems like life becomes tissue paper thin, whereas most people think, oh, I'm just going to, they just don't think about it. They act as if they're going to live forever. Well, to me, I thought, well, if she could die in her 30s, I could die at any time. So death becomes a very, and it's not in some kind of horrible way that I'm looking at.

I'm just saying, this motivates me to live for things that really matter. I don't know how long I have on this earth. And then I took care of my mom and my dad as they were getting elderly and passed away. My granny, grandmom lived to 110 next door. So the last 25 years, my life has been condescary. assume not just with research, but with helping the elderly. And it makes me very aware of death and just how profound it is and how we all need to think it through.

And in fact, with my mother, okay, so you asked about my research. So 10 years ago, I read the little book, Heaven is for real. You know, a movie was made of it. And a relative had asked me to read it. I just read it as a favor because I thought there's no evidence there or whatever. Now, it was interesting. and there were some, there was potential evidence there and that the little boy claimed to have seen some things on the other side

that he didn't know or whatever. But I thought, well, I don't know these people. I don't know anything about them. There is a monetary incentive to writing a book that becomes a bestseller. So, you know, it's interesting. But on the back of it, I believe it was Dr. Long that had a quote saying, I've been studying these experiences for years, and this is consistent with a lot of the experience.

that I've studied and I thought somebody's been studying this. So whereas it seems like most people that I encounter are familiar with near-death experiences through hearing a documentary or going on YouTube and and looking up a bunch of experiences, I wanted to get back to the research that had been done by competent researchers like cardiologists who are interviewing people that actually there are hospital records to corroborate what they're saying that they actually did experience clinical death. They could screen for things like mental illness or, okay, were they actually on drugs at the time and all this.

I wanted to see what the researchers were saying. So I read people like Van Lommel who did his research in Holland, where most people didn't even believe in the afterlife. So you couldn't very well chalk up their afterlife experiences to that was already what they believed or their expectations of the afterlife. People like Dr. Sabom, who's a very respected cardiologist here in the Atlanta area, who wrote one of the most scientific, I think, studies studying his patients. He didn't believe that these things were real. He didn't believe they were leaving their bodies because he just wasn't trained that way. He was kind of a liberal Christian

tent to him, but not really into the thing. After about a year of studying his patients, he said, wow, these patients that experience cardiac arrest, experienced clinical deaths, cessation of heartbeat, cessation of breathing, the ones that say they had a near-death experience and exited their bodies, when I asked them how their resuscitation took place. And he said, it's not like TV where they're all kind of done the same. There are different nuances to how it's done in every case. He said, they always got it right.

And then he had a subset of people over here who also experienced cardiac arrest, also experienced clinical death, but they did not have a near-death experience. And he asked them the same question. What do you think happened during your resuscitation? And they said, well, I don't know. I was unconscious. He said, well, just guess. What do you think happened?

He said, they all got it wrong. So this initial group of people, he said, that's evidence that they're not just saying what they saw on TV. I mean, they were actually telling about things that people were saying in the room. And I mean, this was a very good objective study. He was not some wild preacher trying to just gather evidence. Very carefully done study when I saw multiple studies of this character and dissertations on it. I said, this is strong evidence.

that these people have actually left their bodies for some kind of a dualism where there's our body, but somehow the essence of us can separate from that body. And I just thought it was powerful. I just couldn't believe it was there. I'd been to several different religious schools, several secular schools. Why hadn't I been taught any of this? Moody started writing of it in 1975. They started, they had some great studies of deathbed experience.

in the late 1800s. I'd been studying evidence all my life. Why wasn't I aware of that? So I wanted to get at what the researchers were actually coming to the conclusions of what was their data and what can we draw from that. Wow. It's interesting that there's so much evidence about it, but yet it's somehow, for so long, it seems to be so dismissed by the scientific communities.

Like if you can't measure something, like you can't measure non, Euclidean space, so they just throw it, they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like, let's take the, all that's nonsense. Like, we can't measure it. But why would you be able to measure? I mean, there's tons of things we can't measure. Yes, yes. One of the most interesting things I did, I actually decided to get my dissertation on this.

Okay. Now, that's crazy. I'm in my 60s, okay, getting my dissertation. But I thought, if I'm going to study this deathbed experience. So when I was studying near death experiences, I also came across. this similar what I call a sister experience called deathbed experiences. So near-death experiences, you're having a cardiac arrest or something. You come near death and then you recover and go on living your life and you tell about your experience. Death-bed experiences are like death-bed visions

when people are just about to die, their actual final death, and they start talking about they're being visited by angels or deceased relatives. Now, a huge study had been done of this in the 1950s and 1960s. Osses and H.S. and H.S. and a Haroldson, some top researchers went in, researched them in America. And then they said, okay, well, what if our worldview over here is influencing it? So let's do the same thing in India, very different culture, and let's compare them. So they wrote a book on that. And I thought, you know, that would make a good dissertation.

Nobody's really talking about deathbed experiences. I wonder what research has been done on that. I thought maybe I'll find 100 different articles that are relevant. that'd make a tidy dissertation. You're not supposed to be too broad. Well, once I got to over 500 or 600 resources, I thought, this is huge. Why isn't anybody talking about this? And it was quite powerful.

And I'll tell you one of the most important things, you know, I keep talking about research and some of you that are listening. You say, I like to listen to videos. I don't want to read research and stuff. Start talking to people in your own family and your own circles of trust. Now, I'm in academia, and I would be talking, my wife would say, hey, tell so-and-so what you're studying. And one of my colleagues said, oh, did I ever tell you about my vision? And I'm like, what?

