​Near death experiences demystified

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna So, I thank all of you for coming here today evening.
And as I mentioned, I’ll speak on the topic of near-death experiences. So, I have a powerpoint here, and somehow we couldn’t arrange for projector today. So, we have two laptops, one of his and one of mine.
And probably we will arrange to share the laptops. Maybe some of you can come a little closer. And one laptop will be displayed over there, if possible.
So that when I’m speaking will be also visible. So, near-death experiences. Firstly, these refer to extraordinary experiences.
Near-death experience has a literal meaning and it has a technical meaning. Literally, it means somebody who is near-death. So, anybody who has an accident, who has had a heart attack, they might have been near-death.
But in scientific literature, this word has come to have a specific meaning. It refers to people who, while they were near-death, had some extraordinary experiences. So, many of these people, when they are unconscious and medically they are near-death, at that time, they see themselves emerging from their body, floating out, and seeing themselves from an out-of-body perspective.
And then, so they see what has happened around them. Maybe see the doctor talking with the nurse about how to operate. Or, they may also similarly hear some relatives nearby talking with each other.
And then, they sometimes also go, see themselves floating out of their body, out of their room, out of the hospital, and they seem to enter into some other realm, some mystical realm, where they experience maybe some mystical experiences. They may encounter some long-dead relatives, or they may see some sacred figures from their tradition. And then, they feel profoundly peaceful and then they return back.
Now, quite often, when these people come back, they are often greeted with scepticism and rightly so. Now, it is possible that such experiences could be just hallucinations. So, in this talk, I’ll explain a little bit about the nature of these experiences.
So, I’ll explain what these experiences are, and whether they are credible experiences. And then, we’ll discuss how these experiences can be understood from the spiritual perspective that is given in the ancient yoga texts of India. But before we go into that, how are they relevant? First of all, for anybody who is interested in spirituality, the near-death experiences, if they are for real, they would suggest that there is some aspect of us that can separate from the body and that can continue to be conscious even when we are unconscious or we are biologically unconscious.
That would mean that that part of us which continues to exist separate from the body, that is the source of consciousness. So, spirituality nowadays, many people want to be spiritual in the sense that to be spiritual is often quite, in many circles, it is trendy. But spiritual is often equated as anything that makes us feel good.
If anything, if I can have a wholehearted laugh, and that makes me feel good. Oh, the laughter is so spiritual. We feel like that.
Or if we are just in the company of some person or we go to some place, we feel very peaceful over there. We think that is spiritual. So, now it can be spiritual, but it is not necessary that it is spiritual.
So, spiritual doesn’t just refer to the kind of feelings that we have. Yes, the feelings that we have are important, but spiritual also refers to an ontological reality. Something that really exists which is spiritual in the sense of it being non-material, different from matter.
So, spirituality is not just a matter of subjective experience. It is a matter of individual experience, but it is not just a matter of subjective experience. Spirituality is also rooted in an objective reality.
That is what the yoga texts tell us and that is what many spiritual traditions of the world tell us. So, whether this understanding of spirituality as rooted in some objective reality, in some side of us which is actually real, whether there is any basis for that, we will look at it first from the perspective of scientific experiments and then we will move forward and look at it from the perspective of the yoga texts. So, yeah, I hope you can see this.
it is not much in the slide. It is simply text so it will be more or less clear. So, the question, you can go to the first slide.
The question that the experiences raises, how can we be conscious when we are not conscious? That means that when the body is unconscious, how can we be conscious? Now, in the near death experiences, there are two broad aspects. You can go to third slide here. You will be operating it or who will be operating it? Third slide.
So, even if you are not able to see it, mostly I will be explaining it. So, it does not matter if you are not able to see it. So, basically, if some people claim that they had some other worldly perception.
Somebody says that, oh, I went there, I went to some other place, the shining realm and I saw my grandmother or I saw my deceased sister or whatever. Now, this may be true, this may not be true. There is just no way for us to verify this because that happens in an other worldly realm and focussing on that makes near death experiences a matter of subjective faith.
But what can be objectively evaluated is if those people report something that they observed say in the operating theatre or in the vicinity around it and then we can evaluate could they, was it what, three questions. Was what they reported actually true? Second, could they have known it by any normal means? And third, if they couldn’t have known it by any normal means, then how did they come to know about it? So, we can evaluate that this worldly observations during NDEs are too critical scrutiny and this can help us evaluate this more logically. Now, if we move on, what is the slide you are seeing there? Yeah, hallucinations.
Okay. So, some people may say this is just hallucinations. Oh, when you are unconscious or when you are near unconsciousness, then at that time we all tend to hallucinate.
And you might see something. Yes, it’s possible we may hallucinate, but usually hallucinations are very disorderly and they leave people feeling very disoriented. But usually near the experiences, as the subjects describe it, they are fairly orderly and they fill people with a profound sense of peace.
And quite often, these experiences are life-transforming for many people. Go ahead, next slide. Dr. Pim Van Lommel in an important scientific magazine called The Lancet, he did an exhaustive study of these researches and he concluded that, basically this is technical language, the purely physiological explanation for NDEs such as cerebral anoxia, which is absence of oxygen, for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should have reported one.
That means, if we say this is caused by some chemicals, then anybody who is subjected to those chemicals should have that experience. But everybody doesn’t get. Only a small percentage of the people get those experiences.
So chemicals alone cannot be the cause of these experiences. Yeah, go ahead. See, actually if you can operate the PowerPoint, I have hidden some slides over there because we won’t have time to go over everything.
You are operating the full PowerPoint? Yeah. So what do you see now? Prior general knowledge? Okay, just skip those three slides. So this is an elaborate more than one and a half hour show.
I’ll just make it short here. You can go to the slide of when the blind see. So I’ll come to a specific near-death experience later, but let’s look at generic features right now.
So, there is this book written by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper. It’s called Blind’s Mindsight NDEs of the Blind. Here, they have studied specifically the near-death experiences that people who were blind had.
So they gave the case of this Vicky Omipeg. She was born blind because during her pregnancy, when she was pregnant in her mother’s womb, there was an imbalance in the blood that was supplied and because of that, her optic nerve was permanently damaged. And there was no way she could see by normal visual pathways.
