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5/16/2024 1 Comment A FATHER SHARES HIS SON'S PASSING THE SHARED DYING EXPERIENCE OF CLIFTON FURUKAWA MD AND HIS SON FROM PARTING VISIONS BY MELVIN MORSE AND PAUL PERRY “I know what happens after death” Dr. Furukawa told me. He was an internationally recognized allergist as well as a compassionate clinician. He has written textbooks and medical journal articles that have been responsible for many of the advances in Pediatric allergies. I spent six months working with him in his allergy clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital and have discussed many difficult cases of asthma with him. Still I knew little of his personal life. So I was unprepared for the late night phone call I received from him in which he told me about the out of body experience he had had in relationship to his son’s death. In a calm and clinical manner Furukawa told me about the pain of watching his son drown at a lake in Washington State. He had taken his son to go crabbing for crawdads, on a glorious summer morning. No clouds were in the sky, as he gazed out at the water, it flowed seamlessly into the sky. It was difficult to separate the two. He parked his car on the ramp that allowed boat entry into the lake, and went down into the water to set traps. Suddenly, and inexplicably, his son jumped into the car. He smiled and waved at his father. Then tragically, he released the parking brake, laughing and smiling as the car slowly rolled into the lake. Dr. Furukawa frantically clawed at the doors to the car trying to open them, gesturing to his son to try to open them as well. His son floundered and panicked, accidentally locking the electronic locks. The car continued its slow roll into the lake. He desperately tried everything, pounding on the windows, trying to find something that would break the glass, anything to free his son, but the car eventually became completely submerged under the water. Beside himself with fear, Dr. Furukawa jumped into the lake and desperately tried to push the car out of the lake back onto land. He felt himself being trapped and pulled under as the car continued to slowly sink. Suddenly he felt as if he was out of his physical body, watching himself. The scene was so vivid that he could see the hairs on the top of his head ad even look around at the mountains and the water. He felt completely at peace and emotionally detached as, from this puzzling vantage point, he watched himself struggle to save his son. “At this point I had the sort of empathy that one might feel with a patient,” he told me. “I felt sorry about what I was seeing yet I really had no feelings”. As he watched himself, he became aware that there was a being behind him “watching the two mes”. Furukawa had a sense that he would die if his struggle continued. As he considered this option, the spirit spoke to him without actually speaking, conveying to him that he had a choice to continue to struggle until he died or to return to his body, which would then be in great emotional agony. He chose to return. He saw his son engulfed by the most brilliant light I had ever seen. “I saw his face, it was aglow with love, he was at peace, even joyful, as I endured unthinkable agony.” “It was the worst emotional pain I have every experienced,” he told me. Through the pain of losing his son, Furukawa experienced some positive changes. For one thing, he now has a greatly decreased fear of death. He also sees a greater meaning to life. “Since the death of my son, I think I know what happens when we die”. He told me. “That knowledge has been a great relief to me. Months later, he was lying in bed with his wife. They had not even begun to process their grief. Suddenly he heard a voice saying “they are all your children”. He knew it was the spirit that came to him when his son passed. He understood this to mean that his work with children was too important for him to have taken what Dr. Furukawa called the “easy way out” to have proceeded to join his son in that light that waits us all when we die.
