(upbeat music)
-: You're listening to the OLLI at UNT Podcast recorded
at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
at the University of North Texas,
where we offer courses, events and more
for adults age 50 and better.
To learn more about our program,
please visit our website olli.unt.edu
or send us an email olli@unt.edu.
Now let's join our hosts OLLI at UNT member, Susan Supak
as she sits down for another conversation
with one of the people who makes our program so special.
-: This is Susan Supak speaking
at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas
known to most of us as OLLI.
I'm speaking with Dr. Jan Holden.
Dr. Holden graduated with honors
from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana
with a bachelor's degree in psychology.
Both her master's and doctoral degrees
are in counselor education
from Northern Illinois University.
Her career began as a counselor and in 1988,
she joined UNT's counseling program faculty.
Her primary area of professional interest has been
with the transpersonal perspective of counseling.
That refers to experiences that involve transcendence
of the usual personal limits of space and time,
particularly in the area of near-death experiences.
Dr. Holden has 40 years of experience
in researching this phenomenon,
particularly concerning verifiable experiences.
She is a well-published and highly regarded expert
in her field and fortunately for us,
has shared her expertise with OLLI
Welcome Dr. Holden.
-: Thank you, Susan.
-: Let's explore your background a bit.
And what led you to become an expert
in the field of near-death experience?
-: Well, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs
and went to college, studied psychology,
but then took a job as a high school psychology teacher.
While I did that, I was getting my master's and doctorate
in counselor education.
And when I finished in 1988,
I job searched throughout the country and landed at UNT.
And I just retired from UNT like a month ago.
So I was 31 years on the faculty,
the counselor education faculty in the College of Education.
And I spent, I think 12 of those years as department chair.
And how I get into the field of near-death studies,
there was no single event
and I have not had a near-death experience,
so I've had several transpersonal experiences,
which are in the same category as near-death experiences.
Things like after death communication, pre-cognition,
things like that.
-: Oh, interesting.
-: Yeah, it has been really interesting.
Back when I was in undergraduate work,
my father was reading a book called The Great Soul Trial
and he gave it to me to read.
It's a non-fiction book by Robert Fuller.
It's a story of a reclusive miner
from Phoenix, Arizona named James Kidd who used to go off
and mine for weeks at a time and then come back
to just a little room.
He was a very frugal reclusive guy
and he would cash in whatever he had mined
and then he would get his provisions
and go off again for several weeks.
Well, one day he went off and he never came back.
So after seven years, the State of Arizona declared him dead
and they opened a safe deposit box and there
they found several 100,000 dollars
and a little handwritten note saying
that he wanted the money used for research
in the survival of the human soul after death.
Now this was back around 1960.
So it was a while back.
The State of Arizona did what they thought
was gonna be sort of a throw away.
They did their obligation, put a little ad
in the newspaper saying that this money was available
and they thought nobody would pay attention
and they'd just get to keep it for the state coffers.
But to their surprise, over 100 individuals
and organizations came forward to claim the money.
So the State of Arizona actually had to put on a trial
where a judge heard people come and say
how they would fulfill the will of James Kidd.
And that included the research directors
of the American Society for Psychical Research
and the Psychical Research Foundation.
And a lot of the book is their verbatim testimony
about how they would research the survival
of the human soul after death.
Well, little did I know when I was reading this book,
it was very fascinating to me,
that I would actually end up doing
that kind of research myself.
I probably read that book around 1970.
In 1975, Raymond Moody wrote the book "Life After Life",
which was the first book
in which the term near-death experience is coined.
And I read that book in 1978,
then in the mid '80s, around '85
when I was starting work on my doctoral dissertation,
I ended up doing my dissertation
on something related to near-death experiences.
And a lot of people when they do a dissertation,
after they're done, they're sick of the topic
and they never wanna touch it again.
But I was just the opposite.
In fact, I've been so fascinated by these phenomena
that as a member of the International Association
for Near-Death Studies,
which I was president of sometime back,
but I'm now just a regular member, one of the perks
is they send a monthly near-death experience.
They're taking your death experience from the archive
and send it to us to read.
And when I receive that, even after having read
and heard probably thousands of near-death experiences now,
when I see that in my mailbox
I almost always drop everything and read it
because it's still just endlessly fascinating to me.