And throughout her life, she was blind. But twice in her life, about ten years in between, she had some life-threatening incidents during which she had near-death experiences. And it was only during these two times that she was able to see.
And she actually described seeing herself from above her body and she described how the doctor looked, she described how the hospital looked, and her descriptions were accurate. And there was no way she could have known this because she could normally not see anything. So, not just one, there are dozens of cases like this of blind people who were able to see and she saw only during her near-death experiences.
And never before, never after. So this raises the question that even if these people are guessing, even if these people are, even if somebody could have known something by prior knowledge, but still, if somebody is blind, how much can they guess? The capacity of blind people and what would, how much can they guess and how can they guess accurately something which they have never seen before. Now, one of the most persuasive of the cases, the next one, of the cases of near-death experiences was one that one lady named Pam Reynolds experienced.
Now, she had a cerebral, she had an aneurysm at the bottom of her brain. Basilar artery aneurysm. That means that right at the bottom of her brain cavity she had aneurysm.
And doctors told her that there is no hope. This cannot be treated. And this is a fatal condition.
But then she did some research and she found there was one doctor, Dr. Spencer, he had pioneered an operation called Operation Standstill by which such an artery, such an aneurysm could be operated and removed. And this, because this operation was called Standstill because doing this operation necessitated bringing everything in the body into a standstill. So, what did they do? First of all, they induced an artificial heart attack in the patient so that the heart will stop beating.
Then they would put the patient in a refrigerated condition completely. Then they would, so first of all, blood stops flowing through the brain. Then after that, the blood is drained out of the brain.
So, the heart has stopped beating. Now blood has stopped going to the brain. The blood is, so there is no inflow of the blood.
Then all the blood flowing whatever is there is pulled out. And then after this, that means there is no trace of any brain activity over there. And then the brain is lifted up.
So, this is indicated by the fact that the symptoms I mentioned, the body temperature has dropped to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And it is clear that there is no activity in the brain because the brain waves have flattened. And then the doctor opens up the brain cavity and then lifts the brain out, literally speaking.
Not cut it out, but lifts it out. And then get to the aneurysm at the bottom and then treat it. And now during this whole operation when the brain is literally pulled out, it’s vital that the person be completely unconscious.
And to ensure total unconsciousness, there is continuous testing that is done. And the way they do the testing is by having special ear pieces fit in the ears. And they hear, they emit 90 to 100 decibels clicks, at a rate of 11 to 13 clicks per second.
Now about 100 decibels means it’s like a tea kettle or a train whistle. Quite loud. And that also 11 to 13 per second.
Now, this frequency whistles coming continuously in the ear. So, if the patient is slightly conscious, then immediately they’ll jolt out because of that sound itself. Now, with all this medically being done, during this time, she had a near-death experience.
And after she came back to consciousness, Pam Reynolds reported that she had seen herself from above the operation table, above the body perspective. And the first thing that struck her was her hair had been cut in a very peculiar way. She said, who’s done this to my hair? And then she looked at, she looked and she saw that there were a number of doctors who were doing something near her groyne.
She said, hey, this is meant to be a surgery of the brain. What are they doing near the groyne? And she just was thinking about this, all this. And then she heard a female voice that they were doing something near her left thigh.
She said, the veins here are too small. She heard a female voice saying. And then a male voice replied, try the other thigh.
And then she also observed the equipment being moved to her other thigh. So basically, what was being done was, this female was a, she had not known there was a female going to be involved. The female was a cardiac surgeon.
And because they have to give artificial heart attack to stop the heart from beating, they have to have arrangements for bypass. That’s why they were operating through the groyne. And they were operating through the groyne to have some passage readily available.
And then she heard further conversations going on. And then she felt herself mystically moved out of the body. And she went elsewhere.
And a whole lot of things happened afterwards. But this is what is important for us. And then afterwards she came back to consciousness.
And then she reported this. Now, at this point, let’s see what Dr. Spetzler’s reaction was. So, now Dr. Spetzler said that at that stage in the operation, nobody can observe here in that stage.
And I find it inconceivable that your normal senses such as hearing, let alone the fact that she had clicking modules in each ear, that there was any way to hear through normal auditory pathways. I don’t have an explanation for it. I don’t know how it’s possible for it to happen considering the physiological state she was in.
At the same time, I have seen so many things that I can’t explain, that I don’t want to be so arrogant as to be able to say that there’s no way it can happen. So, physiologically, it’s just not possible. The brain waves are flat, the heart is not beating, there’s no blood in the brain.
So the brain is clearly not active. And most importantly, one more factor that all this is this Dr. Michael Sebomb was the researcher who, nearly the experienced researcher, who studied and compiled these cases. So he found out one more thing.
He said that even if she had been somehow partially conscious and she was hearing, still the clicking sound that was going on in the ear, that would have made it very difficult to hear. Say like, right now I’m speaking to you, and suddenly some car whistle is going on continuously. A 13 whistle per second.
Say a train whistle. It’s going on 13 whistles per second. It’s very difficult for you to hear anything.
It’s very difficult for me to hear what I’m speaking also. But, she was asked, did you have to strain through the whistles to hear this? Through the clicks to hear this? She said, I did not hear any clicks at all. I did not hear any clicks at all.
How were you hearing? She said that, actually I was seeing and hearing by non-physical means. That was her inference. So what this means is that, such experiments, what do they imply? Go to the next slide.
Dr. Sam Parnia is actually a London based researcher himself. And, he says that, what is clear is that something profound is happening. The mind, the thing that is you, your soul if you will, carries on after conventional science says, it should have drifted into nothingness.
So, conventional science means today’s mainstream materialist science. It holds that we, our sense of I-ness, our identity, it’s just a product of our brain, brain activity. So, if the brain becomes inactive, if the brain is completely inactive, then there should be no sense of I-ness.
And yet, the sense of I-ness is continuing. So, how is this to be explained? Now, there are many cases like this of near-death experiences which raise the question, how is this to be explained? Now, some people may say, actually these are fringe cases. Most of the time when people are unconscious, they are unconscious.