And this is a guy I thought was pretty secular in his beliefs. And I thought, wow, this is pretty incredible. I had a relative come through. He's got a master's degree in history, taught history all his life, very respected in the family. by to visit and my mother said tell uh bucky here what you're researching and i said uh near death experiences he said oh let me tell you about mine and and he told me about is actually a deathbed experience a shared death experience so he was uh he was lying in bed sleeping minding his own business and then he like pops out of his body looks down and sees himself from above

in the corner of the room, a tunnel. I think he saw some heavenly creatures. And then he went back into his body and woke up in a cold sweat because this was not. This was unlike any dream he had ever had. He said, no, this was like real. Immediately the phone rang. It was a nurse from a couple of hours away at a hospital saying that his dad had just passed away from a sudden heart attack and that he didn't even.

even know his dad was, was ill. Okay. Now, what about the timing of that that it happens right at the same time? Well, that's called a shared death experience. Moody wrote a book on that recently, glimpses of eternity within the last five years probably, where he pulled them together. Actually, that's a pretty common experience. And that has evidential value because, you know, people like Shermer, atheists will tend to say, well, it's just, it's just a, It's a matter of numbers. You know, everybody's going to have a certain number of dreams during a lifetime. And then with billions of people to pull from, okay, billions and billions of dreams,

some of these are going to eerily correspond to realities just because of the numbers. But in Bucky's case, his, you know, this was, this vision or whatever you would call it, it distinguished itself from all of his dreams from the very beginning because of the stark, reality of it. And it's not like he's had a bunch of dreams and one of them happened to correspond with the reality of the timing. But the only one he ever had, one out of one, the timing was precise. And then I saw some major studies done of these type experiences where the timing was precise, done by excellent researchers. And I said, there's strong evidence here that people are actually coming out of their bodies and knowing things that,

a naturalism they shouldn't be able to know. So science talks about predictions. Naturalism tells me that I can hear you because of we got electrons going back and forth and all these mechanisms. But you know what? I can't hear what's going on in the next room. I know nothing of what's going on next door. I for sure don't know anything going on in Europe. I can't hear it. I can't see it. there are limitations to my senses. So when somebody like Bucky all of a sudden knows something that's happened at the precise time, that would not be predicted by naturalism to me. It seems to make more sense in the light of the afterlife hypothesis than some kind of dying brain hypothesis.

And by the way, you can't explain it away by things like too much oxygen or, you know, things that happen to the brain during death because Bucky was. dying. This is something that somebody that was not dying was experiencing. And in the late 1800s, some of the top people at Cambridge were studying this. They surveyed 17,000 people and found out that about 10% of them in this study, the study of how many people have seen someone who was not physically there. That's been replicated through the years in many societies. It comes to usually around 10% or something. They've seen someone. They've seen someone. who is not physically there.

The largest category of those 10% were people who had crisis apparitions. They saw someone or felt someone or just knew something had happened to someone, but they didn't know the person had died. But they wrote down, they were so sure that this person had come to say goodbye to them, that many of them wrote it down. And they told their wives or other people when they were there. So these researchers, again,

some of the top people at Cambridge University, the Siduix at the time, and then some others that were associated with Oxford. This is Oxford and Cambridge, to the most respected universities in the world. It was commissioned by a psychological, international psychological institute. They did a wonderful job with this study.

What they found was that you could not explain these away by chance because there were like 440 times as many people that this was happening to than just a chance guess or you happen to have an experience at the same time somebody died. They took all the experiences that happened within a 24-hour period,

12 hours before to 12 hours after a person's death. And then they said, what are the odds that this would happen? They said, it's not just twice as many as, you know, would be predicted by naturalism, not just four times or 10 times, which would be incredible,

but 440 times. Very well done. study and I looked at that and I thought my goodness there's an afterlife they they saw people who had died they didn't know they were dying but they saw the person saying goodbye after they had died that sounds like after life to me yeah you know now maybe it just happens for a moment and then they go but in near-death experiences and deathbed experiences or deathbed visions at the time of death, people see long deceased relatives. Now, if we've got evidence that these things are real, then they're seeing people who are long dead. Well, to me, that's again

evidence. I came up with about 11 lines of evidences that deathbed experiences fit better with an afterlife hypothesis than a naturalistic hypothesis. And about 12 lines of evidence for near-death experiences being the same thing, better explained by an afterlife hypothesis. So that's the way I approached the evidence. And as you say, I guess getting back, I may have veered off from what you're asking. But what does that mean for science? You're right. Some people say, well, you can't measure the experience.

Well, there are a lot of things you can't measure. You can't take gravity and put it on a scale and look at it. um, electron, we don't even, people who are materialists, we don't even know what material is anymore, right? I mean, you know all this stuff, but quantum physics is just wonderful. But it's got us so far past the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s, where I think materialism and naturalism made cowards of all of us so that we couldn't talk about experiences. Yeah. Yeah. That weren't physical because it just wasn't popular anymore and we couldn't talk about it. In many other cultures around the world, they'll talk about things like that.

But fortunately, where we are now in history, this is all over the medical journals. You can study it now. People are more willing to talk about it. In fact, a film's coming out, the end of this month, Angel Studios. I think it's kind of a documentary on near-death experiences. Now the information is out there and we need to assess it. It's fascinating to me. And for me, it's a breath of fresh air.

It seems to me that for so long, we've been so stubborn and ignorant to think that we know so much when in fact we probably know so little. You know, sometimes I wonder, let me pose this question to you. Could these experiences be foreshadowing what's to come for all of us? Like maybe it's a heightened state of awareness that allows us to see and understand things. Maybe it's a shift in sense ratios that's happening. Could this be some sort of evolutions beginning to happen to all of us? Well, it could be. What I like to do is throw every possible hypothesis out there.

A hypothesis is a theory on probation. So you look at it and you say, hey, here's one idea. Maybe we're evolving to a greater state and our brains can actually handle things that they couldn't happen that they couldn't handle in former generations. A lot of religious people may look back to document. like the Bible that say, talk about prophecies of the end times that old, old men will dream, dreams young men will have visions. I hope I got that order right. But there would be something special. Now, in a sense, that may have been fulfilled in the book of acts when you had these things happening, but a lot of these prophecies would have double fulfillment again at the end of time.

To me, studying traditional religions, one thing that stands out to me, me is that it is that it seems like God just doesn't want to be put in a box with the way he does things and so it may be something new is happening either it may be happening to more people or maybe just more people are willing to talk about it but there were at least two studies that were showing when we're talking about visionary experiences both positive and negative and seeing angels and stuff. Somebody did a survey in the 1960s. One was in England, one was in the United States,

and they found this that when they would ask on surveys, have you had any of these experiences? More people from year to year, from decade to decade, were saying they had had them maybe even twice as many as in the 1960s, which is interesting. You know, a lot of people, secularists like to say, oh, well, secularism is growing. people don't talk about religious, but at least in this one aspect, even in England, which we think of having become more and more secular over the years, but these visionary experiences seem to be, according to some studies, are increasing. I haven't seen a study yet that said it's been decreasing or stayed the same.