-: It is a topic that interests so many people.
-: Yeah.
-: I had the pleasure of attending your lecture
on your compilation of near-death experience research
and explaining certain aspects of it.
And I cannot tell you how many people
I have mentioned it to.
And knowing that we were going to do this podcast together
that we're so interested in had so many questions
and have said, please, please let me know
when the podcast comes out.
-: Great.
-: What do you think the fascination for that is?
-: Well, certainly it's probably one
of the most compelling questions for humanity
is what happens to us when we die?
Near-death experiencers, none of them have stayed dead.
So they've just temporarily set foot into the domain
of what they perceive to be ongoing consciousness
after physical death, but they've all come back.
So we can't know for sure from these experiences
what happens to people who stay dead,
but we know from the people who have set foot and come back
that there are a lot of similarities
that give us a lot of clues about the nature
of the survival of consciousness after physical death
-: As a researcher, I know that the scientific method
is very important to you. -: Yes, right.
-: What definition do you use to qualify someone
to having had a near-death experience?
-: Yeah, I'm so glad you asked,
because in the popular media,
people use the term near-death experience
to refer to a close brush with death.
And that's not actually accurate.
All the people who survive a close brush with death
and that's from illness or accident,
the majority, 80 to 90% don't remember anything unusual,
but 10 to 20% of people report
that during the experience,
during the close brush with death,
their consciousness was functioning apart
from their physical body, very lucidly,
actually much more lucidly than normally.
And they're perceiving the material world and or perceiving
and interacting with trans material entities
and environments.
And the entities could be like religious figures
or deceased loved ones or even pets.
So that's a near-death experience.
It's this experience of lucid consciousness
during a time when you would expect
there to be no consciousness.
-: So their physical parameters would be flatlined?
-: That's probably the most extreme circumstance,
but in fact people don't actually even have
to be actually injured.
They can have what we lightly refer
to as a fear death experience.
For example, a girl who worked here at the university
when she was a teenager,
she was driving down the road one day
and one thing led to another
and her vehicle rolled over three times down a ravine,
actually landed on her head.
And she was thrown from it, and then it landed on her head.
-: Oh my goodness.
-: And she said from the moment the tires left the road,
when she first started to turn over
to the moment that the vehicle landed on her,
she was out of her body, up in the trees,
watching all this and knowing that her body,
that that was her body she was seeing being thrown
from the vehicle, seeing people rush to the scene.
And she said she was in this state of absolute peace
and wellbeing, kind of like benignly interested
in what was happening down there,
but not invested in it, but mostly just aware of being
in this state of absolute peace and clarity and lucidity.
But then when the vehicle hit, she was just back in her body
and she never actually lost consciousness.
She did crack her skull, but she was never unconscious.
But she had that brief experience
that was very, very profound.
It changed her as these experiences tend
to transform people, their belief systems
and she no longer fear death, became more spiritual,
more philosophical, more circumspect as a result
of having this different perspective
on the nature of who she was.
-: You mentioned the feeling of peace and the clarity,
the observation of it having an effect on her
in terms of her fear of death.
Are there common traits that you find with people
that have had these near death experiences like that?
-: Yes, absolutely.
And I like to say that the changes are PSPS,
psychological, spiritual, physical and then social.
And so some of the psychological changes are
that people become less concerned with material things,
more concerned about serving other people,
become more empathic and then that loss of fear of death
is very pervasive.
The spiritual changes include a greater interest
in spirituality.
I hold a group that meets once a month.
It's open to the public in Louisville.
-: Oh, you'll have to tell us
about that. -: Yeah, second Wednesday
of every month called the Friends of IANDS.
That's the International Association for Near-Death Studies,
Friends of IANDS group.
We'll watch a video from a conference or have a speaker
and last night we had a live speaker.
He talked about how he doesn't watch TV anymore.
He reads the Bible.
He's actually a little bit exceptional
because a lot of times another spiritual change
is that people tend to move away from organized religion,
not because they disagree with it per se,
but because they find that organized religion
doesn't account for everything that they experience.
-: It's just perhaps a little too restraint.
-: Exactly, exactly.
And people also in the spiritual domain
develop pre-cognitive abilities.