They don’t perceive anything. Yes, that is true. But, if we look at the history of science, science has always progressed by the evidence found at the fringes.
The mainstream evidence is always explainable by the current theories. But, it is the what is there at the fringes, when that is not explainable, to explain that, then science has to expand. So, for example, at the start of the 20th century, Lord Kelvin, he said that the biggest problem for future generation of physicists will be unemployment.
They’ll have nothing to do. Because he thought that, at that time, Newtonian physics had explained practically all of reality. And he said, future physicists will only have to fill in the details.
But, at that time, just a few things were not explained. So, the two phenomena at that time which were not explainable, one of them was blackbody radiation. Now, how to explain the phenomena associated with blackbody radiation? And another was, when cosmic objects, they seem to be moving in ways that were not easily explainable by Newtonian physics.
These two were just considered anomalous data on the fringes of science. But, in explaining these two, science experienced two huge leaps. To explain the blackbody radiation, science came up with quantum physics.
And to explain the motion of celestial bodies, it came up with relativity physics. And these two have completely revolutionised the progress of science. By most of the technological advancement that we have seen in the recent decades, none of these would have been possible if science had stuck to Newtonian physics.
So, the point is that the data on the fringe, it is when science investigates that. That is when science makes progress. So, these cases, even if they are a few, actually they are not a few, there are hundreds of cases like this.
In fact, there are journals published by near-experienced researchers and they are peer-reviewed journals which are very scientifically rigorous. And there are hundreds of researches like this and there are thousands of cases like this all over the world. So, how can these cases be explained? So, the ancient yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita offers us a model of the self that can help us make sense of this.
So, the self, it offers us three-level model of the self. The body, that we are not just the body, there is the body, there is the mind and there is the soul. So, if you compare to computer system, the body is like the hardware, the mind is like the software and the soul is like the user.
And, with this, sorry, you saw this, expanding the frontiers of science? Okay, that’s what I explained earlier. And then, go to the body-mind, next slide. Yeah, the text you have shown already? Go to the diagram now.
This is a little, it’s full screen, I hope it’s visible to you, what is happening over here. So, basically, this diagram describes how normal vision takes place. So, on the left, you see the outer world.
From the outer world, whatever visual data is there, that comes into the eyes. From the eyes, it goes through the optic nerve to the brain and from the brain, it goes to the mind. The mind is a part of the subtle body, just like the software is subtle.
I cannot physically touch the software. I can touch the hardware, I can touch the location where the software is present, but I can’t touch the software per se. It’s subtle, but it’s real.
So, like that, there is the mind which has its own subtle eye. And, it is the subtle eye which sees, and from there, it goes to the soul. If you want to come ahead, because there are going to be 2-3 diagrams here.
So, there is a subtle eye. From there, it goes to the soul, and the soul sees. Now, we can ourselves intuitively perceive the subtle eye, that suppose, sometimes, we are sitting somewhere, and we are looking at someone.
By that time, something flashes, we remember something. And, we start recollecting that thing, and then, it’s like, our mind’s eye is over there. And, even if that person shows us something, what did he show? Can you show me again? What happens? At that time, our eyes are open.
And, the data is falling on the eyes. But, if the mind is not there, the mind’s eye is not there, then we can’t perceive it. So, normal perception is not just a result of the visual data entering into the eye.
That’s the first step. From there, it has to go to the brain, and then, from the brain also, there has to be the attention of the mind that is there. Then, that’s when perception happens.
To give an example of that, going from the earlier software, hardware, user, suppose, there’s a computer, on which, say, cricket match is being displayed. And, a person, the cricket match is, say, going on somewhere else. And, from that country, the broadcast is coming on to the television.
Now, the cricket match is displayed, the TV screen is displaying something. But, along with that, the viewer has to have the eyes on the cricket screen, on the TV screen. If somebody else comes at the door, and the viewer looks over there, what happens? So, what happens is, basically, the eyes, the optic nerve in the brain, they basically provide the data on a structure.
But, it is we who see it. And, the seer is not just the brain. The seer is something different from the brain.
So, now, moving onwards, can you go to the next slide? Now, this explains how, from the Gita’s perspective, a person can see during the near-death experience. So, what has happened now? If you see the lower half of the diagram, there, what has happened is that the body is there on the ground. But, the soul and the mind have left the body.
Because, the body is not functioning. When the body is not functioning, at that time, what happens is, the person gets out of the body. The soul gets out of the body.
And, the soul gets out of the body. And then, the soul has its own capacity to see. The soul has its own capacity to see.
Because, there is the mind and it has the eyes. So, the body is broken down, the person is not able to see through the body. But, the soul and the mind have come out and they see directly.
To expand on the earlier example, which I gave about cricket match, suppose, say, somebody is watching a cricket match in a stadium. But, even from a stadium, we can’t see everything. So, in the stadium also, say, they have a phone.
Or, they have a small tablet where they see. Okay, the action replay. You want to see a close-up from various angles.
So, they are seeing from there at that time. But then, suppose their computer breaks down. They can just look directly with their eyes.
Okay, what is happening over here? So, like that, when the body and the brain shut down, the soul and the mind, they can still see directly. So, the soul and the mind, because they have the natural capacity to see, that’s how they are able to see. And, that’s how this perception happens during normal vision.
During near-death experience vision. And, this perception, what does it imply? It implies, essentially, that actually, we we means as the cells, as the source of consciousness, as the conscious beings, we are different from our body. The Bhagavad Gita explains that actually the body and the soul are as different as is our dress and we ourselves.
We have a particular, we wear a particular dress. But, say, the dress gets worn out. We discard that dress and we get a new dress.
But the soul has a particular dress right now, which is the body. And the soul can discard this dress and go to a new dress and acquire a new dress. That is, go to a new body.
That is called as transmigration. That’s what is called as reincarnation. So, reincarnation is, of course, an entirely different phenomena and there are near-death, there are past life memories, which many people have, which suggest that the soul moves from one body to another body.
That’s how that person in the next body is able to remember what they had gone through in their previous body. But at this stage, our focus is on near-death experiences, which suggest that there is a core to us, which is different from our body. And that core is the soul.