Yeah, it's interesting. In some ways, when I look at science, it almost seems like religion to me. Like, they're using events in the past to predict. the future. Like, that seems borderline religious to me. Well, I think naturalism, it's very hard to define religion, by the way. I mean, some religions don't really talk about God much. You can't say it's a God thing or a spiritual thing. And who knows. But in some ways, I think naturalism does seem like a religious. It's at least a worldview. And I think often the scientists who happen to be naturalists don't realize that they're caught in a paradigm like Coon's book on scientific revolutions. He said, you know, really we think of science as progressing from one experiment to another, and scientists just whenever they see the evidence, they just jump on board and are willing to change

their views just because of the evidence. But actually, what we see is when Einstein comes along and says, no, I think, I think, Time is relative, time and space. Well, you hear all these scientists that just no way, that's crazy. Let me tell you, all the things against it. Same thing with the beginning of the universe, the big bang. Many secularists were just totally against that. I mean, it sounded too much like creation.

You mean there was a beginning to time and space? And so one quantum physicist said, you know, science, science just doesn't really progress one experiment to another, it's more likely to progress one funeral to another because the old guard's going to have to die out because they're going to justify what they think is right and their theory rather than be willing to be open to the next theory, which actually may have more evidence going for it. Yeah, it's such a fascinating concept to think about. And it's so full of promise and hope and beauty and equally full of tragedy because, you know, if we look at people that are moving on their way, I think that that is one thing that has been so enticing to people is to know that

someone they love is going to a place where they're going to be loved. And it provides you sometimes the power to move forward or the faith to move forward. Yes. Yes, it does that in a in a big way. And it changed. There's a song going around in religious circles called Heaven Changes Everything. And I believe there's something to that. I mean, let's say that I feel like, I mean, why did my wife have to be diagnosed with cancer in her 30s, leaving me with four small children? Why did I spend a year learning Slovak?

And I'm horrid at languages. I told you how bad my memory is. I have to work and work and work and work. Why spend a year preparing for a ministry that I was not able to do? And a lot of you listeners, you've had a business that was going great and then a law changed or people's attitudes changed. Something happened and it's just, it's just all gone. Well, if this life is all there is, then it's nothing more than a tragedy. But what if this life is mostly about preparing us to help?

other people. And you know, I'm able to help a lot of people who are losing loved ones. One of my students right now is emailing me saying, I'm ministering to a loved one who has cancer. How do I do it? I think I'm much more effective in helping them because of what I've gone through. It brings meaning, even to the great tragedies of life, knowing that my life actually has a purpose and I'm here for a reason. And I think eternity can be a great equalizer. People who just didn't have it well, I think they'll get rewards for how they handle their situation and how they overcame the odds or tried to,

even if you never overcame them in this life. Great meaning to life. And I should say, when I've taken care of loved ones, I never really saw anything special happen with my wife when she was passing away. She was pretty heavily sedated with morphine. She was dying of breast cancer. But my mom was a different animal in that regard. Now, I should mention this.

This was just a couple of years ago. So I started just living with mom next door because I was afraid she was going to fall. She did not have any fatal disease that we knew of. She was just kind of slowing down and not quite as, when she went out on walks, I felt like I needed to hold her hand because I was afraid she would fall. So I was living with her.

But then one day, out of the blue, she says, Stevie, I think she still called me Stevie at the time from my high school year. She said, I think I'm going to die. I said, really? She said, yeah. So I want to talk to you about make sure you understand what I wanted my funeral.

And I said, why do you think you're going to die? You don't, you know, you got a urinary track infection that we're fighting, but you're perfectly lucid. Your heart's fine. Your oxygen levels are fine. Why would you think? She said, I don't know.

I just know I'm about to die. And so she had me pull from her closet, some, the clothes that she wanted to be, to wear in the funerals. Mom was just very practical. She didn't mind talking about stuff like this. And, and she walked through what she wanted to happen at the funeral and all. I talked to a nurse. I said, do you say anything wrong with mom?

And said, physically, is she about to die? And I said, no, no, no. Within a couple of weeks, she died. Now, the day before she died, she said, two days before she had a very lucid moment, she was starting to go downhill quickly, had a very lucid moment where she talked to my wife on the couch and said, I just want to make sure that you take care of Steve when I'm gone. you know and that's become useful when you know sherry will we'll be talking about son and say you remember that promise you made to mom now really you ought to help me out in this situation but uh mom was good

about things like that yeah just kidding my wife is great she would have taken good care of me anyway but then a day before she died she said hey dad and she was talking to her dad just briefly if I had not studied all these studies of deathbed experiences, I thought, okay, well, she's just hallucinating whatever. But when nurses will tell you that work with hospice, if somebody says not only that they're seeing deceased relatives or angels on the other side, but they're actually seeing somebody that may be coming for them,

look out 24 hours, 48 hours, they're probably going. Now, again, put that in your philosophical pipe and smoke on a little bit. Yeah. You say, the doctors are not saying there's a physical reason they believe they're just about to die, right? They don't see any disease that's fatal that's happening to my mom. How did she know? How did she know to say, why would she have this experience right before death where she's talking? to her dad and then she dies. It's called terminal lucidity. They're studying it in Europe right now.

You can find all kinds of examples of this where people will, one of my students tell me about all these experiences. One of my students said, yeah, my granddad was in the hospital and he gathered us around and he said, you know, in seven days I'm going to die and there's some things that I want to tell you. Well, I've actually read a study from the British Journal of medicine, one of the most highly respected medical journals, and they did a study of how accurate physicians are in deciding when somebody's going to die. Now, if you're bleeding out, they're going to say, okay, they're going to say, okay, he's about gone. You know, if you want to say something to him, say it now, he's bleeding out. But I'm talking about when you're dying of cancer,

you're dying of some long-term illness. They can't even get it within weeks, maybe months, sometimes. How do these people know the day that they're dying? terminal lucidity. Often it's happening to people whose minds have been ravaged by Alzheimer's or they've been, um, their brain has basically been replaced by a tumor that's been eating away at their brain. They've been comatose for a time. Suddenly, they're fully aware, telling everybody goodbye, saying, asking forgiveness, whatever they need to do to wrap things up. And then they die. to me, that's just not very consistent with naturalism. And under naturalism, you know when you're going to die because the doctor says this is happening in your body, so it's probably going to be tomorrow.

