Transcript
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Welcome once again to Round Trip Death, the podcast where we have discussions with people
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who have experienced death, seen the other side, and returned to talk about it.
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Today we're finishing up our discussion with Dr. Melvin Morse.
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If you haven't heard part one, it's episode number 235.
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If you're not familiar with Dr. Morse, let's just say that most people consider him the
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world's leading scientific authority on near-death experiences.
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In today's show, Dr. Morse really opens up about how he has been personally affected
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by the things he learned from his research.
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Let's pick up right where we left off.
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Here's Dr. Morse.
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I know people on your show are having, many of them, wonder, was that experience that
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I have real?
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And it's further complicated, particularly as you mentioned in adults, because many of
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the aspects of them are parts of their own personal lives that are woven into the experience.
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And so it's hard to sort out what is sort of an invention of their mind, but not an
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invention of their mind, just making something up, an invention of their mind, struggling
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to understand the incomprehensible.
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And it is hard for adults to sort all that out, but they have to start with the knowledge
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that what happened to them was real.
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And once they start with that bedrock certainty, then they can tease out the rest and go, oh
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yeah, you know, that part of it, that's from my own religious upbringing, and that part
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of it was my own preconception and what I expected the heaven to be like.
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Oh yes, and look, that part there, that was the real deal that came from heaven to me.
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But they're not going to be able to sort that out if they're constantly second guessing
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themselves.
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And that's a normal thing as adults, because especially if somebody tells you you're crazy
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for trying to explain it and we may believe them.
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And so then we have to say, OK, what really happened?
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Was I dreaming?
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Was it the pain meds?
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What was it?
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Right?
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Right.
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So let's.
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Yeah, let's validate what people really experienced.
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Yeah.
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What does it mean to be crazy?
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Crazy is simply the dysfunction of your brain.
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It's you know, it's when you're not oriented to person place, you're you're misperceiving
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things here, taking ordinary experiences and twisting them in some way because of your
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own personal fears or your own psychology or your own biochemistry.
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You know, I mean, psychiatric and mental health disorders are very complex, but they all involve
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dysfunction.
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The near death experience and spiritual experiences in general involve the proper function of
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easily a third of your brain.
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So by definition, you're not crazy for having them because at least a third of our brain
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is dedicated to having spiritual experiences.
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Now, I'm going to just brag about all the books I read, I guess.
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I wrote a book called Where God Lives.
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I wrote that in 2004 in which we said that we have an area in our brain in the right
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temporal lobe, which is right above your ear.
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We call it the God's spot.
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And that connects your brain to the universe.
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You know, we're talking earlier about the informational universe.
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All right.
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Since that time, no neuroscientist has challenged what we wrote.
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And I published it in the medical literature as well.
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The only scientists that have challenged it have said, wait a minute, Morris was all wrong.
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It's not a God's spot.
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It's a God brain.
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Mario Beauregard wrote a book called The Spiritual Brain in which he showed a third of the brain
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is dedicated to having spiritual experiences.
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And a guy named Nelson wrote an excellent book called The Spiritual Doorway to the Brain.
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Now, Nelson doesn't happen to believe in God.
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Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's an issue of faith.
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But his book clearly documents that we are hardwired to have spiritual experiences.
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So for some reason, some people say, oh, well, you're saying this is just in our brain as
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if that somehow discounts the experience.
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This experience you and I are having right now, Eric, it's just in our brain.
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I can even tell you the areas of your brain, which are dedicated to having this experience.
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It feels awfully real to me.
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Yeah, we have a huge visual cortex that allows us to see things.
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Nobody doubts those are real.
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We've got a big auditory cortex that allows us to hear things.
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We have a frontal lobe that allows us to process all sorts of higher mental processing.
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Nobody doubts that's real.
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And we've got a big area of our brain which allows us to communicate with God.
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Who's ever listening to this?
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Please just accept the word God the way kids use it.
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You know, when I understand that, unfortunately, God for many people has now gotten all twisted
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up with the dogma of various religions, etc.
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That's unfortunate.
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I'm not using that God in that sense.
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I'm not saying one person's God is the right God, another one's the wrong God.
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I'm just saying that just the way kids tell me that they saw God when they died, we have
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an area of our brain which allows us to perceive whatever this God is.
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And it is unfortunate that a lot of people seem to twist up something as simple and beautiful
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as God with a lot of their own preconceptions and dogmas.