So, now, we may say that, okay, some people may have had these near-death experiences, but what does it imply for me? Actually, it implies that we all have the impetus and the opportunity to explore our spiritual side. And while some people may get those experiences of their spiritual side just occasionally through some near-death experiences, but there is a way, there is a process for gaining spiritual insight, for gaining spiritual realisation. And that process is the process of yoga.
So, yoga is not just about physical postures. They are one part of the process of yoga. But yoga essentially, Sanskrit word means to connect.
So, what is it to connect? Connect ourselves, that is we are spiritual consciousness, we are souls. So, connect our consciousness with the source of all consciousness. So, that connection is what yoga is meant to establish.
Just as in cricket, say if there is a batsman, different batsmen have different postures. Some batsmen may stand with their bat high up raised. Some batsmen may stand with, you know, they are bent forward.
Some batsmen may stand erect or some batsmen may stand with the bat right on the ground. Now, all these postures, they are not meant for style. The postures are meant for a purpose.
The purpose is that when the ball comes, we should be able to hit the ball as effectively as possible. Similarly, in yoga there are different postures. And the postures, at one level you can serve to improve our fitness, they can improve our shapeliness of the body.
But that’s only external. The purpose, just like the batting posture is meant to hit the ball high, the yoga postures are meant to help us hit or raise our consciousness up. The starting point for us to propel our consciousness upwards from the material level to the spiritual level.
And that same function of raising our consciousness upwards which is done with the yogic asanas, with the bodily postures as a starting point, that is also achieved through mantra meditation. When we chant mantras, mantras can be chanted individually or collectively. Then that mantra acts like a elevator for our consciousness.
If somebody is on the ground floor and they want to go to the upper floor, one way is they climb up, the other is they just enter the elevator. They enter the elevator, the elevator will lift them up. So the yogasanas, they prepare us so that we can climb up the stairs.
But when we do mantras, mantra meditation, what it does is the mantra acts like an elevator. Mantra is not just any ordinary sound. Mantra is a special spiritual sound that correlates with higher spiritual reality.
So when we chant the mantra, essentially what happens is if we chant the mantra and if we hear the mantra attentively, like we enter into the mantra, we absorb ourselves in the mantra, then that is like we are entering into the elevator. And just as we enter into the elevator, we’ll rise upwards. So like that, the more we absorb ourselves in mantra, we’ll find ourselves, our consciousness rising upwards.
We’ll start experiencing peace. We’ll start experiencing joy. We’ll start experiencing a whole new set of emotions that we would normally not experience.
And that is a way in which all of us can experience higher spiritual reality. And near it experiences, they may be experienced by some, but everyone can, by the practise of mantra meditation, get experience of non-material, of our own non-material side. How there is a non-material side to us and how we can, by nourishing it, by realising ourselves through mantra meditation, we can experience higher peace and joy.
And that higher peace and joy can help us to more effectively cope with life’s ups and downs. Because often when we face problems in our life, we all face problems. When we have a materialistic conception of life, materialistic conception of ourselves, when one thing goes wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong.
And in that way, we get into worry. Now worry is the interest that we pay on loans we have not yet taken. Worry is the interest that we pay on loans we haven’t yet taken.
That means actually most of the things that we worry about, the problems, they are not really materialised now. I get a small ulcer on my hand, I think, what if this is cancerous? And what if it is terminal cancer? What if I have only one month to live? Oh no, I have only one month to live, what will I do now? Actually there is nothing more than ulcer right now. So what has happened is the mind has started showing us a horror movie in which we are the victims.
We are not the spectators. So all this happens when we, because at the material level, things can keep changing. And the change, what change will come, how it will come, that can create insecurity.
But when I understand that I am spiritual, that I am at my core indestructible, that gives us a sense of security from within. And then we can separate the real problem from the mind’s imagination. And then we can deal with the real problem more effectively.
Spirituality thus can help us to function in this world more effectively. And by practising spiritual processes, we can raise our consciousness to the spiritual level and ultimately attain the eternal reality which is where our eternal life is. So I’ll summarise and then we can have some questions.
I started by speaking about near-death experiences which involve some people reporting having seen some things when they are supposed to be unconscious biologically. So how can they be conscious when they are biologically unconscious? We discussed two aspects of NDEs. One is their encounter with some other beings in some other realm, which is not scientifically examinable.
But their report, observation of some things that happened here, that can be examined. Did those events really happen? Did they report them accurately? How could they have known these things? So I mentioned about whether near-death experiences can be hallucinations. But anybody, if people get hallucinations because of chemical atmosphere over there in the operating theatre, then everybody should get it.
But not everyone gets it. Only a few people get it. And further hallucinations are disorderly and disorienting, whereas near-death experiences are very orderly and peace-inducing and life-transforming.
And then I mentioned about the near-death experiences which are experienced by blind people. So even if somebody could have known about it or were conscious somehow, how could a person who is blind have never seen, how were they able to see? So Kenneth Ring’s book about Mindsight. And then I discussed a little bit about Pam Reynolds’ experience where it was clearly documented that she was unconscious.
The very operation required that she be unconscious. And yet she was conscious and reported not just seeing things but also hearing things. When she was, there were 11-13 clicks happening per second to the earpieces in her ears.
So the fact that she heard indicate that she was perceiving through some non-physical means. And I talked about Gita’s model of the self. Body, mind and soul.
What are they compared to? Does anyone remember? Hardware, software. Body is like the? Sorry, body is like the? Hardware. Yeah, thank you.
Mind is? Software. And who is the user? The soul. The real person, the self.
Thank you. Thank you. So I discussed about how the how this three level model of the self how does it explain the near-death experiences.
Conventional materialist science finds it difficult to explain because its idea is that the consciousness comes from the brain. If the brain is not functioning then there should be no consciousness. But Gita’s model explains that consciousness comes from the soul.
And the soul’s consciousness is routed through the mind to the eye. And that’s why even when a person is watching a cricket match on their tablet while in the stadium then the tablet stops working and they can directly see with their eyes. So like that when the body and the brain stop functioning, the soul and the mind can come out and they can see through the subtle mechanism that is there through the mind’s eye.