But they're not good at guessing that. How do these people know? Terminal lucidity. There's several things that happen around death that I'm calling deathbed experiences that, you know, the crisis apparitions, somebody else is. experiencing that, like Bucky experience, which would be a shared death experience happening around death. These things are happening to people who are not dying. And yet they all, to me, have evidential value when they're all put together. It's a cumulative case. Yeah. And like you said earlier, I'm willing to bet anybody can ask somebody in their family

circle and something similar along those lines, they've seen it, you know, or they've been in it themselves. It's so much more common than we give it props for, it seems to me. Does it seem that people who, it seems in the West, we're so fearful of death that sometimes the family members try to keep people alive even when they're not alive. They're heavily medicated or sometimes they're on a machine for a long time. Or one of the saddest things that we put a lot of our older people in these rest homes and sometimes they forgot about. Is there a correlation between people that are heavily medicated and kept alive and no death experiences and people that kind of keep their dignity in dying and have death experiences? Is it one more than the other? Or is there

any evidence in any of those? I don't know any studies that that tried to tease out that statistically. I'm not really sure. I do know that that, but it used to be that people would tend to die at home. And I'm glad that my mom, my grandmom, and my dad could all die next door to me where we had family around. And that's one of the wonderful, wonderful things about hospice that they'll come to your home. Now, some people really do need to be taken care of in a hospital situation. Every situation is different. But I think it's a wonderful thing when we can be around because we tend to put them away. Then people can't visit them anymore hardly.

And you hear of a relative dying, but you're not around. It's really, in my cases, it's been a rather sweet experience to be able to be there. And I think when things are hidden away from you, you start believing the worst. And I think we ought to be closer as families when this is going on. And by the way, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who was probably the expert on dying at her time, that's what motivate her. If she was from Switzerland, she came to the United States, was working in a hospital with dying people, And she said, this is horrid.

It's like the doctors are just trying to keep them alive. Some of the, it's not helping them to have a good death. And they're back here away from family. She said, something's wrong here. And I think that was a big part of what motivated her to study the dying and to have probably a part in the starting of hospice and in all these agencies as well. So we're thinking, we're starting to look at it differently now. And I'm so glad for that.

Yeah. You know, when you look, sometimes I'll read or talk with people who have from indigenous cultures. Well, they'll talk about death as a rite of passage. You know, and there's a ceremony behind it. And I wish that maybe in the West we can begin to adopt that more because I think that takes that taboo away. And I think it would help other people not only get to see the near-death experiences, but be part of them. I think that's an important part of it is get to be a part in the end of life. for other people would make it more of a palatable and beautiful experience and something that we're not so afraid of. Yeah, it seems to me that in America, we're just all about kind of success in this life. All the books are about how to get the most successful in this life. And so death just doesn't fit into the equation. So we just, you know, I'll hear people that just, they just won't think about death. They just don't want to think about it. And so they just avoid the whole thing. I'm saying, you know, this could be a big part of helping you to live more. you know, with more meaning.

But if you just forget that you're going to die one day, well, you're going to hang on to grudges and you're going to take money from, you know, try to get all you can as far as money and never be satisfied. To me, we need to be closer to others when they're going through this. It just makes a difference in our life. And yes, people will start seeing things happen and it will become more of a normal thing to say, wow, this really looks not like the end, but like a transition when I saw grandmom die or when I saw my mom die. And other experiences I should mention in the deathbed field would be after death communications.

Again, this is something that's happening to people who are alive and well. You can't blame it on an oxia or just weird hallucinations or something that happened to a dying brain. but when someone maybe long ago, maybe recently has died, and then someone here on earth that still here experiences them in a very powerful way. When I traced that in my book on deathbed experiences, some of the research actually started at Harvard University, which Dr. Kaplan, I believe it was, would say it was one of the most significant studies to have happened at Harvard at the time in their,

I believe it was a psychiatry department, but they were studying grieving people. And at that time, because of Freud and others, they were thinking the way to handle grief is, you know, somebody died, but you don't need to just keep grieving over it.

You know, give yourself a few weeks to kind of get back into life and whatever. But number one, they found out people can experience grief maybe for the rest of their lives. You know, it gets better. You can handle it better.

But psychologically, you don't have to get, get over that person. That was one outcome of it. The other, and this was a surprise finding, they weren't looking for it, but they started hearing people talk about these experience, grieving people were talking about experiences as if they were still relating to that deceased person. And I thought, this is weird. Maybe we need to go back and tackle this. And what they found out was that at first people would say things like, well, you know, I've had this kind of a vivid dream. I mean, you're talking to a Harvard psychiatrist, you know, so you don't want to be thrown in the looney bin.

You probably can't say that anymore. So I erase that if you get a chance. I love it. You're afraid of things like that. But then as they talk to the more, do you actually think this was real that you really saw your deceased relative? And that often say, yes, I believe it was real. So that's an after death communication, ADC. Again, their dissertations done on this.

where people will talk to them. And sometimes these people on the other side will come to you in a vivid dream and say, you know, I left a life insurance policy. Nobody's aware of in the closet. You go to find it. I mean, there's corroborations to some of these. I had another relative. I did not survey my relatives.

It's just that when I told them what I was studying, all of a sudden, these respected relatives would come up to me and tell me things. Actually, this one is an author. He's written some cooking books, drawing on the family recipes. I'm a slow reader. I'm thinking of all these things while I'm reading, you know, relating it to things, thinking it through, smoking on my philosophical pie while I'm reading a page. My wife, she reads fast.

So we're sitting out at family gathering. We've just gotten in this book from a relative, a cookbook of all things. And she just starts breezing through it. And she says, he had an after-death communication. I said, are you serious? It's in his cookbook. But sure enough, toward the end, he started telling him about his life. And he said that his mom had died.

