Divine Encounters Episode 093 | Near-Death Experience Story
Dr. Jeffery Mishlove was a graduate student at Berkeley in 1972, running group therapy sessions in San Quentin prison, when a dream of his Great Uncle Harry changed the direction of his life. In this Divine Encounters episode he talks with Alex Ferrari about that dream, about research into children who remember past lives, and about what near-death accounts and a life review might say about consciousness. The conversation explores reincarnation, karma as habit rather than punishment, and the mystical idea that all is one.
Key Takeaways
- Dr. Mishlove says a vivid dream of his Great Uncle Harry in 1972 came at nearly the same moment Harry died, and pushed him from criminology toward parapsychology.
- He says he felt electricity run up his spine at about age nine when a classmate described a book about reincarnation.
- He describes a University of Virginia database of over 2,500 cases of young children recalling past lives, about 1,700 of which researchers consider solved.
- He says near-death accounts suggest an afterlife, but that reincarnation is only one of many options the soul may have.
- He says the research does not support reward and punishment karma; what carries forward, he says, are habits, phobias and sometimes birthmarks.
- He describes the life review in near-death accounts as experienced from the other person’s perspective, as a participant and not an observer.
- He says the obstacles we face are the philosopher’s stone, and that on a mystical level all is one.
| Guest | Dr. Jeffery Mishlove |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 093 |
| Turning point | A dream of his Great Uncle Harry in 1972, when he was a Berkeley graduate student |
| Field | Parapsychology and the study of consciousness |
| Research he cites | A University of Virginia database of over 2,500 child past-life cases |
| On near-death experiences | Evidence for an afterlife, he says, but not a sign that everyone reincarnates |
| His own near-death experience | None described; he speaks as a researcher |
| The message | Obstacles refine the soul; at a mystical level, all is one |
A Berkeley Graduate Student in San Quentin
Alex asks his standard opening, and Jeffery answers with a time and a place. He was a graduate student at Berkeley in 1972. If you had known him then, he says, you would have found him running group therapy sessions in San Quentin prison with murderers and rapists. He was on a criminology track.
It was at that time, he says, that he began having a series of dreams.
The Dream of Great Uncle Harry
The most powerful of them, Jeffery says, was one in which his Great Uncle Harry came to him. The dream was “more real than real.” He woke up crying tears of joy, and singing at the same time, something that has never happened to him before or since.
He wrote home to his parents and asked how Uncle Harry was. His mother phoned as soon as she received the letter. How did you know? Uncle Harry had died practically at the same moment as the dream.
Becoming His Own Expert
That made him feel he could not simply go on with criminology. He began talking with his professors at Berkeley and learned quickly that none of them had anything intelligent to say about an experience like his. So he resolved that, one way or another, he would have to become his own expert.
Looking back across half a century, he says, the shift into parapsychology was a permanent change. When you read the literature, he adds, you find that people who encounter the afterlife sometimes have their lives changed permanently and dramatically. For more voices on that, see our complete guide to near-death experiences.
The Intuition Network
Jeffery used to be president of a nonprofit called the Intuition Network. Its goal was a world where people feel encouraged to cultivate intuitive talent. He says our culture is lopsided. If you are good at mathematics or athletics, you get plenty of encouragement. If you are a gifted intuitive, the culture dismisses it as airy fairy, woo woo, not as important. He thinks that is a shame.
A Nine-Year-Old and a Book About Past Lives
Go back to third grade, he says, when he was about nine. A classmate, Lee Rosenthal, gave a book report on a bestseller of the 1950s about reincarnation, The Search for Bridey Murphy. It told of a woman who, under hypnosis, produced a seventeenth-century Irish personality.
When Lee said the book claimed that we lived before this lifetime, Jeffery felt electricity running up and down his spine. Even as a little nine-year-old, he says, it really affected him.
Children Who Remember
Jeffery points to the University of Virginia Medical School, where he says a group known as DOPS has researched this for half a century. He says they hold a database of over 2,500 cases from all over the world of young children who, as soon as they can speak, begin talking about a previous life. They say they used to live in another village, had other parents, and that you are not their real mommy. For a short overview, see our glossary entry on reincarnation.