And what is this? All of these experiences may not be very commonplace. There are of course thousands of experiences but still not everybody who is unconscious gets near-death experience. They are on the fringes but it is when science investigates out of the fringes that it expands, that it develops.
That’s what happens with quantum physics and relativity. And similarly, the near-death experiences, they beckon us to expand our conception of the self. So the experience of our non-material side which some people get through near-death experiences, we all can get by the practise of mantra meditation.
So yoga is meant for not just postures for health or shapingness of the body. The postures are meant to launch our consciousness to the spiritual realm. And mantras act like an elevator for our consciousness.
By mantra meditation, we can all experience non-material peace and joy streaming into our heart. And that can vindicate for us the reality of our spiritual psyche. So thank you very much.
Are there any questions or comments? Yeah. When does the soul get connected with the body? Generally speaking, the soul gets connected at the moment of conception. So when the man and the woman unite, at that time, karmaṇā deva-netreṇa puṁsā reta-kaṇāśrayaḥ.
Yuga text describes that that actually by higher arrangement, the soul enters through the semen of the male into the womb of the female. And when they unite, that’s where, that’s the time from which the embodiment of the soul starts. So, the soul’s contact begins from the, not, you could say from the moment of conception, but, yeah, when the sperm and the egg unite, the zygote is formed.
From that point onwards, the soul’s embodiment begins. Yes, please. Yeah.
Yeah. Excuse me. Okay.
So, what is the difference between near-death experience, out-of-body experience and after-death experience? Near-death, as I explained, anybody who is near-death, we can say that they have a near-death experience. But people who are near-death are often unconscious and they don’t have any experience. But when people who are near-death, they have some experience in terms of they are conscious, they are aware of something, that is what is called as near-death experience, technically speaking.
When people who are near-death, instead of being unconscious, they remain conscious and experience something extraordinary. That is called as near-death experience. Now, within the near-death experience, there is a, so you could say near-death experience is like a big set.
Within that, another set is out-of-body experiences. So, some of the people who have near-death experiences, they perceive themselves from a perspective outside their body. And they look at themselves down and they see, oh, this person is there.
That’s me, but that’s not me because I am here. So, they see themselves from an out-of-body perspective. Now, the out-of-body experience is at one level a subset of near-death experiences.
But there are some mystics who may also have the capacity to project themselves out-of-the-body. So, out-of-body experiences can happen in some cases outside near-death experience context also. That means we could say that near-death experience is one set, one circle, and out-of-body experience is another circle when some are intersecting, some may be non-intersecting also.
Like two sets are there. Now, as far as the after-death experience is concerned, that is entirely different. In this case, in out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences, the soul’s connection with the body has not been terminated.
The soul may come out of the body temporarily, but the soul has not left the body irreversibly. And after-death experience means the soul leaves the body. And during that post-mortem journey of the soul, the soul experiences existence in a disembodied state during the transition from this body to the next body.
And so, after-death experience can refer either to the specific journey that the soul goes through after this body, or we could say in general, whatever the soul experiences after that, that all can be called as after-death experience. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, I know.
So when you talk about after-death experiences in terms of people who have been biologically, clinically declared to be dead, and yet they come back, and then they come back. So what exactly happens in these cases? If you actually look at death from a biological perspective, death is a complicated phenomenon in the sense that earlier scientists thought of death as an event. The person is alive now, now the person is dead.
And yes, there is an event like that in most cases. But now the mainstream medical opinion is that death is not just an event, it’s a process. Because in the past, a person would get a heart attack, and if there were no methods for defibrillator available for the heart to be activated again, so the heart stopping would equate with death.
But now even if the heart stops, actually, through some various means, through either mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, or through defibrillator electrical activation, by giving shocks. Most of us may have seen in movies when a person is unconscious, has got a heart attack, they put an electric device on their heart, and they try to electrically activate the heart, shock and activate the heart. So, whereas in the past, medically speaking, the heart stopping would have been considered death.
But now even if the heart stops, the person can be brought back to life. Because they say that, so then then now currently the opinion is that when the brain stops functioning, there is heart death, there is brain death. When the brain stops functioning completely, and the brain also has different parts, and especially the stem of the brain, the basal part of the brain, when that stops functioning, there is no sign of consciousness, there are no brain waves coming from that at all, that is what is considered to be death.
But then, in cases like Operation Sandstall, where the heart has stopped and the brain has also stopped, and still the person can be brought back, it’s a dangerous operation, but it has been done quite a few times. So then the question is, from a medical perspective, right now, how exactly or when exactly death happens, that is not so easy to describe. In most cases, they can say that this is the moment that now the patient is dead.
But it is not so easy to determine the event of death exactly. So let me complete what I am saying. So now from the spiritual perspective, essentially what happens is when the soul, the soul is the source of life, the body is insentient even now, when the soul leaves the body and does not return to the body, that is when death occurs.
The soul doesn’t just leave the body physically, but leaves the body emotionally. That means my connection with this is cut now. That is when death occurs.
In some cases, just as during the course of our life, different people go through different experiences. Some of us may have a lot of health issues. Some of us may have reasonably good health.
Some of us may find ourselves suddenly in the middle of some war zone. And some of us may live through their life mostly in some peaceful areas. Just as there is a variety in experiences that we go through during the course of our life.
And this variety, the Gita’s philosophy explains that this variety in experience happens because of our own past karma. The kind of actions that we have done, they determine the kind of situations we go through in life. So, just as there is a variety in the kind of situations that we go through during the course of life, similarly at the end of life, different people can go through different situations.
And some people may by their particular karmic destiny, they may go through after death experiences, where they seem to leave the body, but then they come back to the body. So, these actually, these sort of experiences, what we can understand from the spiritual perspective is firstly, they problematise the equation of life with functioning of the body and death with the dysfunctionality of the body. Even when the body has stopped functioning and biologically the person is dead, but still the person comes back to life.