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Okay.
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I did ask a question a while ago and that's okay.
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Before we get to that.
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I mean, when you ask me, is there a God?
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I'm not even a religious person.
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I was raised in an agnostic Jewish household.
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But when we die, we see God.
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So and that's a scientific fact.
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Okay.
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No, I don't know.
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I mean, but I understand that unfortunately, because I've had enough discussions with adults
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to know that once you start talking about God, they're all rolling around the floor,
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gouging each other's eyes out.
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And well, then my God says, isn't my God's that?
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And this, that and the other.
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Well, that doesn't seem to be the God we see when we die.
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The God we see when we die is a light that has a lot of love in it.
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It has a lot of good things in it.
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And it teaches us something.
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It's teaching us that we're here to learn lessons of love.
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And that's it in a nutshell.
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And that's the word I hear the most.
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Yeah, love, love, indescribable, pure love.
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So maybe we need to redefine God.
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God is love.
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You know, maybe near-death experiencers have something to teach us about what God is.
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Absolutely.
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How do we help those that have had near-death experiences?
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We've talked a little bit about how some of the things that we do kind of hurt them in
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a way and how we need to support them.
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But if you were, say, a parent of a child that had had one of these experiences, what
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can you do to help them?
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Listen.
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I think that listening non-judgmentally is crucial.
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I don't think there's, you know, it's as simple and as difficult as that.
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It's difficult.
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It's difficult to listen non-judgmentally.
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And it's difficult to listen without our own preconceptions.
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I'll tell you a funny story.
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One of my patients had a near-death experience and she was then left with the perception
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that her grandmother was always with her.
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Her grandmother had passed and her grandmother was helping her with her homework.
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Okay.
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Why not?
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Yeah.
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I mean, these experiences are very real and very pragmatic.
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Another experience, a young man told me that his father had passed, still took him fishing,
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you know, was sort of there spiritually with him when they went fishing.
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So finally she says to her grandmother's past, she says, so what is heaven like?
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And the grandmother tells her, you know, it's really pretty with flowers, you know, the
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kind of thing that you would tell a child that heaven is like.
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So she then told her mother this.
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Well, this conflicted with their church's belief of what heaven was like.
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This church was a fundamentalist Christian church and had a very different idea of heaven.
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And this led to then tremendous conflict because then the mother felt stuck in the middle.
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She's trying to tell her religious leader what her daughter's telling her about heaven.
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And now the daughter is feeling, you know, she's feeling like she's done something wrong.
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You know, she's gotten all the adults in her life upset.
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And you know, now the pastor is coming and listening to her.
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So what did you hear heaven was like?
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And, you know, all this kind of stuff.
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When I heard the whole story, it sounded to me like the grandmother was just telling her
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what anybody would tell a seven-year-old child heaven was like.
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It wasn't some sort of religious, you know, definitive view of what was heaven.
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It just was the sort of thing you might tell a child.
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And so it is harder to listen than you think.
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So what would you say to some sort of a religious leader like that pastor or whoever who a child
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or an adult comes to them and says, I had this kind of experience, but maybe it's not
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exactly in line with what you're teaching in your religion.
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What do you do?
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I'm not sure that it would be for me to speak to that religious leader.
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I just I don't because the things that I would say, remember, I'm a critical care physician.
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I mean, really, I'm not too much about process.
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I'm pretty much about the bottom line.
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But I do know to me, I can just speak for myself.
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We got to be humble, really.
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And, you know, this idea that we know God better than someone who's died and actually
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been in contact, you know, to me, they're the gold standard.
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I mean, even if you really read the religious tracts and the Bible and the various religious
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writings, they only say you've got to get the ego out of there to understand God.
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It is our own ego that keeps us from understanding God.
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Well, that's a great way to get rid of your ego is to have your brain die.
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You don't have much ego after that.
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And so I would think that that experience is the peer experience of whatever this God
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is.
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I think that's well said.
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And let's start with what you said prior to my question, which is just listen.
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Yeah, we don't have to take what they said and try to interpret it for them.
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Let's just listen.
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Absolutely.
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And leave it there.
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OK, getting back to something I asked seemed like ages ago now, 20 minutes or so ago, the
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transformation transformation.
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How do these how do these change people?
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Yeah, I'm sorry.
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I'm laughing.
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I'm laughing because that's OK.
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Let's have a good time here.
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This this journey has been so astonishing for me and nothing really.
