0:04 It should be impossible to explain these kinds of experiences by just claiming the never proven assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of brain function. Well, here we are in the city of Velp, in the Netherlands, and we came here to visit Dr. Pim van Lommel. Pim has done extensive research in the field of Near-Death Experience. He's done it for more than ten years with the involvement of ten hospitals in the Netherlands. And the results of this research were published in The Lancet, a very prestigious medical journal. Nice meeting you. You should not expect patients to have memories. You should not expect patients to have any kind of consciousness as well, because the
0:52 brain doesn't function at all. It started with the Dutch version. Yeah... It's now the 29th print. It's still the largest study ever done and the only study with statistical analysis as well. You never got any funding for it. Really? You've really done this whole study, ten years, just out of curiosity, based on volunteer work? Evening, weekends and... taking some holidays. Wow. Science is asking questions with an open mind. I was asking a question with an open mind. Here you see, the heart stops - a cardiac arrest. The EEG changes after 5 seconds, it becomes like this. After 18 seconds, the EEG is flatlined as well.
1:38 The electroactivity of the brain has ceased. Without a brain and without eyes you could perceive, which is 360 degrees around. You can see details and an overview at the same moment. Consciousness is beyond time and beyond space. It's always everywhere, inside and outside. It's an old... It's an old English... It is an old English one. That's really nice... An old English rose. And we have to change. We have to expand science into post-materialist science. We have to change the paradigm to include subjective experiences.
2:26 Dr. Pim van Lommel, thank you very much for receiving us in your wonderful house. You're welcome. You're a former cardiologist, and for more than ten years, you were doing extensive NDE research with the involvement of ten hospitals in the Netherlands. And the results have been published in The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal that explores the latest high-quality research. You have also written the book "Consciousness Beyond Life", translated into 11 languages. More than 400,000 copies have been sold worldwide. And you're considered one of the leading authorities in the field of scientific research on NDE. And we hope that you can help us answer the following question: Is consciousness an epiphenomenon of brain activity?
3:11 - as many neuroscientists claim it to be. Or in other words, is consciousness a byproduct of brain activity? The answer is short. No. Thank you. The end of the interview. But we want to start with... maybe give us a bit of a sense... How did you get involved in the NDE research and why, actually? Because many doctors, even today dismiss it. They say it's either a hallucination or it's some weird religious experience. So, why you - trained as a cardiologist in the materialist paradigm - got involved in it in the first place? Well, I was as a young doctor a materialist cardiologist, and when I started to work in a cardiac care unit in 1969 as a young rotating intern, I was working in one of the first
4:02 coronary care units in the Netherlands. Before 1967, all patients died of cardiac arrest. So modern CPR techniques like defibrillation and accidental chest compression became available in 1968-69. So we had a patient in the new cardiac care unit, about 44 years old, I think, and he had a cardiac arrest because of a myocardial infarction. And we started to resuscitate him. We had several shocks on him, and after about 4 minutes, he regained consciousness. We were very happy as a resuscitation (team), it was all new. I was a doctor in charge. It was all new for us. But the patient came back and the patient was
4:49 extremely disappointed. He told me about a tunnel and a light and music and a beautiful landscape. And I never forget. I've forgotten this event, but I never did anything with it. I was a young doctor starting my specialization, had a young family: a family with young children. So. Only in 1986, did I read a book by George Ritchie "Return From Tomorrow", where he describes his very deep Near-Death Experience as a medical student in 1943. He died from double pneumonia, and there were no antibiotics available for this medical student. So he died. And his body was covered with a sheet, and the nurse was so upset that this young medical
5:37 student had died that he was able to persuade the doctor to give him an injection of adrenaline right into his heart, which was quite uncommon at that time. But after 9 minutes of death, he came back. He had a problem finding his body back because it was covered with the sheet. But he has his hand under the sheet, where he saw his fraternity ring: "So, that must be me!", and he went in. But he had a very impressive Near-Death Experience with all the aspects we know now: he had also the dark regions as well, out-of-body experience in a place hundreds of miles away from where it happened. And he later went there to see if it really was the place where he'd been. He had been there as well during the period of death.
6:22 So I was so... and I had never heard about the Near-Death Experience before. I'd never read the book by Raymond Moody "Life After Life," which was published in 1975. But from reading that book, I started to ask patients who had survived a cardiac arrest, if they could remember something from the period of unconsciousness from the period of cardiac arrest. And within two years, out of 50 patients who had survived cardiac arrest, 12 patients shared their NDE with me. And that was the moment that my scientific curiosity started to grow because I had learned at university, as we all learn still at school and university, that consciousness is the product of brain function.