He was extremely close to his mom. And one night, he had this vivid dream where she came to them. And I said, do you think it was a vivid dream or a hallucination? Or do you think, just tell me honestly, was it real? He said, it was real. It was her. He said, I'd know her voice anywhere. I'd know her laugh anywhere.

she came back and he said, I'd been concerned because she'd had a painful death. And I was just concerned for that last stage of her life. And so I asked her, you know, was it, was it a hard death? And she said, she kind of laughed and she said, well, of course it was hard. I had a painful disease. I just want you to know, I'm fine. On the other side, you don't need to worry about me anymore.

Those are not the exact words. I'm just kind of summarizing it. But this is a person who's worked for not-for-profits, all his life, very intelligent person. And he's just sitting there telling me about this experience that he says was real. He said, I woke up in a cold sweat. I knew it was real. Well, what do you say to that?

I mean, when I look at someone like that, I say, I respect him. I also respect Bucky, who told me the earlier experience. I really think had I had there. experiences, I'd be saying the same thing. I'd be saying it was real. So why do I have to wait for having my own experience if I think these are trustworthy people? I think what we go back to is legal evidence. You know, you look at the witnesses. Is there a motivation for them to be lying in this situation? Are they sane people? Are they on drugs? Do they, you know, why are they telling me this? and we evaluate just like we would eyewitnesses in a court of law.

And I think that's the type of scientific evidence that we can apply. And then we look for corroboration like Seybeum did with his patients and saying, okay, if they can actually describe what was going on while they were clinically dead, that corroborates their story. Yeah, I agree. So I think it's a very scientific thing. It's just that what I found is that most scientists think that, I shouldn't say most, a lot of scientists think that science, the scientific method, is the way they use science and their specialty.

So if you're a chemist, if you can't put it in a test tube and do all these tests, well, that's not really science. Well, then you've got astrophysicist who are studying the big bang. You can't put that in a test tube. So people say, well, you've got to be able to replicate it. If you can't give me a person and replicate that near-death experience in front of me, then it's not really science. I said, well, go replicate the big bang. I mean, that'd be a little bit dangerous as well as hard to do. I don't think anybody can do it.

But you have a cumulative case of various lines of evidence that tell you that you think the universe actually had a beginning, which is what we call the big bang. Well, I think it's the same thing. We're doing science the same way when we look for multiple lines of evidence that reinforce one another that are more consistent with an afterlife hypothesis than a dying. brain hypothesis. Why not look to the caterpillar and the butterfly? I mean, that seems to be a pretty good analogy to mean. Like, here's this one form and then it's gone. But here's this new form right after it.

It's emerging, right? It's like, and inside the chrysalis, it's just liquefied and done. And then all of a sudden this new form emerges. But the caterpillar or none of his caterpillar friends can see the butterfly. They don't know what's going on. How can they? They're a caterpillar. They're not a butterfly yet, you know?

And I think that there's evidence for, it in nature all around us and to think that we haven't figured out it's like the ultimate hubris well i think and i think that's that's a good analogy is that you say well if if you showed me a butter if you showed me the caterpillar and then showed me the butterfly and you said what happened to the caterpillar well i think a lot of people would say well it's it's gone because that's not a caterpillar you know so the caterpillar's dead and you said no no no no it's It just changed form. And I believe in the same way, so many naturalists are so wrapped up into the material world.

And they say, well, look, the person is going downhill, downhill, downhill, and then they die. Well, even if there were no experiences during this life that showed a separation of brain and mind, and I think there are many different things that show that separation. But even if there were not, to say that life could not go on. afterwards because we just saw this physical body by to me, that's analogous to saying, well, if my computer stops, then I lost all my information because the computer's dead. It was the computer generating the information. When the computer dies, it's dead.

I said, well, no, no, I've been uploading it to the cloud all this time. I can get the information back. Yeah. So that information can go on living. Well, I mean, if there is a God, surely he could take my personality and my, thoughts and everything and recreate them, you know, in the end. It's not a slam dunk saying, oh, I'm a physical person here. When I die, I'm dead.

I don't know. I like your analogy. I think it's good. I think a computer analogy works as well. So if I've got strong evidence that people are actually living on the other side and people are seeing them in near death and deathbed experiences, and often they're giving information that has corroboration. To me, that's just good reason to believe in the afterlife.

Yeah. And it's interesting, too. It seems a lot of the information that maybe not a lot, but it seems to me at times revelations or things that are revealed to people in those particular situations often become wisdom for those of us to hold on to that help us in our life. It's almost like you are revealed secrets at a certain point in your life or wisdom at some level. And then that can help people. An example would be, you know, you had mentioned earlier in the conversation, this.

Sometimes people ask them a question like, why me? Why did my wife that? Why did my son die? And you don't figure out to later in life. Maybe that happened so you could help other people. Maybe that helping to you. And maybe helping out other people is a way of helping out a younger version of yourself about to go through it. You know, like, but these are these revelations people have towards later in their life.

Like, you don't understand why now. You can't. You haven't gone through it. You haven't had that experience. And I often hear, and I don't know the percentage on this, but it seems to me when people go to the other side, all of a sudden they realize there's meaning in this. Whatever. Now, when I was on the other side, I knew the meaning of everything.

Now my brain, now that I'm back in my body, my brain's too limited to understand. Right. But just knowing that I knew it then, I can say, and there might be a hundred reasons that I had to lose my wife in her 30s. I don't know. Maybe, you know, I mean, there may just be a hundred. I don't have to know the reason. I think a lot of people don't know. I want to know why I lost my job.

I don't know why my child died. I want to know why this happened. I want to know why maybe there are a hundred reasons. But I'll see people coming back from near-death experiences and say things like, Now I know why I was born into the family that I was born into. Now I know why this happened. Now I know. And they may not know the specific, but they know that it all had meaning on the other side.

I know one person said, I could see, and I forgot what she said, something like the 40th degree or whatever of if this had happened, if what I'd wanted to happen, it happened, this would have been the result, 40 people after, you know. But because of what I went through, there's another series of events. And it's something that only an expanded mind could even understand. And yet, I think we can latch on to that. I mean, it's just like a parent who's taking a child to the dentist who doesn't want to go.