So, to say that life is a functional body and death is a dysfunctional body, that equalisation which is done quite often, that is problematised by this. And from the spiritual perspective, we understand that the soul can go out of the body because the soul is separate from the body. So, it can go out of the body and the soul can return to the body backwards.
Yes? Yeah, please. Yes, that’s true. Can I mention one short story? Okay.
Briefly, yeah. It’s in Russia. Yeah.
… Yeah. … … … … … Shortly after this, yeah, that motor car accident happened two years ago … … … … Yeah. … … situation, he’s surrounded by terrible suffering, usually in death.
And the judge said to him, we’ve not made anything of your life. You’ve been criminal, violent, abusive. You’ve wasted your life.
There’s nothing good to be had in your life. But standing next to this person, who was called New York, was a very saintly, beautiful personality with an instrument at his shoulder. It sounds like something you might know.
And he said, wait. No, there’s something that he did which is very memorable. He waved at the high priest of New York and said, Shaitan, you’re going to die.
Well, actually, he said to the priest. He waved at him and said, oh, you’re going to die, high priest of New York. So the judge said to him, OK.
And he said, you’ve got two choices. You can stay here and suffer with me, or let me do my work. Not just a moment, but three.
The judge said, if you go back and make amends, he said, I’ll go back. I’ll go back. And he walked up to the high priest and said, look.
And he said, if you take time to recover from this, you can play by the rules. And now, the high priest came up to the high priest and said, OK. OK, wonderful.
So he had a conversation with the other high priest. And he said, he said to him, OK. And he had a really, really lovely conversation.
So sometimes some people may have an after-life experience when they may encounter Yamaraj. And they may come back after that. So how do we understand this? And there’s two things about this which I would like to say.
First is that, as I started by talking about empirically examinable experiences and those which are non-empirically examinable. So there are different, as I said, different aspects of near-death experiences which can be stressed at different levels. So one challenge, one of the strongest criticisms of near-death experiences that sceptics have is that different people perceive the post-death realm according to their religious beliefs.
So for example, Christians encounter Jesus. Hindus encounter Yamaraj. Muslims encounter something according to their religious beliefs.
So the idea is, the Buddhists, they experience Buddha. They see Buddha or something like that. So they say basically this proves that this is simply an imagination based on your own cultural conception of the after-life.
And the Vedic tradition, Yoga tradition has an answer to this. There are some Christian researchers who try to prove that only faithful Christians have good near-death experiences. And everybody has horrible near-death experiences.
That means they try to bring their religious bias into the study of near-death experiences. But they couldn’t really prove it like that. So because from their perspective, Jesus is the only way.
And they say if anybody else is not surrendering to Jesus, then they are going to go to hell. That’s the idea. So now from the Vedic perspective, we understand that there is one God and he sends different messengers.
So the post-death realm is also not uniform. In the post-death realm also there are multiple levels. And the spiritual icons or the religious guides whom we have chosen in our life, the connection is not just during this lifetime.
The connection goes on beyond this lifetime. And that’s why it’s entirely conceivable that Hindus or followers of the yogic path, they will encounter some figures according to their understandings. Because they are being guided that way.
So Christians may experience Jesus. The yogic path accepts that Jesus is also a son of God. He is also a powerful representative of God.
Buddha is also a manifestation of God. So the variety of experiences in the after-death realm, they can be explained from the Vedic perspective. But because this slightly complicates the issue, so what normally we talk about near-death experiences, this takes us in the subjective realm.
But in the objective realm if we stay, then we can actually point to it as hardcore evidence. So when it comes to individual experiences, individual experiences such as these, they are usually good for believers to reinforce their beliefs. But the objective evidences, they are what are helpful for non-believers to start questioning their disbelief.
And to take the journey towards spiritual exploration and then maybe some spiritual growth afterwards. So these experiences are also very powerful and for the individual particularly, they can be very transformational. Thank you for sharing that.
So there is a multiplicity of that. I think I was going to have a bad dream tonight. And I was deeply, deeply distracted last night.
And I went to sleep. And when I woke up, I don’t know how to explain it, but there was a feeling just of gold light spinning. And then everything you’ve said about today, and I really can’t explain it to anybody today, so it’s quite lovely to hear from you.
But it was this gold feeling just of light. And I felt outside of my body, and I was saying it with an intimate mouth, I felt this absolute, and then it’s light. And I became more and more like I wanted, it was like a capsule now, and I wanted to touch it.
And then something touched me and sent me back to sleep. And when I woke up, the things that were going on for me, everything was fine. I wouldn’t have any experience.
And yeah, that was the sentence that I spoke about just today. Thank you. I’m sorry if you didn’t want to hear that.
But, you know, you said about confirming something inside, about, you know, to me, that’s like to say, I learned something today. It’s like, if I’ve been using something else, my dad, and he gave me back a piece when I turned one. And if I’ve been using anything else, maybe that is what I was confirming.
Because it’s been, it was the bag of the future. And so it reinforced, you know, that connection. And I just wondered what that was, like, something about my soul that you could say to that.
Okay, yeah. So, yeah. Thank you for sharing that experience.
So if, you know, we had, you had some experience where you’re sleeping and then you saw a shining light and it made you feel very peaceful. See, basically, near your head, rolling around and round. Outside your head, yeah.
Basically, there is, there are specific experiences and there are generic principles. So, this year itself, I was in Singapore and I gave the same talk in Singapore University. And then after that, a Chinese professor, she came and she told me that around 20 years ago, she had an out-of-body experience where she saw herself going out of the body.
And then she saw herself like a small brown spark, a brown, a brown sort of globule. And she understood, this is me. And she saw coins floating through a river on a log.
And then she came out of that log. And the log, she came out of the river. And then she saw two young, two men, one young, one elderly looking sage, like a sage.
They are approaching her. And they are speaking something to her, but she just couldn’t understand what they were speaking. And as she was about to ask, what are you speaking? Suddenly, they all disappeared.
And then she came back to consciousness. She doesn’t remember anything after that. She says, well, last 18 years, we tried to understand what are the messages they were trying to give to her.
So I explained to her that there is, there are certain things which are, which happen to us in real life. And we try to make sense of them. There are certain things which may happen to some of us during unconsciousness, during sleep, which sometimes, through which sometimes some clear messages may come to us.