7:08 If we know of a cardiac arrest where you're deeply unconscious: there are no body reflexes, no brain cerebral functions, no breathing, and I come to it later. Then it should be impossible to have memories of an enhanced consciousness with memories, emotions, cognition, with a positive perception out and above the body. It should be impossible. There had been just retrospective studies. And people thought it was: side effects of drugs, hallucinations, side effects of neurotransmitters, dreams, trying to be interested, etc.. So, they were not real scientific explanations at all. That's why we started a prospective study of survivors of cardiac arrest.
7:55 When? When was it the moment that you really went from being convinced that consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity to somebody who's saying - no, that's not the case? Was it a specific moment? It took years. Years? It took years. So we did a prospective study of four years, and maybe interviewed 344 consecutive survivors of cardiac arrest in 10 Dutch hospitals. So I spoke to a lot of patients as well. But besides that, I spoke to other patients with Near-Death Experience as well. And we had a longitudinal study, which taped interviews, 2 years and 8 years with all late survivors of cardiac arrest, who had an NDE with a batch control group of patients,
8:44 who survived cardiac arrest without an NDE. Batch control was: the same age, the same gender, and the same time interval. And it was about the transformation. People have a transformation when they have an NDE. And we didn't know if that transformation is due to cardiac arrest or due to the Near-Death Experience, which at that time we did study it in the prospective study. So I've met many, many people, and during the course of years, I rather became convinced, also by reading articles and books, etc., that it should be impossible to explain this kind of experiences
9:29 by just claiming the never proven assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of brain function. It's still a never proven hypothesis, but everybody believes it's true. It has never been proven. I prepared for myself, a list of possible explanations from the point of view of mainstream science. So if we just explore that. If I go through the list. Tell me: yes or no...or is it maybe an explanation after all. I can start with the results of our prospective study. Uh-huh... So we wanted to know if there was a good explanation for the cause of a Near-Death Experience.
10:16 And we compared 18% of patients with a Near-Death Experience and 82% of patients with a cardiac arrest with no memories at all. First of all, we were looking for a lack of oxygen in the brain - anoxia. So that lack of oxygen could be an explanation; people have been saying before. But there was no difference at all if you had a cardiac arrest of 3 minutes or 8 minutes - didn't matter at all. If you have been unconscious for 5 minutes or 3 weeks in a coma - didn't matter at all. If you have a short cardiac arrest and then induced cardiac arrest in electrophysiological studies in the cath lab - didn't matter at all. They were always resuscitated within 30 minutes.
11:03 A complicated CPR with a lot of medication didn't matter at all. All patients that I was studying had been unconscious because of a lack of oxygen in the brain. Just 18% reported Near-Death Experience and it was no difference at all in the severity of anoxia at all between the two groups. So we could exclude anoxia of the brain as an explanation for the cause of Near-Death Experience. Then you had the psychological explanation - fear of death. You could exclude it because most people who have a cardiac arrest don't know that they will have a cardiac arrest. So they don't have fear at all. You have a fear because you have a myocardial infarction. It's also the study of Bruce Greyson, when they are interviewed later they say:
11:50 What happens now? All doctors and nurses are around me? But why are they here? So they don't know about the cardiac arrest. Then they give a medication. There was no difference at all between giving medication with and without a Near-Death Experience. Prior knowledge - that you know that these experiences are possible - no difference at all. Religion: Christian, Muslim, atheist - didn't matter at all. Gender didn't matter at all. Education didn't matter at all. Age did matter: the group who were younger had more Near-Death Experiences. So, age may play a role. Women had more elements they reported, they had deeper NDEs.
12:40 But to have an explanation for the cause of the Near-Death Experience, we could exclude all the existing theories. And then you have the problem - Near-Death Experience is a subjective experience. So how can you prove a subjective experience? That's why we did the longitudinal study about the transformation. And we saw that the main transformation is - no fear of death anymore. And the new insight was important in life. This is empathy, compassion, and love - first, towards yourself, acceptance of your own negative aspects. Acceptance or empathy, compassion towards others, and towards nature
13:26 because they are connected with everybody else still. That's why they call it also the experience of oneness. So, it's a kind of life-insight experience, the Near-Death Experience. And the third aspect is enhanced intuitive sensitivity. That they know what other people think and other people feel. That they know about future events. They know when someone will die: his mother died last week; when someone will have cancer. You cannot know it but they will know it because of enhanced intuitive sensitivity, which is quite a problem because they don't know it, and they don't want to have this. And what you found out is that just only the patients with Near-Death Experience had this classical transformation. Which is the objective proof for the subjective experience.