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 Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) was developed by Ingo Swann and the Department of Defense at Stanford Research Institute. However, it is not well known that it was actually the rediscovery of an ancient protocol developed by the Buddha and his monks. Isabelle Chauffeton Saavedra and I have taken the ancient remote viewing wisdom of the Jewish sages and Buddhists Monks and created Spiritual Sight, a tool for transformation. The essence of CRV is the monitoring of one's own mindstream (thoughts) and dividing those thoughts into two categories, sensory information that comes from the sensory or nonverbal consciousness, and analytic information, that comes from the left brain. In order to understand the protocol of Spiritual Sight, we first must understand the processes of meditation. Our ordinary consciousness is based in local reality, which is the reality that we all share while interacting with each other and our environment. There is a second hidden consciousness, known as the nonverbal consciousness, or the heart consciousness. This consciousness is our link to the quantum energetic informational field that is ultimate reality. We interact with this energetic field with our sensory receptors, taste, touch, vision, hearing and so forth. These receptors translate the energetic field into information processed by the neurons in our brain. We then create local reality which is the three dimensional time space bound reality that we call “real”.  With Spiritual Sight (or CRV) we reverse engineer this process, and return to the sensory stream of consciousness. This places us right at the opening to the perception of ultimate reality. The point of Spiritual Sight is to learn how to interact with that ultimate reality which is the informational domain that many of us call “God”. Those who have directly experienced this domain tell us that it is imbued with unconditional love and wisdom. The Buddhists call it the "luminous reality"; a child who had a near death experience tell me that it is “a light that told me who I was and where I was to go”. We can be confident that this luminous consciousness is the substrate of reality described by the theoretical physicists, as they describe reality as being an electromagnetic field, better known to us as “light”. Of course, the ancient Buddhists did not use CRV to find their car keys or intelligence gathering. Instead, they used it to directly access the divine universal consciousness. By using their basic protocol, later rediscovered by the early controlled remote viewers, they accessed the universal source of unconditional love and wisdom, which contains the basis of energetic healing and deep intuition. The point of Spiritual Sight is to learn to reverse engineer the process of creating this local reality, and then enter into the slipstream of sensory nonverbal consciousness. Once we are there, we can then enter into ultimate reality for the purposes of energy healing, accessing deep intuition, mediumship, listening to the voice of God in our lives, hearing the faint ding of angels and tonglen, the appreciation of the suffering of others. (among many other uses)
Many of my class members have asked me for the specific references documenting this. That is the reason for this blog. 1. How does the process work? How does meditating on a nine digit number allow us to access information from the chaos that is the informational reality? The controlled remote viewers say that the unconscious mind “wants” to work with us and cooperates with the process of CRV. The Jewish sages explained how this works. In the Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation (Aryeh Kaplan, Weiser Books 1997) the sages wrote nearly two thousand years ago: “In Kabbalah there is a general rule that every awakening from below motivates an awakening from above.” So when we meditate on the numerical address of the remote site, it generates an awakening of the signal line and the energetic signature of that complex of information in ultimate reality. 2. One of the most important documents I studied to develop Spiritual Sight was that of The Venerable Acariya Maha Boowa Nanasampanno, who wrote in Straight From the Heart that during the process of meditation, we enter into “the entire world that is this single awareness, as if there were nothing in our consciousness at all, even though everything still exists, sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations together with the mental acts that intermingle with them (such is the nature of the process of meditation) To investigate these things is not for the purpose of taking possession of them, but for the purpose of knowing them, stage by stage.” Of course, this is a precise description of the Spiritual Sight or controlled remote viewing protocol which involves the accessing of sensory information coupled with intermingled analytic left brain overlay. He further wrote: “We cleansed the mind with sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations, using them as a whetstone to sharpen mindfulness and discernment, which then probes inward and turns the mind absolutely pure.” And: “moving to the realm of senses is the first step to nonjudgment.” He calls the processes of spiritual sight “the language of the heart”. 