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It's all been counterintuitive for me.
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So I we studied adults who had near death experiences as children.
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And we again, systematically studied them.
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We compared them to six control groups.
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We're compulsive.
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We control.
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We compared them to adults who just were very religious.
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We compared them to adults who had no religious beliefs.
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We compared them to adults who had serious life threatening events but didn't have a
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near death experience, you know, on and on like that.
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And we learned what the great secret of life is by doing this.
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And the secret of life is to be nice, to be kind.
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That's what we learned.
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And then just stop right there.
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That's enough.
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That's what we learned.
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People having near death experiences, they're more likely to be in helping professions in
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our control group.
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They on personality studies, they definitely are nicer.
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They have almost no fear of death.
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We gave them all sorts of, you know, death, you know, death, anxiety, questionnaires.
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A little girl said it to me best.
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She said, well, I'm not afraid of dying anymore because I think I know a little bit about
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it now.
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But they give more money to charity.
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We looked at their tax returns.
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But by and large, they're just nice people.
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They spend more time with their family.
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They spend more time alone and contemplation.
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And when we ask them, what did you learn from your experience?
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And I did these studies, by the way, I was a lot younger and more cynical and more closer
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to the sort of arrogant of the critical care doc.
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So I asked this one guy, I said to him, so, you know, what do you think your near death
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experience has meant to you?
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And he said, it told me that I have a very special job to do in this life.
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And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, great.
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You know, he's like, he's here to cure cancer.
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You know, he thinks he's like some special person or, you know, it's given him some sort
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of, I don't know, Messiah complex or something.
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So I said to him, OK, I'll bite.
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What's your special job?
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You know, what's your special purpose?
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And luckily, he didn't take offense at my tone.
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And he looks at me and he goes, I already told you what my job was.
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I run a small construction company.
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And he said, those num nuts that I work with, they could never get a job if it weren't for
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me.
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He hired all his high school friends and he had a small little remodeling company.
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And so that was the meaning of his near death experience.
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That's what he thought his life was all about, was to run a small remodeling construction
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company and hire all his high school friends.
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So what I learned from that is it's the small things in life.
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It's the ordinary, everyday aspects of life that are important.
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And when I talk with adults who have near death experiences, I'm sure you've heard the
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same thing.
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There's one woman I interviewed, she was the head of a large pharmaceutical company, and
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she'd done all sorts of wonderful things with her life.
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So she has her near death experience and her life review.
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And she learns that she was kind to a handicapped child when she was in summer camp.
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When she was in high school.
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That was like the highlight of her life.
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And I've listened up to that.
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I really have.
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I just, you know, that the meaning of our lives is to be kind to each other, to be loving
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to each other, that the ordinary things that we do in life are probably the most important
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things.
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And, you know, for an overachiever like myself, you know, proud, you know, my book's a best
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seller, and, you know, I graduated with honors and all that kind of stuff.
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This was really a big wake up call for me to learn that none of that stuff matters.
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Taking care of my mom in the last year of her life.
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That's probably one of the most important things I've ever done with my life.
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Have any of the children that you interviewed and that you studied, did any of them have
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life reviews like some adults do?
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No.
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And that doesn't really surprise me.
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The closest one child told me she had had a lot of surgery and had leukemia with numerous
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relapses.
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And she had this experience of just thinking, oh my God, you know, I went through all that
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and now I'm just going to die.
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I'm not sure that's the life review that adults have.
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But even though they don't have a life review, they have a clear sense that this life is
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about learning lessons of love and learning to love each other.
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And perhaps even more important, learning to accept the love that other people have
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for us.
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I mean, even the youngest children, you know, children in age three, age five, it's not
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really coming to me how they express it.
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But you just get that sense from them that they understand that this world is about love.
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All right, doctor, I'm going to get a little bit more personal with you if you don't mind.
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Yes.
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I can tell that this topic really, really means a lot to you deep down, deep down since
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getting involved with it.
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How has it changed you personally?
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Well, let me rather than me, I think there's two major ways it's changed me.
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One, it's made me pay a lot more attention to other people's feelings and frankly, unloving
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ways that I've been.
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My failures of love, my failures of being able to love other people.
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And you know, thinking that what was important in my life was writing a paper or, you know,
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being the smartest person on the faculty or the smartest person in the room.
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So that's for sure is that in learning to accept the love that people have for me, I
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think that that's probably where it starts with me is understanding that other people
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love me.