14:14 Because you can prove with the questionnaires that really the transformation happened; so that's the objective proof of subjective experience. And you can link the transformation directly to NDE, not to meditation or use of psychedelics or any other... It was just the group of patients we had. They had a cardiac arrest. It was the only group we interviewed. You know what amazes me... Because, as I said, I made a list for myself, right? So possible causes from the point of view of mainstream science: hallucination - number one, release of neurochemicals - number two. About hallucinations... Yeah. You need a functioning brain to have a hallucination. Uh-huh.
14:59 Your brain doesn't function at all during cardiac arrest. So you can exclude hallucinations. Yeah, but then people say, hey, okay, but, you know, cells remain viable for hours, not for minutes - what people think. And that's why conscious consciousness lingers longer there. So linking, therefore, consciousness to matter, to the body. Right? So there are various arguments... But... Shall I answer this? Yes, go ahead, please. Well, one living cell or surviving cell doesn't explain consciousness at all. To experience waking consciousness, so as how we sit here, you need a functioning system of exchange of information and energy between all cortical
15:45 neural centers, which is the global neuronal workspace. That's what you need, according to modern neuroscience, to experience consciousness. And we know from cardiac arrest, and we may come to it back later, there is no function of the cortex at all left. So you have to initiate CPR within 5 to 10 minutes; cardiac arrest is the first stage of dying. And when you don't initiate CPR, when you don't defibrillate for ventricular fibrillation, people will die because of irreversible damage to the brain. And we know from other studies that
16:31 there could be some cells living, especially glial cells, living hours after cardiac arrest. But it does not explain at all the possibility of consciousness because you need a functional global workspace for it. And perhaps it's now a moment also to explain what we know from the brain function during cardiac arrest because that's a very important aspect. We have also...have been done studies for induced cardiac arrest, in patients who have an ICD - an internal defibrillator. And in the first years, we did threshold testing. That means people getting ICD and then you induce cardiac arrest to find a good threshold to resuscitate it.
17:18 Nowadays it's different. But they did this kind of studies: induced cardiac arrest in ICD patients with an EEG. They also did studies with induced cardiac arrest in animals. And what you see - and it's the same as what we see in cardiac arrest patients in the cardiac ward and in coronary care units - you lose consciousness within seconds. There are no body reflexes anymore, the body is just... which is the function of the cortex. There are no brain stem reflexes there anymore. The gag reflexes; you put a finger in someone else's throat. The corneal reflex. Fixed light dilated pupils, which are all brain stem reflexes - are gone. There's no breathing anymore: the breathing centers are close to the brainstem -
18:05 they stop breathing. So the clinical findings are loss of all brain functions. And then you have the EEG measurement, which is the measurement of the electrical activity of the cortex of the brain. You see a flatline EEG within 10 to 20 seconds. There's no patient resuscitated successfully within 20 seconds, always 2-3-4 minutes. And we also know that people who have a cardiac arrest outside the hospital, then the mortality is more than 90% because you're not within 5 to 10 minutes of adequate CPR. So finding some cells... There has been a study done in Holland that they found after ten days of death, still
18:56 somewhere in the brain a cell that you could not resuscitate, but it was not really dead. But it doesn't say anything about consciousness at all. They could grow a stem cell out of it, something like that. That's what I heard... Yeah. Cells are different and neurons are very receptive for oxygen deprivation. When you have a muscle, you can block the blood flow to your arm for 30 seconds. It does matter. When you throw it up, the muscle cells are still there. And also the cells of the heart can survive minutes to, perhaps an hour or more. Not all cells will die.
19:43 But the brain cells are very susceptible for the deprivation of oxygen. But, you know, some doctors now claim that with this new research, they will be able to resuscitate people and bring them back completely hours after the clinical death. Do you believe in that? No, I don't believe in it. What we do now is, when people have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and they come in a coma to the hospital, you put hypothermia of the brain, or even of the body, you put a kind of artificial circulation with cold blood. Try to prevent irreversible damage to the brain.