3. The Buddha is quoted as saying in the Dvedhavitakka Suttra (Handful of Leaves, Volume 2 Sutta Pitaka) “I noticed two forms of thinking, Monks, before my self awakening, when I was still just an unawakened Bodhisattva, the thought occurred to me: Why don’t I keep dividing my thinking into two sorts”. And: "When the mind was concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished and rid of defilement (meaning logical verbal thoughts, nouns, concepts) I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives.” In other words, he used Spiritual Sight to remote view his past lives. And: (Of the process of meditation and enlightenment) “Monks, I will teach you the sequence of the root of all phenomena.” Contrast this with Ingo Swann’s statement about CRV: "We are not learning to be psychic, but rather learning the nature of perception." And: (Another precise description of the processes of CRV and Spiritual Sight) “When the processes of feeling and thought are stilled, and there is a breakthrough to the cessation of the six senses, is there anything left? This dimension is NOT a total annihilation of experience. It is a type of experience that I call consciousness without surface, luminous all around.” Finally, the Buddha is quoted as precisely defining what is from the left brain, known to the controlled remote viewers as “analytic overlay”. The Buddha clearly identifies what thoughts come from the left brain and identifies them as being created by the mind. Modern neuroscience agrees with this. “Apparent things, external to the mind, do not exist (except as energetic information). They are the mind, in various forms, appearing to itself. Bodies, goods, locations-all such things- are but the mind alone, I do affirm”. Of course, this is a nice description of the mental processes we place in the right hand column during the protocol of Spiritual Sight or CRV.  CRV is often portrayed as an elite process, that requires significant training and expense to acquire. In fact, it is a natural normal ability when understood as a spiritual training tool. Anyone can read “Spiritual Sight: The Manual” and with a partner, train themselves to do it. As the Buddha’s first disciple said of his teachings: “It rose up in me as if I had always known it”. Learning Spiritual Sight connects you with your deepest intuition and awakened true self.  The basic process of Spiritual Sight or CRV is the return to the basic sensory understanding of reality, the source of deep intuition. I did not understand this link between returning to the nonverbal sensory consciousness and accessing this ultimate reality of information, unconditional love and wisdom, until I studied the writings of the 2d Century AD Tibetan Monk Nagarjuna. The Monk Jamgon Mopham Rimpoche, in a commentary on Nagarjuna called The Introduction to the Middle Way wrote: “The first importance of to study the Dharma is the correct understanding of the nature of phenomena, the objects and situations that surround us in our daily life and (to differentiate them) the thoughts and emotions that occupy and agitate our minds. Ultimate truth is not separate from phenomena. It is the very nature of phenomena. (ultimate truth is used here to mean the same as nonverbal consciousness or the sensory stream of information). Ultimate reality is veiled by the appearances of the illusionary truth of the world. These two truths are never separate, they merge and coincide in phenomena.” By studying Nagarjuna, we can at last understand the important of separating the sensory stream of consciousness from the analytic mind, the minds, concepts and objects identified and separated out in the process of spiritual sight and CRV. This very process unveils and reveals the ultimate truth of reality which is around us all the time. This process leads directly to the discovery of a wholly new dimension of the mind itself.  5/16/2024 0 Comments FROM SOCIOPATH TO THE NOBLE PATH THE TRANSFORMATION OF A CAREER CRIMINAL: IF IT HAPPENED FOR HIM, IT CAN HAPPEN FOR YOU “With the abundance of happiness that I have, getting high would interfere with my contact with my creator” Astonishing words from a man society considers a sociopath. James H is a 34-year-old career criminal with a five page rap sheet. Since his first incarceration at age 18 to age 31 he had been home a total 13 ½ months. After he was released, he reoffended within six months, was released and lasted one month, then reoffended. After that incarceration he was released and reoffended again after six months, was released and finally reoffended after only 8 days. His offenses include felony theft, burglary third, unauthorized use of a vehicle, resisting arrest, possession of heroin and loitering! He has now been out of prison for three years and no longer uses heroin. He says: “I want to protect the happiness I have. I have a good connection with my creator” How did he achieve this connection? Through meditation. He was taught meditation through a prison program and I worked with him as well. His goal was to relieve stress. He says “at first I just focused on breathing to calm my nerves. I went through all the other steps to relieve stress as well.” These included tightening and relaxing his muscles in sequence from head to toe, focusing on a calm place such as the beach, and listening to music. He gravitated towards meditation for reasons he can’t explain. He did not see meditation as a spiritual exercise, nor was it taught to be one. He says: “It was very hard to meditate. I struggled with it. I started meditating for maybe a minute a day, or three minutes before giving up. It was very hard to get my mind clear. It’s very hard to be in the present in prison, as I was always thinking of either my past or the future.” OPENING THE CHANNEL TO HIS CREATOR I worked with him and encouraged him to meditate everyday even if it was just for three or five minutes. For him, I thought the best method was to simply focus on his breath. When thoughts intruded, he was just to note them as if an interested observer. “Oh, I’m thinking about the day I was arrested again”. And then to return to the breath. After a solid month, he was meditating ten minutes a day. Soon it was fifteen minutes or sometimes he would just lose track of time and it could be ½ an hour. And then it happened! In the middle of a short ten-minute session, he suddenly found himself having a conversation with God. Like the children who have near death experiences, he just told me that it was “God” but couldn’t say any more than that. “I knew it was God because he was talking to me”, almost the same words a child told me about her near-death experience. I have noticed that children and non-religious adults who talk to God typically just say "it was God" without any further religious dogma or embellishment. They describe a loving presence that is otherwise hard to define. At first James sort of laughed about his