They sometimes foresee the future.
They sometimes start seeing dead people
and communicating with the deceased.
So you can have those kinds of paranormal changes.
Then the physical changes include:
Sometimes people say it's just seems like
their metabolism has changed
and they don't need to eat as much food as they used to.
They may have a desire not to eat meat.
But on the other hand, I have a good friend
who has to eat meat every day
who had a near-death experience when she was five.
And there is this interesting electromagnetic effect
following a near-death experience.
Electronic devices in the vicinity
of near-death experiencers tend to malfunction.
And that's actually was the topic
of one of my doctoral students dissertations.
So it's been verified that people absolutely report
these experiences more than the average person.
And then the social changes.
You can imagine that if the person
is changed psychologically, spiritually, physically,
they really are transformed.
They're different than they were before the experience
and so that has repercussions in their social lives.
People tend to change groups of friends just
because their interests have changed.
This on topic of another of my former doctoral students,
that people who are married at the time
of a near-death experience are more likely to
go on to divorce.
She found that the dynamics behind that were that
when you think about two people married
and having kind of similar values
and then one person has an NDE and their values shift a lot.
Well, if the values diverge from their partner,
those people tend to divorce.
She also found a couple of couples
where the people reported they were happier than ever.
And what she found in those cases was that
in those couples the non near-death experiencer
actually started out
having somewhat more near-death experience like values,
so when the other person had the NDE,
their values converged more and they continued
in the relationship happier than ever.
That has a lot to do with the value shifts that occur
as a result of the experience.
-: Do people tend to find more purpose in their life?
-: Yes. I'm glad you mentioned that
because that is one of the big...
People absolutely have the sense that lives have purpose.
People have had near-death experiences
as a result of suicide or associated with suicide attempt.
And whereas in the normal population
if someone has attempted suicide,
they're actually at higher risk of attempting again.
If they've had a near-death experience,
they're at lower risk than the normal population
to try again, not because they encountered anything bad,
but because they learned in the NDE that their life
had purpose and that learning often comes
during a particular part of the near-death experience
that about 20% of near-death experiencers report
called the life review.
Usually the experiencer has encountered a being of light
which is this light that is a being that is all-knowing
and all-loving and in the presence of this light,
they review and re-experience typically every moment
of their life and also experience being
on the receiving end of their actions.
So it's like, whatever we do to other people,
we actually do to ourselves is what people experience-
-: So they actually experience what that person
would have experienced, good or bad?
-: Exactly.
-: It certainly makes you think
about the actions you take every day.
Doesn't it? -: It certainly does.
And that's one of the ways that study
of this phenomenon has impacted me.
As I'm about to make a decision,
how will this play in my life review if I do this or that?
Also in the life review
sometimes the being of light will ask something
along the lines of what have you done with your life?
What can you show me that you've done with your life?
And sometimes people are actually told
that they've been gifted with abilities
that they're not using for the purpose
that they were intended to use it in their lives.
And of course, after their NDE,
they redirect their lives to use their talents more
to the purpose of helping others and helping humanity.
-: It makes me think we could all use
a good old fashioned NDE to help put us on the track-
-: Exactly.
-: without going through all the trauma ahead of time.
-: Yes, yes.
And actually there's research showing that
when people learn about near-death experiences,
especially if they immerse themselves in the study
of near-death experiences at least for a little while,
they tend to show the same value shifts
as people who actually had NDEs.
So there is value to just learning
about near-death experiences.
-: Oh, wonderful.
-: And now one can go online
and hear one near-death experiencer after another
on YouTube and really get a sense of the kinds of things
that I've been talking about.
-: Do you find in your research that particular types
of people tend to experience the NDEs?
For example, are they more common with women
or people who have had a certain level of education
or particular religious affiliations
any of those types of things?
-: Well, the bottom line is that the phrase
that I like to use is that near-death experiences
are an equal opportunity transpersonal experience.
So every demographic, every personality trait,
everything you can think of, people's expectations,
their belief systems, their religious background,
or lack of it, anything you can think of,
researchers have studied and not found
any determinants of the experience.
So we take all the people who have survived a close brush
with death, 10 to 20%, remember an NDE, 80 to 90% don't.