Of those 2,500 cases, he says, approximately 1,700 are considered solved, meaning the information the child gave led to the identification of the previous personality. That database alone, he says, makes the case for survival of the personality after death, and it is just one of dozens of examples. The number in the episode title refers to these cases.
Afterlife, Reincarnation and Many Options
He says evidence from near-death experiences certainly points to an afterlife. But he does not think it means everyone has to reincarnate. He suggests that you can go into the afterlife with many options. Reincarnation is one, if you want to return to this dense physical Earth plane. You could also move up the levels described in spiritualist literature, a gradual evolution of the human soul, a mystical path ending in union with the Divine.
Researchers have studied near-death experiences for decades. The 16-item NDE Scale, published by psychiatrist Bruce Greyson in 1983, is still widely used to measure the experience. Jeffery speaks as a student of that wider literature, not as someone describing his own near-death event.
A Simple Definition of Consciousness
He offers a definition he calls simple. “Consciousness is having the experience of being who you are.” In other words, “what is it like to be you?” Even seeing the color red is a conscious experience, whether or not you know you are thinking it. You can notice that you see red, and that you see yourself seeing red, in an infinite regress.
He adds an imaginative thought: a star might be a conscious entity, or a galaxy. For a human, a moment of consciousness is roughly a fifth to a tenth of a second. For a star, a moment might last billions of years.
Karma as Habit, Not Punishment
Vedanta and Buddhist literature, he says, refer to karma and reincarnation. But he says the research in the Virginia cases does not support the classic notion from Indian culture that if you are bad in one life, you will be punished in the next. He recalls an anthropology study of a village in India where the belief was that a very bad person would be reborn as an American, in a materialistic culture, as punishment.
What the cases suggest, he says, is not reward and punishment but “a sense of the habits that you carry forth.” Strong inclinations of thought and action may continue into the next lifetime. A high percentage of children who remember past lives, he says, remember because they were violently killed, and may come with a phobia related to how they died. He also says that people who were stabbed or shot in a past life are often born with birthmarks that correspond to the wounds. He does not say punishment never happens, only that it is not what he sees in the research.
The Life Review, Experienced as a Participant
Jeffery notes that a high percentage of near-death accounts describe a life review, in which you experience the impact you have had on others, moment by moment, from their perspective. If you hurt someone, you feel what that was like for them. People say it may take a few minutes of Earth time, but can contain lifetimes of experience. “It’s experienced as a participant,” he says, not as an observer.
Our glossary has a plain-language entry on the life review for anyone who wants to explore it.
Duality, Good and Evil, and a Novel Put Down
Our everyday world, he says, is a world of duality: good and bad, right and wrong, life and death. We are always making judgments. From a mystical point of view, “everything is one,” and the dualities are illusory. He does not deny they are real at this level; he says we are, today, on the edge of World War Three, and can see good and evil playing out on television.
But at another level, he says, it is like reading War and Peace. When you finish the novel you can put it down and appreciate every character. It was a good story, with a mixture of good and evil. You can transcend the whole story.
Arthur Young and the Philosopher’s Stone
When he became a graduate student in parapsychology, Jeffery says, he had a mentor, Arthur M. Young, who set up the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley and invited him to live there. Young was an inventor of the first commercially licensed Bell helicopter, and a cosmologist who wrote The Reflexive Universe.
One day Young asked what the philosopher’s stone was, the stone that turns lead into gold, which Young took to mean the soul. Jeffery did not know. The answer: “It’s the obstacles that we face in life that’s the Philosopher’s Stone.” We confront them, our soul is refined, and we become closer to who we are. We come to this physical plane, Jeffery says, to face obstacles that cannot be found anywhere else.
Billions of Years Old, and All One
Jeffery says he is perhaps unusual. He does not think of himself as someone born in 1946 who will probably die in the next twenty or thirty years. He thinks of himself as billions of years old. His body evolved from single-celled organisms, and he suspects it may have gone through many cycles. That is who he really is.