perception he was talking to God and didn’t believe it was real. He felt funny about it, thinking he was just making it up. He explained that it wasn’t a dialogue, but more or less sensations. “Like hearing a truth that cannot be denied”, is how he described the experience of talking to God. DRUG ADDICTION IS OFTEN NOT A DISEASE BUT A LEARNING DISORDER: A LACK OF BASIC SKILLS Nothing in James background prepared him for this experience. He was raised without any religious or spiritual beliefs by a woman who was 16 when she conceived him. She struggled with bipolar disorder and PTSD. His father was 60 and only briefly met his mom. He first met his father when he was 13 and spent a week with him, with no contact since. He dropped out of school long before high school. A drug addict for most of his life, he became addicted to heroin at age 22. He did not have any of the training in mental discipline or spirituality that most of us take for granted. He did not go on camping trips, or afterschool clubs, did chores, had household responsibilities or had hobbies he shared with his parents, so he never developed the mental discipline those types of experiences demand. He never achieved something and received praise. He never had the opportunity to actually work hard toward a goal. He missed out on all the teaching and development stages of child development, such as having to delay gratification, learn to share, or learning the complexities of social interactions. We don’t think of this baseline of knowledge and mental discipline that most of us have, as spiritual or mental training, but it is. It is immediately obvious to me when I meet those who had shattered childhoods as they lack the basic fundamentals of knowing how to navigate the complexities of adult life. Most of us have these skills ingrained in us throughout childhood and take them for granted and think everyone has them. Prison job training programs often overlook that many of the incarcerated don't have fundamental skills such as looking someone in the eye, having a firm handshake, or the ability to make the sort of reassuring small talk that can built bridges with a future employer. Furthermore, many adult drug addicts were addicts throughout the teen years. Developmentally those are the years we start to form our basic problem solving strategies for life. Drug addicts miss out on all that as their basic strategy is to simply get high. Many either drop out of high school or are not active in the high school social scene so again they miss out on all that is learned by attending clubs, playing sports, and being involved in school activities. There is no reason anyone can’t learn these skills, no matter how old they are. It is not helpful to feel sorry for them or overlook the fact that they lack certain basic skills. It is also not helpful to assume that they are sociopaths or criminals incapable of transformation. James quickly learned these skills once he was able to sit and think long enough to realize what his goals were and what he needed to achieve those goals. FINDING THE RIGHT PATH Jame's transformation began when he started to have a conversation with God while meditating. He says: “At the time I was struggling with following the rules of prison and getting along with other inmates. I was ashamed of being in prison and living a life of failure. When I first heard God speak, he didn’t say any of the things I thought he would say. I didn’t hear that my life would ever be good or that I would ever be happy. I didn’t even hear “all is well”. Instead I heard “keep going, you are on the right path”. “The right path” he said to me with wonder. “I have been in prison most of my adult life. I have no friends and no skills and don’t know any other way of living than stealing to get money for drugs. The right path?” Yet the following day, when he meditated again, he started to see that everything was part of his path. “Meeting you Dr. Morse, was part of my path. Even negative people and horrible experiences are part of my path. Everything I have done has helped me to progress spiritually." Specifically he was saying that being a drug addict and his criminal behavior was part of this path. He accepted his past failures as stepping stones to his future. He asked God while meditating “should I study Buddhism?” He heard “yes”. “I have a glowing warm feeling in my heart. If you could package what I have and give it to someone, then they would take the steps I have taken to have it. I am genuinely happy. Sometimes I end my meditation laughing.” I taught James to remote view and he was excellent at it. He told me that remote viewing taught him that God is real. He immediately applied himself to learning the skills he needed to change his life on the outside. He completed his GED. He became confident in his social skills as he had a sense of self-worth. He entered the Green Tree program which is a comprehensive intensive program which immerses the inmates in learning everything they need to thrive on the outside, from social skills, to assessing their life story, to taking business classes, and doing regular chores with specific consequences for not doing them properly. Inmates in the Green Tree program often have to get up at 5 am to clean their cell and the cell block they are living in, followed by rigorous exercise programs. The men are not permitted to play basketball and watch TV all day but take a variety of classes designed to help them function on the outside. I spoke to James after he had been out for three years. He told me that he believed he opened a channel to God, and it kept speaking louder and louder to him until he had to change his life. “But it only speaks love” he said, “only encouragement, only making me aware that I was loved, no matter what I had done and suffered”. “I never want to use heroin again”. AMERICAN HAS A MASS REINCARCERATION PROBLEM James, by being drug free and out of prison for three years, already beat the odds. 75% of the ex-incarcerated return to prison nationally within three years. Drug rehab programs have perhaps a 10% success rate as most relapse within one year.