20:29 But I don't know how many patients are coming back in full, with full consciousness, with a fully functioning body. I doubt it. We know that when people are drowning in the cold sea, in cold water, or have a cardiac arrest in the snow, they can survive longer because cells will not have irreversible death... damage because of the cold temperature. But again the survival of some cells is not the same as a fully functioning brain, which you need to have waking consciousness. There is one more argument I heard, and I am wondering about your opinion about this.
21:19 There was a lecture by a neuroscientist, and she was saying that even with the flat line EEG, we don't know what happens in subcortical deeper regions of the brain and brainstem. Right. Well, what see... What do you think? We also had induced cardiac arrest in animals... Mm-hmm. And they did brainstem stimulation: there was no stimulation possible at all, which means that the brainstem didn't function anymore also in animals. You cannot do it in humans. So we know that in cardiac arrest also the brainstem cells stopping. But also from the clinical findings: no brainstem reflexes. How can you talk about a fictional brainstem when there are no brainstem reflexes? When there is no breathing at all?
22:05 Because the breathing center is close to the brainstem. So they desperately try to find an explanation for their own dogma. What I told you before - is the never proven assumption that consciousness is a product of brain function. But the problem is for them - for most of scientists, philosophers, and psychologists - is that because of the study about the Near-Death Experience in patients who survived a cardiac arrest, we have to reconsider this never proven assumption. Because people have no brain function at all. Still a percentage of ...between 10% to 20% of those patients reported enhanced consciousness;
22:52 far more consciousness than they have normally as waking consciousness. It's a different kind of consciousness. It's memories from early childhood and with emotions and cognition. So we usually don't have memories from early childhood. And when you have the life review with memories, then you're all connected with the consciousness of others. You relive your whole life. So when you took some playing thing from your little sister of five years old, you know, you feel how sad she was. Because you connect with other people as well in your life review. So it's not just a memory. It's reliving. When people have a cardiac arrest of 5 minutes, they can talk for one week because everything in this life review happens at the same time.
23:38 The moment you focus on something or someplace, you will be there, where you have future events as well. So you are in a dimension of consciousness where past and future are available. At the same time. At the same time, So it's beyond time and beyond space. That's why we call it non-locality. We know this. And everything is connected as well. Since we know this terminology from quantum physics. Quantum physics is not an explanation for non-local consciousness, but it's an analogy to understand what people try to tell us because there are no words for it. It's such a problem to put your experience into words.
24:25 It's an ineffable experience. So that's the problem and the challenge as well. But when you hear about the kind of consciousness, they have enhanced consciousness at the moment that the brain doesn't function at all, it's a paradoxical occurrence of enhanced consciousness that does not fit into the dogma that consciousness is a byproduct. You should not expect patients to have memories. You should not expect patients to have any kind of consciousness as well. Because the brain doesn't function at all or hardly functions at all. And they are still the same. You know, my biggest difficulty with the mainstream explanations so far for NDE in science, is
25:13 how do you explain the fact that some people (not everybody), some people who allegedly... well when they come back, they tell the story of everything that they heard and saw happening in the room while they were resuscitated. So how is that possible? If it's a hallucination, how is it possible that people heard and saw things happening while they were, yeah, brain-dead or...clinical Brain death? It's a clinical death. Yeah, clinical death, not brain dead. Cessation of consciousness because of lack of circulation and breathing, that's a clinical death. And you have to resuscitate and start CPR within 5 to 10 minutes, otherwise, people will die. And what you ask about is the out-of-body experience. The out-of-body experience is when you have this cardiac arrest,
25:58 people can have the possibility to have perception out and above the lifeless body, from a position from the ceiling. And they see people, doctors, nurses, the CPR. And then they see a body. Oh, that's my body. They don't feel connected with it. They can see from above how the resuscitation room looks like. Blind people can have perception during an NDE, even blind people from birth. In the fifties, from the last century, babies who were born after, let's say, 30 weeks got 100% oxygen. And they all got blind because of an atrophy of the eyeball and the 'nervus opticus'.
26:51 You don't have pictures when your dream when you are born blind. And it's the first time in the NDE that patients... and I described it in my book as well, and also in the book written by Ken Ring "Mindsight". The first time they saw a body with hair and then they said, that must be me because I recognize a ring. But then they went through the ceiling of the hospital and for the first time, they saw trees and light and... It's not seeing with your eyes. But it's perceiving by your mind. I know someone who had very strong glasses. Without glasses, she couldn't see anything. And then during a cardiac arrest, she could see everything. And then she saw her glasses lying beside her bed. And without the glasses, she couldn't see anything, just some misty, foggy sight.