And we don't know the difference between those people.
We can't predict who will
or won't have NDE. -: There's nothing
that separates those two groups.
-: Exactly.
That we've been able
to find so far. -: Right.
-: Within the people who've had near death experiences,
about 90% or more report a pleasurable experience.
It's the experiences dominated by peace, joy, love
and those sorts of things.
But about 10%, maybe a little less,
report distressing experiences
that are dominated by terror, horror,
profound eternal isolation, things that are hellish
although I've only really read one case
involving actual hell fire.
It's more like the hell of having treated a lot
of people badly and experiencing, one person after another,
what they experienced at my hands, so to speak.
Or being in an absolute eternal void alone forever.
The good news about distressing NDEs
is that even though in the short run
these experiencers tend to be afraid of death,
understandably, in the long run they come
to see the experiences having been
for their psycho-spiritual development.
-: That's incredible.
-: Yeah, so-
-: I can see how it would be very transforming.
-: Yes, absolutely right.
-: You truly see the effect of whatever negativity
that you've put out into the world.
-: Mm-hmm, yeah.
-: I've read also a lot of people report tunnels.
Is that right?
-: About 30% of people report that some time
during the experience, it's usually...
usually what happens is that the person first has
what I call the material aspect
where they're out of their body
looking at the material world
and it's usually their physical body and the area around it,
although it can be anywhere
because things move at the speed of thought.
So if the person is out of their body
and watching their body being resuscitated
in an operating room or something like that,
they might think, oh, my spouse is here in the hospital.
And the minute they think that, vyoom,
they're in the waiting room, watching their spouse
who's reading a magazine or pacing
or talking with another person who's waiting or whatever.
Then typically what happens is that the person
has a trans-material aspect in that the tunnel or movement,
a sense of movement through some kind of space
or a tunnel or void is usually a transition
between the material and the trans-material.
Almost kind of like a wormhole
that the person's consciousness goes through
to arrive at another dimension.
-: Do you see that these reports vary depending
on the age of the person or the culture that they're from?
-: No. And once again, equal opportunity.
(both laughing)
-: Even children?
-: Even children, that's right.
Children's NDEs can be very touching
because like one child said
and then I was looking down this big noodle.
-: Oh cute.
-: And so instead of not knowing the word for a tunnel
or that the best they could think of was like a macaroni,
a straightened macaroni noodle.
So yes.
And culturally, there is a website called NDERF,
N D E R F, standing
for Near-Death Experience Research Foundation,
.org I think.
And or it might be .com.
There are thousands of accounts
of near-death experiences there
from people from all over the world.
And you still see the same patterns.
The webmaster, Jeffrey Lang, and his wife, Jody Lang.
But Jeff wrote a book about the cross-cultural
near-death experiences and how they're the same patterns.
-: That's wonderful.
I find that very affirming.
-: Yeah.
-: With your research, you particularly focused
on the verifiable experiences-
-: That's right. -: that people had.
And as I recall, you had mentioned a woman in Austin,
a young woman that had an accident and what she saw
with her stepfather and her mother.
Would you like to share a little about those verifiable?
Yes, we can. -: Sure.
-: We can listen to what you report and we can sure confirm
that that did happen.
-: Yes, well, and this is Tricia Barker
and she has a website as well.
She's an English teacher in community college
in Fort Worth here.
And back when she was a college student,
she was in a car accident and broke her back
in several places, broke her legs in several places
and was told that she wouldn't be able to walk again.
But in her near-death experience
she had a healing experience, which happens sometimes
where near-death experiencers
have really seemingly miraculous healing
and she is able to function just normally now.
-: Wonderful.
-: The part that you're talking about
is that she was out of her body.
She flatlined during the surgery
and she was out of her body.
And she again thought about her mother
and went to the waiting room and then noticed
that her mother and her father who actually at that time
had been divorced several years
and her mother had remarried.
And Tricia knew that her stepfather had been there
at the hospital, but he wasn't there in the waiting room.
And she wondered where he was.
And just like I said, vyoom, she goes to this other part
of the hospital and sees him putting quarters
into a candy bar machine and taking out a candy bar.
And she thinks that's really odd
because her parents were health food nuts
and they never ate refined sugar.