Okay, do this, don’t do this, or be like this, don’t be like this. But in some cases, no clear message may emerge. So when that happens, you know, if by whatever higher arrangement we got that experience, if the purpose of that experience was to convey a specific message, then that specific message would have been told to us.
The fact that no specific message was told over there, what we can see is we can go beyond the specifics to the generic features or generic principles. The generic principle is that we can be conscious and we can perceive even when the body is unconscious, even when the body is under surgery or the body is asleep. And that indicates that there is something more to me than my physical self.
And if you focus on that principle, that there’s something more to me than my physical self, and now what that specific physical self is, that I can use other sources of knowledge to explore that. So now, yes, it’s possible if somebody had been reading some other book, they may have seen the particular experience you had as confirming that book’s thesis. But rather than just seeing it that way, what we could see it is that this experience was not specific, it was generic.
Basically, it shows us that there’s something beyond the body. Our self is not just physical. Now what that non-physical side is, then we should use our rational intelligence to scrutinise the books of wisdom and see which model of the self offers us the most coherent explanation of the non-material side of our being.
So basically, there are many books of wisdom in the world’s traditions and they all, at the very least, the common denominator is that they talk about that our self is not physical. There’s something more to our self than our physical shell. So now what that non-material side of ours is, that is explained very coherently in the Bhagavad Gita.
The Bible also talks about the soul quite often. But the Bible doesn’t go into any details about the soul, for example. That’s the same with the Quran also.
It talks about the soul more as a metaphorical reference to our non-material essence. You have some non-material side and that’s what you refer to as the soul. But specific knowledge about the soul is not given.
So when such experiences come to us, we can look at, okay, there’s something more to life than what I’m experiencing in my day-to-day life. There’s something more to me than the body. And what that more is, let me try to find out and let me look at that book which explains the non-material side the best.
Thank you. Yeah, you had a question? Yes, please. Yeah, please.
Okay. What should we do if we have a near-death experience or any such mystical experience? Oh. So, essentially, the point is that we all are exploring spirituality and such experiences that come, we can see them as some kind of confirmations that I should continue to explore the spiritual path.
See, the paranormal experiences some of us may have, some of us may not have. But the important thing is that there is a normal or standard process by which you can raise our consciousness to the spiritual level. Say, somebody comes and tells us that, you know, that, oh, yesterday Krishna came in my dream and Krishna said this to me.
Now, is it possible? Now, who are we to say that Krishna cannot come in someone’s dream? Krishna is free. He can come in the dream. You know, Prabhupada was once asked, I was told this, one person came to Prabhupada, Krishna came in my dream yesterday.
So Prabhupada’s reply was, then serve him today. Then serve him today. What does that mean? That, you know, Krishna’s coming in our dream, that could be true, that could not be true.
Even if it is true, it’s a special mercy of Krishna. But the way we reciprocate with that special mercy is by following more forcefully, more diligently, the process that will raise our consciousness upwards by which we will eventually get more realisation of Krishna. So we can see if the experiences have come like this, we can see them as some special spurs for us to take up the ordinary process.
There is no need to, if somebody else has this experience, there is no need to deny that they had the experiences. But those who have the experiences, there is no need to overplay those experiences. Those experiences, we can see them as further spurs for us to follow the normal process by which our consciousness will get elevated.
And then, such experiences will, the realisation of the higher spiritual side will become more of an accessible and accessible reality for us. Okay? Thank you. Yes.
Okay. Yes, please. At the point of death, the golden thread goes with the soul.
Is there a point when the cord is still attached to the soul and then it can take, take back hold of it and give it a new life? Okay. So, at the time of death, the golden cord or golden thread goes with the soul. So, is this permanently attached or has it become detached at some time? The soul does not go alone.
The soul goes with what is called as the subtle body. So, basically the body, mind and self, soul that is there. The mind is, the mind is also what accompanies the soul from one life to another.
And that’s why we all have different natures. Even twins, they may be physically identical but they are not psychologically identical. And in fact, there are a particular kind of twins which are called as monozygotic twins.
Monozygotic means that in some cases there is one zygote which splits into two. And in that case, the twins are not just genetically similar, they are genetically identical. So, if our personality, if our behaviour, if we were simply products of our genes and two individuals have identical genes, then the two individuals should be entirely identical.
But even monozygotic twins are not identical. They have their individual personalities, they have individual psychologies, they are different persons. So, basically the soul goes, along with that the mind also goes.
And that mind which goes with the soul, that determines our psychological disposition in the next life. And that, when the soul actually is going through a transmigratory journey right now, when the soul becomes liberated, that means the soul is right now attached to matter, attached to material things for the sake of enjoying material things. So, it’s like, earlier I gave the example of a dress.
The body is like a dress for the soul. Another example that is often given is like a house. You know, if we are a tenant in a particular house, then when the period of tenancy expires, at that time we have to leave that house.
And then we go to the next house. The next house that we get, that will depend on two things. You know, what is our liking and what is our budget.
So, similarly, when the soul leaves one body and gets another body, the next body is determined by the karmic budget, the kind of karma that the soul has done, and the soul’s desire. They determine the next body. But just as a person who has got a temporary house, a rented house, they always want to have their own house, so that they don’t have to keep changing houses.
So, like that, the wise soul seeks not just a temporary body, but a permanent body. The permanent body is the spiritual body that the soul gets in the spiritual world. So, when the soul, as long as the soul desires to enjoy the temporary things of this world, the soul has to get a new temporary body.
But if the soul’s consciousness gets directed towards the eternal, soul gets connected with its source through love, then the soul gets transported to the spiritual realm. And when the soul gets transported to the spiritual realm, then at that time, the mind that is accompanying the soul, that mind no longer accompanies. Because the mind is required for interfacing with this world.
When the soul leaves the world of matter and goes to the world of spirit, then the soul doesn’t need the matter. So, at that time, the soul goes unaccompanied. Till that time, lifetime after lifetime, the soul will go with the mind.
Did I answer your question? Thank you. Yeah, you had something to say? Oh, no, I was just going to make a comment. Okay, sorry.