And they think, oh, you can either decide my parents hate me or you can decide, you know, they're smarter than me. There's probably a good reason for this, even though I can't understand it at this Yeah, it's in some ways I think that there's so much we can learn and I'm so thankful that a lot of these different studies are being done. You know, you mentioned exploring the alignment of these experiences with Christian teachings and other worldviews. How do you navigate the intersections and divergenives between these experiences and different belief systems? I'm just I'm not coming into this saying okay I'm going to try to I'm going to try to push this into a system and make it work or and I try and you know we talked about my background and my objectivity and the way I question things and if if I were to study it out and say I think it works really better with this other world. old view. And I'd say, okay, at this point in history, it looks like it fits better with this other

world view. But to me, now, I did a lot of study of Bible and theology, so in my background, studied Greek, Greek New Testament, state of Hebrew, these things, interpretation. So I'm not just coming from a casual relationship with that. And I don't know Islam to that extent. I don't know. Hinduism is varied, by the way, as people's beliefs, many, many different things come under that umbrella. But since my background has been so much in Christianity, I want to say, okay, well, how does this fit within Christian theology? And a lot of people would say, well, it just doesn't fit because Christians believe that at death, you're going to go before God and have this judgment and this and that. And instead, you have people of all stripes, all religions come up,

and they see this good God who's not yelling at them. So that's obviously not consistent with Christianity. So they say it really fits better with a new age belief or a Hindu belief or something. else. I would just say, so what a lot of them are claiming is that the core experience really goes against Christianity. I didn't find that in my study. What people are experiencing in a near-death experience is not their final death. They're experiencing a halftime experience, something that's happening in this life. And the Bible doesn't say every time you come before God, he's going to yell at you if you've done anything wrong. I mean, it just doesn't. It doesn't say you're going to experience in a halftime experience everything that happens

at a final death experience. So I don't see that as contradictory anyway. In fact, the Apostle Paul in 2nd Corinthians 12, he talks about an experience that it was apparently him that had it. He put it in kind of unusual terms as to not be proud about it. But he said that he had this experience of whether it was in the body or out of the body. I don't know, but I wouldn't experience this third heaven. You know, well, he doesn't talk about the things that are supposed to happen at the end of time, you know, like a final judgment or anything like that. He had an experience.

Stephen in the book of Acts, he was about to die. He was being stoned to death for his fate. And he looks up and starts having that. He says, he's having a deathbed vision. Jesus in the transfiguration, people say, oh, this stuff about talking to death. people, that's a cult, that's a cult, that's a cult. And I'm like, now wait a minute, Jesus in the transfiguration, he's talking to Moses and Elijah. They were long since dead. Okay. So here are people, it's, wouldn't that be called an after death communication? Jesus and the three close disciples

where they're experiencing these people who are long since dead. So I see a lot of those, a wide variety of visionary experiences in the Bible, and I personally don't see any contradiction. Now, one thing you have to do is you have to look for the core experience. And I keep coming back to this, because if you go on YouTube and just look for near-death experiences, what you're going to find is whatever YouTube's algorithm is sending your way. which is probably some of the most interesting experiences,

and probably over, they're going to give you more that are really anomalous experiences because some of those are the most interesting, I hate to say. So you're going to have probably more people with mental illness, more people who were on drugs and just didn't mention it. You're going to have all kind of, maybe it was really a hallucination and not a near-death experience. So what I did is I took Dr. Long's website where he's got over 5,000 near-death experiences.

I'm sure you're familiar with the N-D-D-E-R-F. So people just submit their experiences. And he and his wife are over the website, and they really don't pick and choose which ones they'll put up. If somebody says they've got a near-death experience, they put it up. A lot of them are obviously not near-death experiences because somebody, will say, well, I was just walking along and I had this vision or I was, you know, doing this heavy meditation thing and took a drug and whatever. And you're saying, okay, that's not, but I'm glad he put it up.

He's not going to let his worldview influence what goes up. So I looked at consecutive experiences submitted to his site. I looked at about 140 experiences and just said, okay, what is the core? What's going on here? Now, if you go onto his site and search for something like aliens, you're going to find people who saw aliens. If you search for Krishna or something, somebody's seeing Krishna. But what we're looking for is a core experience to see what's there.

And to me, when I look to the core experience, I was saying, okay, is it really teaching against Christian theology? Is it saying that Jesus is not important or Jesus is not the way? is it but there are actually maybe 20% of the people said that that 17 to 20% of them said that they talked to Jesus on the other side and um and they weren't saying I saw a being of light and I'm pretty sure that was Jesus because of my religious experience so I think Jesus is significant you know if you're searching for truth a part of your search ought to be to search out Jesus because he he's pretty prominent in these experiences in fact things

like, if you look at other parts of the core experience, like tunnels, for example, I forgot what the percentage is, but it's probably less than Jesus, yet we consider tunnels a part of the core experience. I just think sometimes we as academics, we want to stay broad, we

don't want to talk about specifics in religion, we just want to kind of give the evidence and explain away anything that might be specific to a religion. Well, I think after you come to believe in the afterlife, you come to believe there's more to this life. There's some kind of a God out there. Well, I want to know as much as I can, and I'm still seeking.

And I'm not saying all religions are false, you know, except for Christianity. I think that there are, I teach world religions. I think there are a lot of good things in many religions. But I think it is my responsibility to come as close to the truth as I can and to seek that. And in near-death experiences, I think sometimes we're afraid to go. there and look at things which may be more compatible with one experience than another. For example, in Islam, there's a lot of strong teaching in Islam that says that death will be painful, as emotionally painful when you're experiencing death, even for good people.

And yet, and especially for non-believers, those who don't believe in Muhammad, it ought to be a horrible thing. Well, to me, that's contradicted by so many people of various religions saying they have a good deathbed experience. Some of them are not having it. Now, does that mean all Islam's wrong? No, maybe just that version, I'm just saying that there is evidence that maybe certain versions of Islam would contradict the near-death experience. If you have a more liberal view of the Quran and the Hadiths, if you have a more spiritualist version of Islam, maybe that fits better. I don't think near-death experiences fit with all versions of Christianity. Some Christians believe that the New Testament teaches that actually when we die,

we experience soul sleep to where we're not conscious until the final resurrection. Well, I'd say, I don't think that near-death experiences fit with that version. of interpreting the New Testament. I think it fits better with the version that says that when we die, like Jesus said to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise. He wasn't talking about physically. He wasn't talking about the end of the time.