Of course, they resuscitated her.
They finished the surgery, she's in recuperation.
And her mother is there when she regained consciousness.
And longer story shorter, her mother said, oh, Tricia,
you'll never believe this year stepfather came back
from a long walk through the hospital eating a candy bar.
And Tricia is like, yeah,
I believe it. -: I know.
-: Now, we've collected over 100 cases
of verified paranormal phenomena associated
with near-death experiences.
And these are verified by credible third parties,
in most cases, the physician who was in attendance
at the time.
So another example is a woman is in surgery.
She unexpectedly flatlines.
She has a near-death experience.
They resuscitate her.
Of course, during this whole time,
she's still completely anesthetized and all this.
They finish the surgery, take her to post-op
where she regains consciousness
and her surgeon comes to visit her.
She tells him, I know that I died during the surgery
and he's taken aback like, how do you know that?
And she said, well, I was up above the ceiling
and she proceeded to describe everything everyone did
during the resuscitation process, which astounded him
but to us near-death researchers, that's kind of like, whoa.
(Susan laughing)
But the really good part is she said, yeah,
she said I was up above the ceiling
and I could see into the adjacent operating room.
And there they were amputating a man's leg
and I was watching just as they were finishing
and they put the amputated leg
into a yellow plastic bag to dispose off it.
Now, her surgeon was completely taken aback by this
because he said, I don't even know what's going on
in the other operating rooms.
But he went then to the hospital records
and looked up a couple hours before
when he was doing the surgery on her.
Indeed, in the next operating room,
they were amputating a man's leg.
-: Wow.
-: And that was a specialized operating room for amputation
so he wasn't familiar with it.
But at this time when he was looking up the records,
it was now empty.
So he went to it and just peeked inside
and there he saw the yellow plastic bags
they use to dispose of amputated body parts.
So the question is when people try to say
that near-death experiences are just the hallucinations
of a dying brain, how do you explain people
having these veridical that is verified perceptions
of things that based on the condition and position
of their physical body,
they should not have been able to know.
And weren't even in many cases known to other people
in their immediate area and yet they're correct.
And I did a study where I gathered all the ones
that I could find in the literature, in books, in journals
and I think I came up with something like 130 of them,
but they didn't all meet the criterian for this book,
"The Self Does Not Die"
that has the over 100 cases of verified.
Anyway, my purpose was to see how many
of them involve some kind of error.
And it turned out that it was just a very small percentage.
And sometimes the error was just the tiniest thing
like one girl in her near-death experience saw her brother
in uniform.
He had several medals on his chest
and in one place she saw a Christian cross.
Later when she got back home,
she was out of country at the time,
and actually saw a photo of her brother in his uniform.
In that place where there was a Christian cross,
there actually was another metal.
So I counted that as an error, even though the fact
that he had died and she didn't know it
and she met him in her near-death experience,
she saw him in uniform. -: My goodness.
-: She didn't know that he had volunteered
for the service and her she was out of country
for an extended period of time.
All of these things were accurate,
but because there was one error, I counted it as wrong.
Out of all of those cases, a very small percentage
had even the tiniest error.
It was really out of that study
that the core number of cases came for this book,
"The Self Does Not Die" with the over 100 cases
of verified paranormal phenomena.
-: Well, that to me speaks a great deal toward the comments
that it's the brain firing the synapses
or it's some kind of a seizure or things like that.
-: Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Yeah, experiences often happen, as you mentioned earlier,
while the person's heart is not beating.
And what cardiologists tell us is that within 20 seconds
of no more blood circulation, the brain shuts down
and in terms of at least any measurable activity whatsoever.
In some cases, it's very clear
that the person was perceiving in the out of body state
while their brain was offline.
And so speaks loudly to the idea that rather
than the brain producing consciousness,
that consciousness exists apart from the brain,
but is closely associated with it during physical life.
But when that physical connection is broken
through cardiac arrest or any extreme condition
that can facilitate "near-death experience",
you don't actually have to be just close to death,
but that's probably the most reliable way to have one.
Yeah, so any extreme circumstances can facilitate
this kind of experience.
But the point being that the brain seems to be functioning
as a filter of consciousness rather than the producer of it.
