Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me, what your life was like before you died.

Dr. Janice Holden 0:08
Growing up, I was always interested in phenomena that were difficult to explain, and I grew up in the more liberal branch of the Lutheran Church. So I was raised in religion, and then in 1978 I read Moody's book, and it really captured my imagination, especially the phenomenon of veridical perception, where, when people are in this near-death experience, and they're, they've experienced their consciousness functioning apart from their body, and they perceive things in the material world or the transmaterial world that involve information that they couldn't have known from any normal means, but then is confirmed as accurate, and then in the mid 1980s I was finishing my doctoral degree in counselor education and had to do a dissertation, I ended up doing it on something related to near death experiences. Dr. Mary Neal, I love when she says, "You know, I'm not an imaginative person, so I could not have made this up. And because she's a physician, you know, physicians are among the most trusted profession, and so to hear a physician talk about the kinds of things she experienced and learning that her son Willie was going to die before his 18th birthday, and when he was only, I think, five at the time of her NDE, a lot of aspects that she experienced just very convincing, and also that her NDE occurred when her body was underwater, and they now have figured out that she was underwater for just a little over 30 minutes, so she was dead, dead. Then to have this vivid experience that had these vertical components, like Willie's passing, and so forth. What I found is the same is true of near-death experiences. There are certain features that are broad, general features that you find across cultures and throughout history, but they manifest in a way that is reflective of the culture of the experiencer, and then beyond the cultural level, there's another one more surface structure level, which is personal, and so even within the same culture, so the example I use is one of these universal features, is there's movement through space, and in the West it's very common for people at some point in their NDE to talk about moving rapidly through a tunnel or some kind of enclosure, something like that, so, and that tends to be it's not only in the West, but it's much more commonly reported in Western NDEs, so that's a cultural manifestation of movement. Now, just to take a minute to, in there's an example from a Maori woman, indigenous New Zealander, and in her NDE, she flew rapidly over Aotearoa, which is the name, the indigenous name for New Zealand, to the leaping off place of souls. So she flew over, and she talks about seeing all the rivers and things that she saw. So she didn't go through a tunnel, but she moved rapidly through space, so back to the Western NDS, moving through a tunnel is seems to be a predominantly Western cultural expression of that universal theme of rapid movement through space, but if you hear three different people talk about the tunnel, you will not hear the same thing, and so there's a little boy who is five years old, and he said, then I went really fast through a big noodle that was his reference point. A trucker said, then I went, then I zoomed through a giant tailpipe, and then another person who said, you know, I went through this thing that had light, and or it was dark, and there was light at the end, and everybody describes the tunnel differently. About half of people are given a choice to come back, and when they decide to come back, it's virtually always because of a love connection on earth that they still need to do something for that person or fulfill something, and then the other half of people either are forced to come back against their will. People become less materialistic, more concerned about others, and lose their fear of death because they now know that their consciousness is going to continue after their body's demise and another kind of psychological changes, and then the first S stands for spiritual. People become more spiritual, usually less religious, but as we just said, not always, and become often like people will say, I just, you know, read one and one thing after another, I just.

Dr. Janice Holden 4:59
Had this hunger to immerse myself in spiritual books and movies and things like that, and and also people develop what in some religious contexts are called spiritual gifts, so they develop the ability to see the future and also things that are questionable in some, in some religions, like the ability to communicate with deceased entities, you know, people like a medium, or, or after death communication, which is after death is the direct communication with the person who is for personal reasons, so that's back at the spiritual, where people develop like precognition, telepathy, a lot of ND years, after I don't know if I should say a lot, but certainly a good number after their NDE, there it's like their boundaries between themself and others and the world are have kind of weakened and thinning of the veil and a lot of indie ears can't go to parties because just being in a room with everybody with all their stuff that they get affected by and sometimes have to spend some time withdrawing socially in order to build up their, their boundaries, their psychic boundaries again, and be able to manage social interaction, so it can be, you know, a lot of us think, oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to see the future, or know what people are thinking, oh, it's, you know, we're given these boundaries, I think, for reasons that enable us to function in this world. One of the things I like to clarify about vertical perception is that it can be perception of the material world, like the, you know, this surgeon, or it can be perception of the transmaterial world. People have met deceased loved ones who were not yet known in the physical world to have died. I'm going to be using the words pleasurable and distressing, because even distressing experiences usually eventually bring about positive after effects, and conversely, pleasurable experiences can be very disruptive to people's lives and be quote unquote negative, at least in the short term, so pleasurable experiences, as you said, dominated by feelings of peace, joy, love, and, and those sorts of things, distressing experiences dominated by feelings such as terror, horror, isolation, that sort of thing, and there's been research about distressing NDEs, so I can can speak to the results of the research, and we know that there are at least three types of distressing NDEs. The most common, most commonly reported isn't that bad in the sense that it has the same features as a pleasurable NDE, but for some reason the person is seems to be resisting and that's creating negativity, like they're moving rapidly through a tunnel, but they don't want to be moving rapidly through a tunnel, they're like digging in their heels, and it's making the experience unpleasant, resistance seems to be a factor in many, many of those cases, and we also know that in some cases the person decides to just like relax and let it happen, and when it does, then it turns completely pleasurable, so when they let go of the resistance, it's, it's good, so that's what's most commonly reported. Next, most common are experiences of being absolutely alone forever, so it's an experience of absolute eternal isolation, where there is complete clarity and consciousness of being absolutely alone forever, and it is a particular kind of hell, because there's, you know, there is nothing, and no hope of anything. The first distressing NDE I ever heard from, directly from a person, was of this type, and it was in a support, a nerd, an I support group, and in one of them, I'm out in space, you know, I'm not connected to my body anymore. I'm out in space, and there's a darkness over here. And I said to my therapist, Julie, I'm suspended outside of darkness. So I was just hanging there, and that was fine. But at some point I moved into the darkness. As I moved deeper and deeper, I said to Julie repeatedly, I'm losing my sense of myself. I'm losing, and then at one point I said, I'm not me anymore. Now that doesn't really make sense, except experientially it made perfect sense. I was not me anymore. I actually tried to remember how I got here.

Dr. Janice Holden 9:59
And I could not remember who I was, and I had no concept of Jan or that identity at all, and I, and I said to Julie, I'm one with the darkness that is nothing slash everything, I was in this darkness that was the pregnant void, the source of everything before it manifests into phenomena, and it was an experience of absolute peace, very crystal clear awareness. There was nobody, nobody, because every nothing had manifested yet, so, and I was still a center of consciousness, and also I have to say, and also immediately I have to say, and part of everything, so it's not like I was just this, just me, any, it was I wasn't me, I wasn't me anymore. So that for me was God, that's all that is. It's the everything before it manifests into anything, having a sense of what my purpose is here and fulfilling it, so you know, feeling a combination of being guided and making choices that seem to fulfill a higher purpose.