I think he was talking about today at the time he was talking. So I think it fits better with that idea of Christianity than others. Yeah. I'm often reminded of this idea of the Tower of Babel. you know, the language we use is so slippery, you know, and it's sometimes a symbol seems to be like, I often think of the yin yang symbol and how there's so much that light spark in the, in the dark paisley of chaos, and the white spot in the dark of the other and the motion it has. Sometimes these ideas of symbols can convey so much more meaning than a word, which is also a symbol.

And like you said, maybe in some of these near-death experiences, like we can't, we don't know. We're not quite capable of thoroughly understanding how to interpret what's happening. So when we come back from these, we do our best to explain through some symbology and literature and our very core being and knowing, like what's on the other side. And maybe that's one of the beautiful things about it is that it inspires people to try and convey a message that's almost ineffable to people. Like there's a lot of inspiration when that happens, be it through painting, through talk, the divine, the divine spark, you know, there's a lot there to think about it. What do you think? Yeah, I think that we tend to put God in a very literal box.

Yeah, yes. When if you look at, for example, the New Testament teaching on heaven or visions or whatever it is, there's just a wide variety of things. And sometimes there are hellish experiences as well. This gets controversial, but there's, I think, that some good scholars in recent years of studied and found that some near-death experiences are not all that happy and good. And you look at the New Testament and they'll say, well, it's not what you see in the New Testament. But actually in the New Testament, it talks about things like a bottomless pit, talks about a lake of fire.

It talks about, you know, a fire. Well, how does a fire go together with water unless there's oil on top of it or, you know, it kind of gets a little complicated there. and if it's a pit, how is it a, and you begin to realize, I think they're giving analogies to saying that, you know, some people, when Hitler dies,

I don't think he's just going to be welcomed into a glorious heaven. You know, when he died, I think that he had done some horrible things, and there'll be some kind of, uh, something that's going to have to be paid on the other side. And I think hellish or distressing,

near-death experiences are consistent with that as well as deathbed experiences. But I think, as you say, we need, in fact, I have a lot of people read my manuscripts before I do my final editing. And one guy said, hey, this ineffability that people talk about in near-death experiences when they say, okay, they don't say, oh, it was a tunnel, just like a tunnel that I went in the other day. No, no, no. They say it was like a tunnel, or it was sort of like a tunnel, I guess.

And he pointed me out to Ezekiel, where in the book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament, he was using some of the same things. He was seeing a vision and he would say, it was like this kind of animal, or it was like this. He didn't say it was this in Revelation. It was like this. It's perfectly understandable to me that if you're in a non-corporeal existence on the other side, that some things you just can't come over here and use human language to explain. I mean, I'm going to expect that some of it is simply inexplicable. And you often hear, in fact, that was one of Moody's things back in 1975 when he published

life after life. Ineffability was one a part of the core experience. He said they're struggling with words to convey what happened on the other side. They said, it amazes to me how many people will say, I wasn't talking like I'm talking to you now. we were talking mind to mind. And I just knew the thoughts of this relative that I was talking to, or that time seemed to disappear. Again, these are things that secularists who say,

oh, it's just people's expectations they're working out in these hallucinations. No, it's very, you know, Christians aren't expecting to go to a place on the other side where they're speaking mind to mind and time disappears that some, somehow they can see things far off just as well as they can see them up close. A lot of this is not expected by hardly anybody, except people now that have studied near-death experiences, but go back to Moody and Seybom and Van Lael, most of their people, they didn't know anything about these experiences, and yet this is what they were saying happened. Ineffability, I think that's a big part of it.

And I think we ought to be willing to talk about things in that way and realize our limitations. In fact, this is just a big problem. everywhere. Science. Okay, I got into this. Maybe interest to you. I was doing my dissertation, and the person who was over my dissertation that I would talk to week after week, he was a biologist at his background. He said, okay, I want to make sure I understand how the evidence you're using is truly scientific. Make that clear to me. I said, fine. I thought that's no problem. I went to school. I know the five steps of the scientific method that we all memorized back then at some stage.

And so I went into our library, Kennesaw State. There's about 40,000 students there at a large university, nice library. So I started looking in dictionaries at what is science and what is the scientific method. I looked in regular dictionaries. I looked at regular encyclopedias like Britannica. I looked at scientific specialist encyclopedias, scientific dictionaries. And you know what? The definitions all contradicted each other.

and the scientific method was never consistent. I thought, now that's pretty strange because scientists keep telling me what science is as if they know. Why is this happening? So I took another step. I went into the bookstore, and they allowed me to go look at the scientific text,

the most recent texts of biology, chemistry, all these. Now, I hope they're telling the right thing where they're telling about chemistry and, physics, but apparently with philosophy of science, this is not their thing because they'll give definitions that contradict each other. And there are a few that would actually be honest and say, you know what, there really isn't a consistent definition of science and the methods actually differ from specialty to specialty. This is extremely important to clear up because most people think they know these definitions were actually one Harvard president said, you know, there really is no

scientific method, no evidence for that because he was a historian of science and knew it. So, but I think we can draw from different specialties like astrophysicists who are using multiple lines of evidence to decide that there's a beginning to the universe, or we look at legal science and see how do they deal with eyewitnesses? How do they use corroborative evidence from different fields? I think we can use those. But what I'm saying is very, we're not very good with their definitions. So we need to keep asking, what do you mean by that when you say this? And that's what you asked me at the very start. I appreciate that. We're on track. We are. Yeah, it seems to me so much conflicted debates could be ended with the beginning sentence of.

Our best guess is. Yes. Yes, I had a philosophy teacher at a college who said, he was a Christian. This was a Christian school. So I told you, I went to several different types of schools. But he said, the longer I go in my life, the more comfortable I am with that little phrase, I don't know. Yeah.

And I've always remembered that. And I think so many times when we get into interviews like this, it's easy to overstate things. Sure. And I just want to be willing to say, you know, I don't know. Or I've got some pretty good evidence on that, but I'd like to see more study done. Yeah. I think a much more humble approach would help us all at getting closer to the truth. Yeah.

