Guest host Connie Willis (info) welcomed researcher Jeffrey Long who discussed near-death experiences (NDEs) and related studies, and how they provide strong evidence for the reality of an afterlife. If NDEs are real, this changes the view of the universe, Long suggested. When someone has an NDE, it involves "an imminent life-threatening event and... an experience at that time when they're so physically uncompromised, they are conscious or clinically dead, and shouldn't have any remembrance at all, and yet they do," he explained. Millions of people across the planet have had NDEs, Long estimated.
An NDE can be as brief as a few seconds, such as with a person who has a car accident, goes momentarily unconscious, leaves their body, has consciousness above their body, and sees the wreckage and people working to resuscitate them, he continued. If the NDE goes longer and the experiencer goes into the afterlife, they often report an engrossing sense of love and peace. "In the afterlife that they describe in near-death experiences, essentially always, those having the experiences say time is either radically different from earthly time or time simply doesn't exist on the other side," Long added.
NDEs often end spontaneously with the experiencer's automatic return to their physical body. "For people that have near-death experiences that make a decision [to return], the great majority of time they don't want to leave... that heavenly realm," he revealed. According to Long, in addition to loved ones, pets are present in the afterlife in many near-death experiences, and he believes that means "that which we love we'll ultimately be reunited with."
As proof of the reality of the experience, some NDE studies have placed a randomly generated target image on a laptop screen in a location in an operating room that can only be viewed from above. There have been five or six of these studies done, and the goal is to prove the out-of-body part of the near-death experience, Long noted. Some near-death experiencers return with information they could not have known prior to the NDE. As an example, Long pointed to accounts of experiencers who encountered people in the afterlife they did not know were dead.
Sometimes amazing psychic changes can occur in an individual after an experience. "We had a very prominent near-death experiencer come back and was an accomplished piano player and no interest in that before," Long reported. For him, the preponderance of evidence that NDEs are real ultimately shows the afterlife is real as well. "This is absolutely amazing, strong, powerful evidence that we don't really die, that there's life after death, that there's a wonderful afterlife for all of us," Long said.
The final hour of the program featured Open Lines.