Prison is a non-stop cesspool of screaming, anger, and hate. The men are simply warehoused without little job training, spiritual guidance, or opportunity to improve their characters. The young men I spoke with often told me they didn’t mind being in prison. “I get to be with my homies, play cards and basketball, and watch TV all day. The food's not too bad and we can wear pajamas all day. What’s not to like about prison?” The men we are locking up typically are not sociopaths or hardened criminals. I once asked an experienced prison guard what percentage of the men needed to be in prison, and he laughed and said “you mean, the real pieces of shit. Oh maybe 5 or 10%. The rest are no different than you and me. Contrary to the public perception that we are locking up murderers and rapists, we are mostly locking up men like James. They had horrific childhoods, have few practical skills or the mental discipline to function in society, and are often heroin addicts. The rest are veterans with PTSD, the undiagnosed mentally ill, alcoholics, meth addicts, and those who turned to crime as they see no other way to survive. Perhaps 5-10% are innocent, according to those who have looked at the problem including the LA Times, Mother Jones, The Innocent Project and the National Registry of Exonerations. And we just keep locking them up over and over again. America locks up more of its citizens than any other country in the world, including Communist China. We spend billions of dollars locking up and warehousing men who could easily be productive citizens. It actually took very little for James to change his life. He meditated at most 30 minutes a day. He completed his GED and took a program that taught social skills, problem solving skills, basic business skills for ordinary citizens such as how to open a checking account and obtain credit and featured doing chores and being responsible for one’s actions. All the stuff he never learned from his teenage bipolar drug addicted mom and absent father. Most importantly, he developed a sense of self-worth. As he explains it, he opened a channel to his creator. If he did it, most men in prison can do it, given the opportunity. And so can you. 5/16/2024 0 Comments If Spiritual Experiences Were Pills, They Would be Prescribed in Hospitals Everywhere Betty Eadie writes in the forward to my book Parting Visions of how premonitions and visions have the power to prepare us for the loss of loved ones. The loss of an infant or child can render life meaningless; the knowledge that premonitions are real and not inventions of the mind can restore meaning to what is otherwise a senseless tragedy and descent into an abyss of grief. I was the Eadie's Pediatrician and cared for Betty's grandchildren. Here is what she wrote about her own premonition when her daughter died of sudden infant death (SIDS) at age 3 months. "Usually I would just hold her until she fell asleep and then put her to bed. I had several children already, and as any parent in that position knows, I needed all the spare time I could get. When I got her to sleep, I finally had some time to myself to rest. This particular night was different. When Cynthia fell asleep, I held her in my arms for several hours, even though I had other things to do. I felt deeply compelled on this particular night to just hold her in my arms and rock her". Betty told me that she had a sense of great sadness, yet peace. Cynthia died later that night. Betty writes: Parents have a special bond with their children. I have heard many parents tell of knowing that their children were in trouble, even when they are hundreds of miles away. There is a psychic bond that most parents admit to without hesitation. I did a scientific study of SIDS with the Southwest SIDS Institute that we published in the medical journals. We documented that frequently parents have vivid dreams, premonitions, visions or strong intuitions prior to their infant's passing. We did a control group of parents who reported on their dreams and fears of SIDS for infants that did not pass, and we showed that there was a provable difference between the two groups. Sadly, the premonitions did not prevent any infants from dying, even when the parents would take their infants to doctors to have them evaluated. Betty writes: "I believe that premonitions are God's way of telling us about difficult events before they happen so that they will not come as such a surprise to us. God tries to not give us more than we can handle, and one of his ways of doing that is by gracing us with visions that foreshadow events. He did that with me just a few days before my father died. The visions I had took place in a dream. I was puzzled by them, but after my father died, there was no mistaking what it meant. The vision prepared me for my father's death. Although I was deeply saddened by his death, I realized that