Well, I think that I think that you have written several incredible. engaging, fun, interesting, mysterious, and engaging books. And I want everyone to go down to the show notes and check them out. And while we're just coming up over an hour, I hope that you'll come back. Because I think we just barely scratched the surface of some of these things. I think we can get real deep. Maybe we could do it with series or bring in some other people. I would love to do something like that.

It's such a fun topic. And it's something that all of us have either been touched by or are going to be touched by. And I think it's something that we should try and dispel the taboos from and try to get our arms around on some level and embrace because it's it's beautiful, I think, in a lot of ways. And so, but before I let you go, Steve, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Oh, man, I'm just, I just can't get enough of this. I don't know how much time I've spent studying it. What you'll find in my books is I document them relentlessly so that you can check out my statements as to, you can go back and see if you come. up with the same conclusions as well. I document them just relentlessly. So my first book was called near-death experiences as evidence for God in heaven, God in heaven. It's just, it's about 200 pages.

Very well documented, though, but I'm just saying, okay, let's put in plain language. What's the research telling us on near-death experiences? There's been tons of research done over the years. Then my second book, starting to be based on my, on my dissertation, was deathbed experiences as evidence for the afterlife. And that's where I get into these studies. It's not being talked about as much, although in a hospice in New York, some doctors decided to ask hospice patients in their in hospice facility, ask them every day what they had experienced. And they found over 80% of the hospital. And they found over 80% of these patients that were dying were having deathbed visions, you know, seeing angels and deceased relatives, being studied again. But I go into that in that book on deathbed experiences.

Then my more recent one, I'm tackling the thing, theoretically, is Christianity consistent with these experiences? You may agree, you may disagree, but I had to keep doing my own studies to try to find out where is it on the theology level and and where is it consistent with certain views of Christianity inconsistent with other views of Christianity and then I I deal a little bit with Islam and and Buddhism and Hinduism although I'm not experts in those fields I know how to get at some of the research so that hopefully it's getting us started in that so then I'll have another book come out on where I'm going to look at atheists and naturalists their arguments against the afterlife

and deal more with is this really scientific what I'm doing and try to get more justifying our methodology and just some leftover things I think need to be dealt with. So by the end of it, I will have had probably well over a thousand pages of stuff on this. And probably more because this is fascinating. This is about helping me with what life is all about, about what priorities ought to have. Hey, do I spend time with my wife or do I just go out,

flitting around trying to be a successful author. I think loving my wife is like, she's my closest neighbor. This is my number one thing. Loving my children. That stuff that nobody sees, taking care of relatives, which nobody sees when they're dying.

I've spent years doing that. Now I'm looking back saying, these are the things that count. Wow. I mean, this just has relevance to all of us. And what I find out is that I'm a happier person. when I believe that love counts.

And that's a part of my bottom line at this point. But thanks for asking about the books, yes. And by the way, I'm not doing this for the money. I would have done a lot better with all the time I put into it if I'd worked at Taco Bell for all those hours. I'm not a high-profile author. But if you don't have the money, my Gmail is J. Steve Miller at gmail.

And I'll send you a free PDF if that's all you can afford. I'm not out for the money. This is something that bears strongly on all of our lives. And I want to get other people into the research looking at it as well. Yeah, I love it. I love it. You know what? I wish sometimes I think one of the messages, one of the takeaways from this is that when we look to people who have lived a full life and maybe had a near-death experience or even the words you just spoke of it, if you can begin to.

understand how people feel at the end of their life, then you can learn from them and you can start living your life. Their near-death experiences can cause you to start living more of your life now. That's one of the biggest takes away possible. Like, why are you doing the things you're doing? Here's someone that made it that far and they wish they wouldn't have. And you care, you love this person. Maybe to help fulfill that, you should stop doing these things that are like chasing your tail and not getting you anywhere. Like love your daughter, your wife, your family, spend more time begin a new journey start a new life start a new profession find something you love and do it yes and nobody nobody goes to be buried with a uhollet behind them full of their stuff that they spent their entire life

accumulating and their precious things and it's just that stuff just doesn't count unless you use it for other people right? I think that's what's giving things meaning. It's life-changing stuff and we all need it. And how do you get the motivation to do things like forgive and move past people who've done things to you? Unless you say, you know, these things count in the long run, even loving your enemies, even loving those who have despitefully used you,

those are things that just don't come naturally, but those are the things that I work on because I think it counts. and I might can change somebody's life just by loving them, even if they hated me or despised me. Those are all things that count. So this is at the root of while we're all here. I think it has a lot to do with our own happiness and fulfillment of life. And it's just extremely interesting. So I encourage you to get, if you don't read my books, read somebody's and start getting into the data and seeing what it means to you.

And especially start talking to your families about them. I mean, if 4% of the population, like Germany, United States, I think it was 6% of the population in Australia, if they're claiming to have experienced near-death experiences, that's millions of people, you know. That's like one out of 20, you got a group of 25 people that are around your table for Thanksgiving. One of them has probably had a near-death experience. And then you add the deathbed experiences that they may have seen. and then you add other visionary experiences that don't even come under those categories. When I add those together, I'm wondering if almost everyone is going to have some type of visionary experience that they think is real by the time they die. This is important stuff, but we just didn't talk about it for 100 years because we're all, I mean, even the religious realm.

I didn't hear sermons on this because I think we were so influenced by naturalism. It just made cowards of all of us. We thought we were the only one having these experiences. Yeah, it's so alienating, and it doesn't have to be. It should be the thing that brings us together. You know, our dreams, our visions, like it, it's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. And it's so much more meaningful and exciting than who Taylor Swift's dating.

I mean, I know that's important, and I know they're important people, but people spend their lives following. Yeah. It looks like, yeah. Really? Is it that important? Let's talk about some things that matter. Right. I love it. Well, let's come back in you and I and more people will talk about things that matter.

And so go down on the show notes, ladies and gentlemen. Reach out to Dr. Steve Miller. If you can't afford the book, he'll send you a PDF copy. Where else you're going to find that? Are you kidding me? What a beautiful thing. Ladies and gentlemen, well, hang on briefly because I'm going to speak to you afterwards for a moment. But I want to say thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to us today.

Hope you have a beautiful day out there. Ladies and gentlemen, aloha.