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And once I could understand that, it's a lot easier than for me to start to understand
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other people and how I've hurt them.
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And even to the point where I learned a meditative technique called Tanglin in which you actually
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meditate on the suffering that other people have because I've come to understand that
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this is what's important in life is being kind.
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And so it's changed going to the supermarket for me.
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It's changed.
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You know, well, actually, I was inspired by a child.
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She was a teenager and I asked her, I said, you know, what does it mean to you?
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And that's what she said to me.
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She said, I don't mind standing in line at the supermarket anymore because I know there's
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only something there that's important.
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Maybe somebody there needs a smile.
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Maybe somebody there, you know, maybe I can make a difference to someone I'm standing
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next to in line just by.
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So it's helped me a lot.
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The second thing that it's done is it's really helped me to forgive myself, to understand
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that when we die, we're going to get a big hug from God and we're going to get an attaboy
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and we're going to get a sense of you did your best.
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I mean, even Nazi prison guards that have had near-death experiences report that.
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And this is not just something for myself, but I work a lot with the ex-incarcerated,
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prisoners are struggling with their own spiritual issues and the knowledge that when we die,
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you're not punished for your sins, but your sins are put in perspective as that they're
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part of why we're here, that they had something important to teach us, that, you know, that
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whatever it was, that whatever we're struggling with was a lesson.
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Maybe we failed the lesson.
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Maybe, you know, maybe we totally screwed it up.
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And certainly I have.
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But on the other hand, seeing it in that context, I think it helps because once you get crippled
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by a sense of that you're worthless or shame or guilt, then that in itself prevents you
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from forgiving others and forgiving yourself and making restitution.
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Whereas when you know that what awaits us is a hug and you did your best, to me that
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makes all the difference in whatever it is that I'm struggling with.
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So those are the two ways it helps me.
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It's helped me to be kinder, to pay attention to how I affect others.
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And it's helped me to, that sounds like a weird thing, you know, to forgive yourself.
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But oddly enough, forgiving yourself is an important part of moving forward and making
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restitution and improving yourself.
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You know, I'll expand on that just a little bit.
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I'll share with you a story from a good friend of mine.
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He unfortunately got drunk one night and ran over an elderly woman and killed her.
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And after years struggling with this, served time in prison, of course, he got to the point
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where he forgave himself.
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So I said to him, well, so that's kind of easy, isn't it?
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So you just decide to forgive yourself for, you know, getting drunk and running somebody
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over.
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And I said, well, what would you tell?
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What would you tell that, you know, that that woman's son?
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Would you just say to him, oh, I just forgave myself?
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And he said, actually, I would do that.
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He said, you know, that I realized that what I did was part of my spiritual journey.
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And I would explain that to that woman's son.
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And I would tell him, you know, it's part of your spiritual journey to how you want
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to react to me, whether you can forgive me, whether you don't.
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You know, that's your spiritual journey.
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But he said, but don't think that this is something that's easy.
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He said, I wasn't able to forgive myself until I took the barrel of the gun out of my mouth,
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you know, meaning that he was going to kill himself and that, you know, but it's true
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that he couldn't then move forward.
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Once he forgave himself, then he could start doing the hard work of figuring out how he
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can be a better person.
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And I've had that experience as well.
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I didn't understand the near-death experience until I had my own problems with I was convicted
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of crime.
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I don't want to go into all the details of that.
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It's a bit of a complex case.
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But what I do want to say is that I never understood anything about near-death experiences
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until I had my experience of the life experience of really having to confront my own behavior
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and really have to look at what kind of person am I?
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Have I done the things and behaved in ways that I am proud of?
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Prior to that, the near-death experience was an intellectual exercise for me.
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It was something that I really did as a fellow.
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I wanted to publish papers.
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That's the academic, you know, I wanted to write books.
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You know, as I told you, I wasn't interested in making money off the books, but I certainly
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saw it as an ego exercise.
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And none of this stuff ever touched me personally when I had my own struggles.
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You know, that's when I really learned what the near-death experience is all about.
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This knowledge that we're here to learn lessons of love and to know that that is, in my opinion,
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a scientific fact in the year 2022.
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I don't see that as a philosophical statement.
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Well, then that then brings you directly to what lessons of love am I learning?
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And am I learning them appropriately?
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And what am I doing to, you know, or am I failing in my lessons of love?