He goes further. He subscribes to the mystical vision that all is one, so that you and he are, “one might say, different versions of each other,” as are every animal, grizzly bear, octopus, insect or extraterrestrial. He mentions the philosopher Schopenhauer, who described “the One Mind that sees through the eyes of every living creature.” The realization of that, he says, not merely intellectually but experientially, is the path of spiritual growth.
Where This Episode Fits
This conversation is a little different. Jeffery does not tell a near-death story of his own. He brings a researcher’s wide lens: dreams that seem to cross the boundary of death, children who recall previous lives, and a life review that is felt from within. Take what resonates. For the research side, notice that he says the cases do not fit the punishment version of karma at all. The glossary has a short entry on karma if you would like the traditional meaning for comparison.
Questions to Sit With
- Jeffery says a single dream changed his career. Is there a moment you could not explain that quietly redirected your path?
- He suggests that obstacles are the philosopher’s stone. Which obstacle in your life might be doing the work of refining you?
- If karma is more about habit than punishment, which habit of thought do you carry that you would like to put down?
This week, name one obstacle you have been resisting. Write one sentence about what it might be asking you to become.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Jeffery says the afterlife may offer many options, and reincarnation is one of them.
- He says what carries forward from life to life are habits, not rewards and punishments.
- He describes the life review as feeling the impact of your actions from the other person’s side.
- He says the obstacles we face are what refine the soul.
- He says that at a mystical level all is one, and the aim is to realize it experientially.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Jeffery Mishlove.
Guest Links: Connect With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
- Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove’s official site
- New Thinking Allowed on YouTube
- The Roots of Consciousness by Jeffrey Mishlove on Amazon
- The PK Man by Jeffrey Mishlove on Amazon
- Full conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove
Listen to the Episode
- Watch this episode ad-free on Next Level Soul TV
- Download the MP3
- More episodes: Divine Encounters
- Listen to Divine Encounters on Apple Podcasts
- Listen to Divine Encounters on Spotify
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dr. Jeffery Mishlove?
Dr. Jeffery Mishlove is a researcher who became a graduate student in parapsychology at Berkeley after a dream in 1972. He discusses consciousness, reincarnation and near-death experiences with Alex Ferrari.
What was the dream of Great Uncle Harry?
Jeffery says it felt more real than real, and he woke crying tears of joy and singing. He says his mother later told him Uncle Harry had died practically at the same moment.
What is the University of Virginia database he mentions?
He describes a database of over 2,500 cases from around the world of children who talk about previous lives, with approximately 1,700 considered solved.
Does Jeffery say everyone reincarnates?
No. He says near-death evidence points to an afterlife, but reincarnation is one option among many, including moving up through levels of the soul’s evolution.
What does Jeffery say about karma?
He says the cases he cites do not support a reward and punishment view. What carries from life to life, he says, are habits, phobias and sometimes birthmarks.
What does Jeffery say about the life review?
He says a high percentage of near-death accounts describe it, and that people experience the impact of their actions from the other person’s perspective, as a participant.
How does Jeffery define consciousness?
He defines it as having the experience of being who you are, or what it is like to be you.
What is the philosopher’s stone, according to Arthur Young?
Jeffery says Young told him it is the obstacles we face in life, because confronting them refines the soul.
What does Jeffery mean by all is one?
He means that at a mystical level, dualities such as good and bad are illusory, and that we are different versions of each other and of every living creature.