the gentle beauty of my dream was to make me understand that my father would soon be gone. Visions and spiritual experiences happen frequently to those who are dying. Unfortunately these experiences are often ignored or even ridiculed. This is too bad as they have great power to ease the dying experience and heal grief in the living. In fact the healing benefits of these experiences are so great that, as Dr. Melvin Morse points out, if they were a pill they would be prescribed in hospitals everywhere. It is clear to me that Melvin Morse has followed his spirit in researching this topic. Like many important medical researchers, he is being led in his work by faith, the subconscious knowledge that his work is beneficial to the body, mind and spirit of mankind. Being led by faith is far more difficult than being led by knowledge." (Thank you Betty for these amazing words of support) It has not been easy making the transition from the rational logical world of critical medicine to learning to listen to those same patients and learning about their spiritual intuitions. Often the healings I have seen from spritual visions and intuitions is far greater than any medical interventions by our team of doctors and nurses. I recently met the neuroscientist Mona Sabhani who told me she made a similar transition. She says "the old me would have hated the new me". I can relate to that, as I started out my research to prove that Elizabeth Kubler Ross and my to be brother in law Raymond Moody were wrong when their research showed that the dying experience is vibrantly spiritual. My team at Children's Hospital in Seattle thought that we would prove that medications or a lack of oxygen to the brain were the causes of NDEs. It has often been a hard lonely even painful path. I am guided by the fact that I had personally witnessed experiences that I strongly feel grieving parents need to know. I also want parents to know that science validates their spiritual intuitions, rather than debunking them as is often erroneously believed. My Mom, who had a powerful near death experience before she passed, always told me that there are no coincidences. I was privileged to be at her bedside while she was in a coma and the doctors were considering stopping her life support. She suddenly opened her eyes and turned to me and said "Incredible". She lapsed back into coma, but then made a full recovery and lived for a few more months, From then on she constantly admonished me "Melvin, there are no coincidences. Pay attention to your life". It was not a coincidence that I was Betty Eadie's Pediatrician for her grandchildren. Every day I am encouraged and inspired by her words of support for me.
5/16/2024 0 Comments If Spiritual Experiences Were Pills, They Would be Prescribed in Hospitals Everywhere5/16/2024 0 Comments FAQ: Why Did I Only See Darkness During My Near Death Experience? Was I in Hell? Q: I had an NDE but only experienced darkness. I didn’t see the light, no one came to greet me. Was I in Hell? Is there something wrong with me that no light appeared? A: Experiencing darkness as the only aspect of a near death experience simply means that the event was brief and only the initial stages were experienced. This is a good thing! The longer one is in the near-death state, the more likely it is that irreversible brain death will follow. The only essential characteristic of the near-death experience is that consciousness persists while the brain dies. In the case of comatose patients, consciousness awakens as the brain dies. This has been well documented in experimental studies of near-death states done by the US Military. They exposed fighter pilots to tremendous G forces to see at what point blood would stop flowing in the pilot’s brains. As the centrifuges they used accelerated, the pilots would lose consciousness, often have seizures and lose all muscle tone. Then, just as they are at the point of near death,, their consciousness returns and they become awake with an expanded sense of consciousness that extends beyond the body. As the brain dies, our mental model of reality dies with it. We no longer have sensory input from our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs. But we are still conscious. As one child told me, “I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t dead at all. Some part of me was still alive”. So the first stages of the near death experience, which is the dying experience, is darkness. Those who only experience darkness are fortunate as their near fatal event was brief and quickly resolved. We can see this sequence by the following child’s drawing of his experience. As he was dying, he said that “hands lifted him out of his body and plunged him into darkness. This darkness became a light, and then he enters into heaven which for him was a pup tent in a golden field and a world filled with rainbows.