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Thank you so much for opening up, being vulnerable.
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I appreciate it.
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What's next for you?
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I think at this point, I'm trying to understand how I can best share with people that science
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does in fact validate the near-death experience and spiritual experiences in general.
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And so people can see how this has applications for grieving, for grief of resolution.
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And then I have a particular interest in working with recidivism prevention, working with the
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ex-incarcerated and bringing heroin addiction.
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I think that there's a spiritual aspect to that that we can learn from, you know, apply
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the lessons of the near-death experience in a practical way to some of the problems that
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our society is facing.
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Okay.
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Dr. Morris, you killed it.
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That's a good thing.
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Thank you.
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I appreciate it so much.
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All righty.
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I mean, I'm going to ask you if you have any last thoughts.
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First tell me on a scale of one to ten, how much fear do you have of death?
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I don't have any fear of death.
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I have a tremendous fear of not being there for my wife has a number of serious medical
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problems and I want to be here for her.
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She might be facing a lung transplant and I want to be here for her.
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So I fear that part of it, but I don't fear death.
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There's nothing to fear about death.
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I don't want to die.
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But the process of dying is joyous and spiritual.
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And we had talked earlier about this issue of, well, that the messages of the near-death
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experience can be inspiring and that they say wonderful things, etc.
402
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I'm not sure that's true, Eric.
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The near-death experience to me says that we're here to learn lessons of love.
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And those lessons of love, by and large, are pretty painful at times and can involve a
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lot of suffering.
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And I don't think, you know, and then you have to learn, you have to live it.
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I don't, you know, it's not a Facebook, you know, bumper sticker slogan.
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You know, you have to actually make mistakes, fail at those lessons and understand what
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you did wrong and being willing to look at them.
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And I didn't understand until I actually had to face my own challenges.
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And every single person here that's listening to this, you know, you're, it's, there's
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a song that I often listen to that says, what if your blessings come with tears?
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What if, you know, what if it's raindrops?
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You know, we pray for blessings, but what if it's actually painful experiences of loss
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and suffering?
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It's hard to study near-death experiences without coming to that conclusion that there's
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a reason for the various things.
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Well, they say it.
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I understand why there's war.
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I understand why there are serial killers.
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I understand, you know, and the reason they're saying that is that even in those horrific
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types of experiences are lessons of love to be learned.
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So it's not for sissies, you know, learning your lessons of love.
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Jesus' life is not for sissies.
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And I do believe there's a message of hope in all that.
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Okay.
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Alrighty.
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Okay.
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I see as long as we define the message of hope that at the end of the day, we're going
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to get that hug from God.
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That's beyond dispute.
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We're going to get an atta boy or an atta girl or, you know, we're going to get that
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hug of unconditional love and unconditional love.
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Think what that means here.
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People don't think of that.
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I think enough.
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I hear people say all the time, but wait a minute.
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How can a murderer, you know, go to heaven?
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How can a murderer have, you know, this dying experience?
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Unconditional love, nonjudgmental.
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That means you're not being judged.
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The judgment comes because you judge yourself.
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And that's far more harsh and yet far more spiritually nurturing and leads to greater
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spiritual development than this, I think, distorted idea of a judgmental God.
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The nonjudgmental God, I think, is more terrifying in many ways.
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But I believe all loving still.
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Absolutely.
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Yes.
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Can you think of any one really beautiful thing that a child said to you as they were
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describing their experience or drawing their experience?
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Oh, my gosh, there's so many.
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Oh, you've got to have a couple of favorites.
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Well, my favorite is I'll tell you about both of my favorites, I guess.
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One young lady told me that she saw a light that told her who she was and where she was
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to go.
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And she drew a rainbow.
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But I just my favorite one is the young girl that said to me, I saw a light and it had
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a lot of good things in it.
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I just love that one.
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That's great.
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All right.
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Dr. Melvin Morse, thank you so very much again.
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You're so welcome.
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Thank you for an outstanding interview.
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I learned a lot from this.
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You got a lot out of me that doesn't usually I usually don't think about.
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So I appreciate it.
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00:36:24,600 --> 00:36:27,600
Thank you.
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If you have an opinion you would like to share about his research or if you've had a near
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death experience of your own, send an email to Eric at roundtripdeath.com.
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While you're at it, please share this podcast with a friend and head on over to roundtripdeath.com
472
00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:47,560
to sign up for email notifications when new shows are released.
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Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.