Is Jeffery’s research proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares these conversations as personal accounts and views in the guest’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate the questions, and nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- A short entry on reincarnation
- What a life review is
- A guide to reincarnation
- Dr. Raymond Moody on naming the near-death experience
- Janice Holden on research into near-death experiences
- Greg Shushan on ancient civilizations and near-death experiences
- Dr. Scott Taylor on thirty years of near-death exploration
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 0:08
I was a graduate student at Berkeley in 1972 if you had known me, you would have seen a person doing group therapy sessions in San Quentin prison with murderers and rapists. And it was at that time that I had a series of dreams. The most powerful one is one in which my Great Uncle Harry came to me in in the dream was like more real than real, and I woke up from that dream just crying tears of joy. It was such a wonderful dream and singing at the same time, which has never happened to me since then or before. And so I wrote home to my parents. I said, How's Uncle Harry? I had a dream about him, and my mother phoned me as soon as she got that letter and said, How did you know that was when Uncle Harry died practically at the same moment. So that made me feel like I couldn't just continue on my criminology track. I needed to explore this further. I started talking to my professors at Berkeley, and I learned quickly none of them had anything intelligent to say about that kind of an experience, so I resolved that one way or another, I'd have to become my own expert. When Uncle Harry came to me in a dream, I was a criminology student, and today I can look back over half a century and say when I shifted into parapsychology, that was a permanent change that occurred to me, and when you look at the literature, you find that people who encounter the afterlife sometimes it is so powerful, it changes their lives permanently and dramatically. I used to be president of a nonprofit organization called the intuition network, and our goal was to create a world in which people felt encouraged to cultivate this talent. We live in a in a culture which is kind of lopsided in the sense that if you're good at mathematics or if you're good at athletics, you get a lot of encouragement, but for people who are gifted, intuitives, our culture sort of dismisses that as sort of airy fairy. Woo, woo. It doesn't count. It's it's not as important. And I think that's a shame. Go back to the third grade. I think I was about nine years old when my classmate Lee Rosenthal gave a book report on back in the 1950s a book about reincarnation that had been published at the time. It was a best seller called the search for Bridey Murphy, about a woman who had been hypnotized and under hypnosis. This whole 17th Century Irish personality came out called Bridie Murphy. And so that was the book. And so Lee Rosenthal is giving his book report, and he says this book says that we lived before this lifetime, and at that moment, even though I'm a little nine year old kid, I felt electricity running up and down my spine. It was like it really affected me strongly. So I think there's a lot to be said about reincarnation today. The major center for the study of this phenomenon is the University of Virginia, the Department of personality Perceptual Studies, DOPS at the University of Virginia Medical School, they've been researching this for half a century, and they have a database of over 2500 cases from all over the world where young children, as soon as they can begin to speak, they start talking about, I used to live in this village, and I had these parents, and this used to be my name, and you're not my real mommy. My real mommy lives in that other village and all of these things, and researchers get called in to study such cases, and they're actually of the 2500 cases, approximately 1700 of them are considered to be what they call solved, which means that the information that the young children provides actually led to the identification of the previous personality. When you look at that database, that's just one example of dozens supporting the existence of past survival of the personality after the death of the body, but that database alone is makes the case for it. The evidence from near death experience certainly is evidence for an afterlife, but I don't think it means that everybody has to reincarnate. I think it's possible that. You can go into the afterlife, and you have many options at that point. Reincarnation is one of them, if you want to come back to this dense physical earth plane. But you could also move up the various levels that have been described in the spiritualist literature and elsewhere of the gradual evolution of the human soul. It's sort of a mystical path, ultimately leading to a mystical union with the Divine. I have a simple definition. I don't think it's complicated. Consciousness is having the experience of being who you are.