And so when people are freed from the filter of their brain,
they actually think faster.
That's what people report in near-death experiences.
They can see in every direction
because they're not limited to their physical eyes.
They report seeing colors and hearing sounds
that they've never heard on earth.
Well, if you understand, like the ultraviolet continuum,
we can perceive only a narrow range.
And it appears that when people are freed
from the physical constraints,
they're able perceive beyond just what we can see
in our physical and here in our physical lives.
Communication tends to be mind-to-mind
and very instantaneous, very rapid.
It's a different way of being in that state.
-: That is so exciting to hear.
That's really amazing.
I can see why you have been drawn
to this field of research for so long.
What a gift.
-: Yeah, it really has been.
I've been very, very fortunate in my professional life
to be able to do this and I really credit UNT
because when there had been branding exercises,
a couple things that come out about UNT
is that it's a very caring place
and it's a place where there's a lot of creativity.
That has been a perfect environment for me to be able
to do this research all these years.
And my last year at UNT,
I received the UNT Foundation's Eminent Faculty Award.
-: Of course you did.
(Jan laughing)
Congratulations. -: Thank you.
-: I'm not in no surprise.
-: Yeah, that's really nice of you to say, but for me,
it's an affirmation of the kind of place that UNT is
to instead of looking at this kind of research very askance,
there's an understanding
that this is a legitimate social science research area
That really, as you commented earlier
when you said we could all stand to have an NDE,
the values from NDEs hold a lot of promise
for a better world.
To have the university affirm this area of research helps
to affirm the values that come out of NDEs
and that we could really use a lot of in our world today.
-: We need another dimension.
We need a greater dimension than just the superficial level
that seems to be in operation in a lot of activities today.
You've had quite a bit published throughout your career.
I found your scholarly reviews
such as "The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences-
30 Years of Investigation", and "The Self Does Not Die-
Verified Paranormal Phenomena From Near-Death Experiences"
edited by you to be full of a variety
of interesting information.
Do you plan on writing or collaborating on more?
I know you're retired now.
I'm just curious if we're getting more from you,
you have so much to share.
(Janice laughing)
-: Thank you.
Well, I have been telling people I've retired
from the university,
but not from the field of near-death studies.
So I'm the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies
and I'll continue in that role.
And I do have plans for several projects,
a book and some modules that would be available online
for people to learn about things like this and conferences.
Although I have to say that I'm being very strategic
about where I apply for conferences.
Like I applied for one in September in Paris
and the paper was accepted, so-
-: You're a smart woman.
-: Going on a river cruise after the conference.
So yeah.
-: Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed
that you have much more involvement also with OLLI
because your lecture was extremely fascinating.
You had mentioned some books in particular
that you recommend for people on the topic.
-: Yeah.
-: Would you like to come in on those?
-: Sure, for somebody kind of new to the subject,
I like Ken Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino's book
"Lessons from the Light", because it's about
what people who haven't had a near-death experience
can learn from near-death experiencers.
And since most people haven't had it,
it speaks directly to them.
People who are more interested
in a more scientific approach,
"The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences"
and for people who are interested in specifically
in veridical perception, "The Self Does Not Die".
I think those are the ones that I would recommend first off.
-: What about "Dying To Be Me"?
-: So Anita Moorjani's book "Dying To Be Me",
I highly recommend, she had end stage lymphoma.
Have you read the book?
-: Yes, I have.
It's incredible.
-: It is.
She had end stage lymphoma,
went into the hospital weighing 70 pounds in coma
with her organs shutting down
and came out three weeks later symptom-free.
She had a profound healing experience during her NDE
and when she regained consciousness,
she just rapidly recovered.
One of the things you asked earlier
about interesting things.
One thing in her experience that really blew my mind.
So she's out of her body, she's with a spirit guide,
they're conversing and looking down on the hospital room
where her body is laying.
Her husband is there, her mother is there.
I don't know if her brother had arrived yet.
The spiritual entity that was with her,
I think actually it was her deceased father said,
it's time for you to decide if you're going
to stay here or go back.
And she was like, oh, it feels so good here.
People don't tend to wanna go back.
She decided..
Well, she said, I don't know that I really have a decision
because we just saw somebody come and take a blood sample.