 The most strident skeptics are often that way because they have had a personal world-shattering spiritual experience. Sometimes these experiences are so profound that they make them question everything they previously believed. So of course, they are going to ask hard questions. Since these questions are often based in fear of the unknown, they come across as angry and hostile. This is especially true when they have suffered the loss of a child. They can see my research as fairy tales designed to simply make them feel better but ultimately not true or real. The stakes are high for them. If my research is true, then a profound spiritual experience that they had previously dismissed might also be true. And all their previous assumptions about life and death might be false. One such skeptic was a Critical Care Nurse I had worked closely with for many years. After I published our research teams findings on near death experiences in the medical literature, I was invited to present my findings at Grand Rounds at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Afterwards, the doctors and other professors gathered around, fascinated by our research, and recounting their own experiences with patients. A frequent comment was that they had too heard spiritual visions from patients but previously had felt uncomfortable discussing them. Now there was a scientific framework to discuss them with patients. In other words, suddenly it was okay to talk about something that previously had been dismissed or trivialized. Except for this nurse. Her thin body quivered, and her face was pinched and angry as she pushed her way through the audience towards me. She stridently attacked me, in front of my colleagues, saying that my research was not scientific, that it meant nothing. I was taken aback, felt defensive, and didn’t know what to say. I stammered and started to repeat that the most prestigious medical journals had accepted our research as well as the Heads of the Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology and the Intensive Care Unit at Seattle Children’s. She just scoffed and turned her back on me. Listening to AngerFrom time to time, I would see her in the hallways. I knew her well, as she worked in the Intensive Care Unit. At first, I was defensive, even ducking into a patient’s room to avoid speaking to her. Yet as I listened beyond her anger, I came to realize that she was asking me important questions, the same questions we attempted to answer with our research. One day I was in the main lobby talking with some of the residents. nurses and medical students. I saw her bearing down on me, an intensity in her eyes, that made me think of a mother about to collar a badly behaved son. She was pushing people out of the way, without so much as an “excuse me”. I could feel my heart rate climbing and my palms were beginning to perspire. I knew that I had some explaining to do, but just didn’t know about what. “I have read all your papers in the medical journals” she said. “how do you know that these kids weren’t just having a reaction to morphine or valium. What about all the other drugs we give patients in the ICU”. I calmly explained that we studied patients who were given all the same drugs as those children who had had near death experiences, many times at much higher doses. But they weren’t near death. None of them had anything resembling a near death experience. “Okay, but how do you know they weren’t just making it all up? Maybe they just wanted to be on a talk show with the famous Dr. Morse. I have heard my patients tell all sorts of crazy stories about monsters chasing them with needles.” I remembered how Elizabeth Kubler Ross had counseled me to listen to angry people. “Often they push people away with their anger but remember that under that anger often is great hurt”. I looked at the nurse closely and saw the hurt in her eyes. Even tears. Skeptics are Often Struggling with Powerful Emotions:I took her to a bench and spoke calmly and lovingly to her. “We studied these patients long before I was the Dr. Morse on the Oprah Show. They tell amazingly consistent experiences which have little in common with Intensive Care Unit psychosis. I had the same questions you have. You know Don Tyler (Head of the Intensive Care Unit) and Jerry Milstein (Head of the Department of Neurology). They would never have put their name to our findings unless they were rock solid science.” But tell me, why is this so important to you? Tears came to her eyes as she told me her story. When her daughter was 14, she came down with leukemia. The two vowed to fight this illness with all the heart they could muster, but their best was not enough. During the next two years, she spend 20 weeks in the hospital. This was during a time her friends were worrying about dressing for the prom or what jeans to wear that day for school. “My daughter was wearing a wig and throwing up all day” said the nurse. After her third relapse, our oncologist took the mother aside and told her that her daughter had only a few weeks to live. “I wanted to spend as much quality time with her as possible. I knew in my heart it was hopeless, but I wanted her to have a peaceful death, that was the only gift I could give her” said the nurse. Unfortunately, that was not to be. As her daughter deteriorated, the team of doctors with life support equipment was called. The mother, as an Intensive Care Unit Nurse, knew their efforts would be futile, but didn’t know how to tell the doctors to just let her little girl die. For several hours the doctors and nurses put lines into her veins and tubes into her nose. When her heart stopped, they put paddles on her chest and shocked her back to life. When the mother gasped at what was happening, a nurse led her from the room. “Finally, when it was all over, they let me come back into the room. The entire resuscitation team left with their heads down, none could look me in the eye. They felt they had failed me as they had not been able to keep my daughter alive.”. As a Critical Care Physician, I knew how they felt. It is a horrible feeling, wanting to do everything possible, and yet knowing that even if we succeed, it is only temporary, that the battle had been lost long ago. My Daughter Came Back to Give Me a Message:The mother sat alone with her daughter and sobbed. She sat in silence. And then something shocking happened. Her daughter sat up and looked her mother in the eye. “She was alive. I know she was”, she said. “She squeezed my hand and said “Stop crying Mom. I’m okay now. I watched everything that happened and saw them take you out of the room. I’m okay Mom. I love you.” “I am sorry I came on so strong with you Dr. Morse, but I had to be sure your research was solid. For the past 10 months, I thought what happened to me was all a grief induced hallucination. I didn’t believe what my heart knew was true. But after you presented your research at Grand Rounds, suddenly I knew I wasn’t out of my mind with grief. I know what I saw as a nurse. After your lecture, I realized that my daughter came back for me for just a few seconds to give me that message. After hearing about near death experiences, and that science that supports them as real, I will never think about my daughter’s death the same way again.
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