Dr. Jeffery Mishlove 5:35
It's like, what is it like to be you? That's consciousness, where, even if you're not aware of it, you may that's being conscious, of being conscious, but even just having the experience of having experiences at all, seeing the color red, for example, is a conscious experience, whether you know you're thinking that. We call it sometimes a metacognitive stance, you could say, Yes, I see red, and I see that I'm seeing red, and I see that I'm seeing myself seeing red, and it's like an infinite regress at times. The Vedanta literature and the Buddhist literature refers to karma and reincarnation. I can tell you this, and it's a very interesting finding, the research that we have, the 2500 cases that are at the University of Virginia, don't support the classical notions that people have of reincarnation and karma that come out of the Indian culture, the idea you're a bad person in one life, you're going to be punished in your next life. I remember studying in anthropology, there was a village in India where they believed if you're a very bad person in that village, in your next lifetime, as your punishment, you'll be reborn as an American, and you'll have to live in this materialistic culture where it'll be very hard for you to pursue your authentic spiritual growth. But what the research literature, what we gather from the cases that have actually been studied, is that what persists from lifetime to lifetime isn't a sense of reward and punishment at all, but a sense of the habits that you carry forth. If you're a person who has strong inclinations or habits of thought and action in one lifetime, you're likely to carry those with you into the next lifetime, or often, we also see in the cases of people who remember their past lives that a very high percentage of them happen to remember their lives because they were violently killed in the previous lifetime, and so they come into their next lifetime, perhaps with a phobia related to how they died in the previous lifetime. One of the most fascinating kinds of evidence that we have is that people who are, let's say, stabbed or shot in a past lifetime are often born with birthmarks that correspond to the death wounds of the previous life. So you have certain things that carry over from lifetime to lifetime. But there, I haven't seen anything in the literature that suggests that if you're a bad person for any reason in one lifetime, that in the next lifetime, you're going to be punished for that. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it certainly not in the sense that some people talk about instant karma. It doesn't seem to work that way at all. There's something called the past life review that a high percentage of Near Death Experiences talk about, where you get to experience the impact that you have had on all the other people in your life, moment by moment, second by second, and you experience it from their perspective. So if, if you hurt somebody, then you get to experience what that felt like to them when they were hurt. And people say that it can on our earth time, it might only take a few minutes, but they can go through lifetimes of experience in this altered state of consciousness or near death state and experience these things. And it's fascinating how it's not experienced as an observer. It's experienced as a participant. Well, I imagine, for example, that a star might be a conscious entity for all we know, or a galaxy, and where is the human a moment? When you talk about what is a moment, a unit of consciousness for a human being, that's roughly a fifth of a second, maybe a 10th of a second, but if you're a star or a galaxy, or a group of galaxies of such are conscious. Religious entities, a moment might last what we think of as billions of years. Normally, our everyday world is a world of duality. We think, especially in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, evil and not evil is a question of duality. Life and death is duality. So we're always making judgments. That's the world that we live in. But from a mystical point of view, everything is one. All the dualities are actually illusory. I mean, they're real insofar as at this level you can't deny I think especially today, we're in the edge of world war three. You see good and evil being played out in on our television sets every day. But at a different level, it's like you're reading a novel. You're reading war and peace, and after you finish the novel, you can put it down, and you can appreciate all the characters in the novel and say, what a wonderful story. It was a good story. Has a mixture of good and evil, but you can transcend the whole story in in a way. When I became a graduate student in Parapsychology in Berkeley, I had a mentor who had set up an institute and invited me to live there with him, Arthur M young, he set up the Institute for the Study of consciousness in Berkeley. And he was an inventor. He invented the Bell Helicopter, first commercially licensed helicopter. And he was also a cosmologist. He wrote a great book called The reflexive universe. And one day he said to me, Jeffrey, what do you think is the Philosopher's Stone, the mystical stone that turns lead into gold. And he was referring to the soul of lead in your soul into gold. I said, I don't know. He said, It's the obstacles that we face in life that's the Philosopher's Stone. We have to confront those obstacles, and then our soul gets refined, we become closer to who we are. So I think we all come here. We're here on this physical plane in order to face obstacles that you can't find anywhere else. And I have to say it's the evolution of consciousness itself. I guess even to begin to answer that question, we have to ask, what is the present of human evolution? And maybe I'm unusual. I think of myself not as a person who was born in 1946 and who will probably die sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. I think of myself as a person who is actually at least billions of years old. I mean, my body is certainly it evolved from single celled organisms billions of years ago, and I suspect it may have gone through many cycles. That's who I really am. In fact, I go even further and say that I subscribe to the mystical vision that all is one, so that you and I are, one might say, different versions of each other, as well as all of your viewers and listeners or the same with every animal, every octopus, every grizzly bear or extraterrestrial or insect that that we the philosopher Schopenhauer called the One Mind that sees through the eyes of every living creature Well, that would be the realization of that, not just intellectually, as I'm explaining it to you, but understanding it experientially, that I think, is the path of spiritual growth.
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