And so the answer is in the tube
about whether my organs are gonna continue shutting down
or gonna start functioning again.
And the spiritual entity said, no,
your decision is gonna determine the outcome of the test-
-: Wow. -: Of the blood test.
So it emphasized that consciousness is more primary,
that the material world is a manifestation
of consciousness rather than vice versa.
That it kind of empowers us and can be kind of daunting
to think that we actually have that much power
to influence the nature of the way things go
in the material world.
That was kind of a mindblower for me
-: Something that really stuck with me in her book was
she described, as you mentioned earlier,
the limitations we have on lights, colors
and that kind of thing.
And she described it as having looked at the world
with a little flashlight
and then when she had her experience,
it was as though somebody turned the lights on
and she could see everything,
not just- -: And she was just
huge warehouse of all this stuff, yeah.
-: Things she'd never seen, colors and whatever
she had never seen before.
Just fascinating. -: Yeah.
-: And that image really stuck with me from the book.
-: Yeah. She's wonderful.
She's spoken three or four times at the annual conference
of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
So anybody who really wants to come in here,
NDEs, talk about their experiences
and hear researchers talk about what they're finding,
that conference is held Labor Day every year
over the Labor Day weekend.
-: And does it vary, different points?
-: Yes. Next year, 2020, it will be in Salt Lake city.
-: Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about
that I haven't mentioned?
-: Talking about Anita's experience reminded me
that one of the things and this may be a great point
to end on, that about half of people
in the near-death experience have the sense that
they didn't choose to return to physical life.
They may have actually resisted it.
One girl said she was arguing with the being of light
and being was saying you need to go back.
Your work isn't done.
And she's like, no, I'm not going back.
-: I'm fine here. -: Yes, you are. Yeah.
And she's going no, I'm not and light says, yes you are.
And she says, you see who won.
(both laughing)
And so another portion of people who don't have a sense
that they chose to come back say that
they were just tooling along in the NDE
and suddenly it's like somebody just turned
the off switch on and they're back
in their body, unprepared.
In many cases, they're told that they need to come back in
but about half of people say that they either directly
or indirectly chose to come back.
And usually it's indirectly.
Sometimes it's directly, they'll actually think
of someone who needs them and that
that person's life will be...
the quality of their life will be much reduced
if they don't go back and be with that person.
But sometimes like my friend, Linda,
who drowned when she was five,
she was out of her body and watching the resuscitation
and she had fallen into a river and her, or a stream,
and her brother was supposed to have been watching her
and he wasn't.
And she thought about what his life would be like
if she died, that he would be forever guilty
and held guilty.
And the moment she empathized with him that way,
she was back in her body.
And so people, whether they do come back voluntarily
or involuntarily, it's always as a result of empathizing
with someone that they can be of service to
and it's an act of love. Yeah.
-: That matches a conversation that I had
with a gentleman from the community I live in.
He had had a near-death experience and he described it as
you often hear going in the tunnel and the light and peace.
And he said, it was as though there was a wall there.
And he knew that if he went on the other side of that wall,
he would not come back.
But he said, I love my wife
and I'm not through living my life with my wife yet.
And then that was it.
-: Yup, exactly. -: So it just matches perfectly
what you just described.
-: It sure does.
-: That's pretty incredible I think, the power of love.
-: The power of love -: It's a wonderful thing.
-: And then probably if there were one message
that near-death experiencers...
well actually when near-death experiencers say that
in the big picture, there are two purposes
to our existence on earth:
And one is to advance in our capacity to love
and the other is to learn to acquire knowledge.
So it's all about loving and learning.
-: So let's all do that now.
-: Let's do it.
-: We don't have to flatline in order to do that.
-: Absolutely.
-: Thank you so very much.
What an incredibly, incredibly interesting interview.
We could speak again and again and again.
I'm sure you have so much knowledge to share.
And I know even with your lectures,
you have videos and all types of information.
So I encourage people if they hear that Dr. Jan Holden
is speaking anywhere
that they need to actually clear their calendar.
-: (Jan chuckles) Thanks.
-: So thank you. Thank you so much.
This has been Susan Supak speaking
at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
at the University of North Texas with Dr. Jan Holden.
Thanks so much for listening.
(gentle music)