The incident that happened, you know how you mentioned that in most places, our cultural context determines which messenger of this world we meet in the afterlife. In that particular incident, we were not the Hindu or the Hare Krishna, but we met the Yamaraja, which is generally associated with the Vedic paradigm. That’s interesting.
We met the Yamaraja, even though we come from a Latin culture. Yeah, it’s a good experience. Good point.
Thank you. What you were explaining earlier on the twin, mythically, is very, very similar, but very different in lots of other cases as well. Okay, yeah.
I noticed that. Amazing. Amazing.
Thank you. Yes, please. Okay, yeah.
Yeah. So how is it that some children have recollections of their previous lives? Basically, the mind is the same from this body to another body. And our memories are partly stored in the brain, but they’re partly stored in the mind also.
So, especially the deep memories, the deep impressions are stored in the mind. Now, in some, in principle, the memories are stored in the mind, then it is possible for people to remember it, remember their previous lives. But usually the transition from one body to another body is so traumatic, so disorienting, that most of the memories get pushed back to the background so much that they’re not recollectable.
But in some cases, especially in cases where death is violent or unexpected in some way, then at that time, the soul, the event of death is not fully processed. And because of that not being fully processed, in some cases, those unprocessed memories filter up. So, the children, basically Dr. Ian Stevenson was a prominent researcher from the University of Virginia, and he did a lot of research.
He actually spent four decades travelling across all the inhabited continents, investigating thousands of cases. And he found four levels of indicators of this continuity of the person from one body to another. The first was, as you said, past life memories.
Children would remember, oh, you know, I was so and so, and I lived here, and this was my friend, and this was this was my brother, this was my wife or my husband or whatever. Like that. That is one level.
The second level is not just past life recollections, but there are also past life recognitions. The children were taken to that place. There was this case of Titu Sharma.
He was Suresh in his previous life, and he was shot dead outside his car, outside his house when he was returning home from a car in Kanpur. And then he was reborn as Titu in Lucknow. These are both cities in India.
And then he was taken there back. And he was a small child. He was just a barely four-year-old child.
You know, he would say that, I am married and I have a wife. My wife’s name is Uma. Now, his parents were shocked.
What is this child saying? He says, I own an electrical shop. Name is Verma Electrical Shop. And then I stay in that city of Kanpur, he said.
So then his relatives went and checked. They actually saw there was a Verma Electrical Studio, and they found it was run by a widow named Uma. So then they took this boy there.
And then as soon as they took their boy there, normally as a four-five-year-old boy, if you see some unfamiliar woman, there will be a little hesitation. She said, as soon as they saw the shop, hey Uma, why did you change the shop like this? That’s the first thing he said, you know, because there was something which was kept high up and she was a woman. She had changed the design in such a way that things would be more accessible to her.
So then he not only called her by name, but called her in a very familiar way, like a husband calling his wife. But then later on, when he met her, he identified several other family members also. So when his grandmother saw him, his mother, he went and just embraced her legs.
And she thought, she didn’t see who it is, she thought it’s her grandson. And she called her grandson, I’m not your grandson, I’m your son. So there are past life recognitions.
That’s the second level. Third level is past life behaviours. That means, okay, there are two aspects.
There are phobias and there are behaviours. So for example, if somebody has died by drowning in a severe hydrophobia. Or in some cases, there was a Muslim boy who was born as a Hindu.
And he was born in a vegetarian family. But when he went to his previous life Muslim parents, he told them. All these things happened, he identified them.
In this life his name was Om, in the previous life his name was Naseeb. So he went to Naseeb’s parents and then they saw him, they were amazed. They just couldn’t process it, what is happening.
Because according to their belief system, there is no such thing as reincarnation. But finally, when he identified him, he was about to go. He says, what is this? My mother would never let me go without offering tea and eggs.
Now he in his house would never eat eggs. But here he had that habit. So there are phobias which can go on from previous life.
At the third level. And the fourth level is actually birthmarks and birth defects. So for example, this Titu, Suresh Verma had come back from his shop at night, in the evening and he had been shot at point range.
So a bullet had entered from his right temple and gone out of his left temple. And Titu had birth marks at exactly the same location. Swelling on the left side, swelling on the right side and swelling on the left side.
And normally when a bullet enters, usually standard it is that the entry point of a bullet is smaller, the exit point is bigger. Because the bullet process causes more damage. So in this case also the swelling, the birth mark on the right side was smaller, the left side was bigger.
And because it had been a murder case, so they had done some post-mortem of Suresh Verma’s body also. So Ian Stevenson, what he did was, he divided the human body into a set of grids. Like we have XY coordinates.
So he divided it into 64 grids. And then he correlated. Now how precise is the location of the previous life’s fatal wound and the location of this birthmark? And he found there are precise correlations.
The same place in the grid where the previous life’s wound was there. The same place here there is a birthmark. And another thing he found is, by the current scientific understanding, birthmarks and birth defects can basically occur for two reasons.
One is there are some genetic factors. The parents have those birthmarks and that’s how the children get the birthmarks. Second is that during pregnancy, if the mother goes through some chemical imbalance, either she has some disease or she smokes or she drinks and she takes in some chemicals, which can harm the embryo.
Now in these cases, he monitored and he found that there are no genetic defects in almost 70-80% of the cases of birthmarks and birth defects. He found that there were no cases of the mother having taken any substance that caused the child any problem, nor were there any genetic factors. So biologically also the presence of birthmarks and birth defects are not explainable.
So these four things, past life recollections, past life recognitions, past life behaviours and past life correlations with birthmarks and birth defects. They are all very strongly strongly pointing towards the continuity of the person from one life to the next. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you. All the way from Mumbai, just to give us a joke.
And we hope that he comes back again sometime soon and tell us some more experiences. He’s written a lot of books. He’s written over 16-17 books.
So he’s a very good writer. He’s written a lot of books. You can get some.
If you want him to sign it, he’s been there for a while. A few days. Thank you.
Thank you very much. We will have our new paper now and we are very fortunate to have with us Shakti Gopal. Shakti Gopal.