27:42 So it's when you have an out-of-body experience, you have perception beyond your body, at the moment your brain doesn't function at all. But you cannot explain it. When you say: I've tried to convince someone else that it is a product of brain function. The other thing is - who is seeing? When you are looking around with your eyes then the electromagnetic information, waves, come into your eye and into your retina. Then the electromagnetic information goes through your optical nerve to your occipital lobe. There is another electromagnetic activation, activity. But who is seeing?
28:29 It's not your brain. It's not your eye. It's your consciousness, who uses the brain and the eye as instruments to see. And without the brain, without the eyes, you could perceive, which is 360 degrees around. You can see details and an overview at the same moment. You see it from a position out and above your body. You cannot explain this by stating that consciousness is a product of brain function. I particularly liked the example in one of your lectures or in the book you also describe it, about the man who lost his dentures. Would you mind just telling it again? Because it's just... It's hilarious. Really. I mean... This cannot be a hallucination, can it be?
29:16 There have been two. There's a chapter in a book about Near-Death Experience. There's another book "The Soul Does Not Die" by IANDS. And it's about more than 200 cases, which have been corroborated. These veridical perceptions have been corroborated by doctors, nurses, and family members about the content and the time of these out-of-body experiences. So it's conclusive that it has been at the moment - there was no brain function, there was no heartbeat. But this patient that we're talking about, was about 40 years old man, who was found in a meadow unconscious by some people, passersby. And they started to do some, well, simple chest compressions, and they called for an ambulance.
30:02 And when he was brought into a hospital, coronary ward, cardiac ward, it was more than 30 minutes later. There been in the ambulance, trying to do some resuscitation and defibrillation - didn't succeed at all. When he came into the hospital, he was already... his body was cold, was blue, like the... Just a dead body. No breathing, no circulation, widen pupils didn't react to light. So the nurse who saw him first tried to give him extra oxygen, by intubation; to give him a tube, to give more oxygen in the lungs.
30:50 And then he found out that he had still dentures in his mouth. So he took out the dentures, upper dentures, and put them somewhere on a crash cart. They did it for 1,5 hours before he had blood pressure and circulation again. It's a long time but he was young. ...But he was still on artificial respiration, he was intubated, he was in a deep coma. So he was transported to the intensive care unit to continue artificial respiration for one week. He was one week in a coma. Then he came back after one week on a cardiac ward. He was just in the cardiac ward when the nurse came in for medication and he saw him and he said: "You know where my dentures are!" He was flabbergasted. He said: "Well, you know..." You were there when I was coming to the hospital.
31:37 You took out my dentures, you put it on this... covered with all those bottles on it, and there was sliding underneath, and there you put my teeth." And he could describe the resuscitation room, where he came in a coma and he left in a coma. He could exactly describe the resuscitation room from a position out and above his body. He could see his body, he could recognize the nurses and doctors, who had been busy with the CPR. So. It shouldn't be possible at all, as there are more cases like this. Yeah, more cases like this. But this is really in your practice, right? It's not... it's not a book that you read or in the... I know this, once, back in the early nineties, there was I think it was
32:24 ABC, NBC, or I don't know which company, which TV company from the U.S. They interviewed the nurse as well, but he's now... He doesn't want to be interviewed anymore. But sure... I can imagine. But in the book, "The Soul Doesn't Does Not Die", it is also extensively written about this case. I mean, it's just amazing, mind-boggling, right? And after... after that, you go on and say: "No, consciousness is a byproduct of brain function." Well, the problem is. For most neuroscientists - they're frightened. Frightened? They are frightened to lose ... They are frightened that what they have been telling and what they have been studying, should be wrong.
33:10 They lose their position at the university. They lose their research money. And they still have a lot of research money to look into the brain somewhere to find consciousness. And research is important about the brain function, but not for looking for consciousness in the brain. You will never find consciousness in the brain anymore. So they can be... Sometimes be very aggressive, or being a debunker because they're really frightened to lose their position. And I know from professors personally telling me: "You could be right!" But officially said: "This is total nonsense." Until they retire and then they say:
33:56 "It could be right." So that's... it's the position they are in as well. So I understand why they react like this. I understand it. It's fear. When you started your research you know, the majority, the vast majority still is, but then it was over 90%, I would say if not more, wouldn't touch this topic with the five-meter pole, you know. Because it would ruin their career. It would ruin their, you know, jobs, opportunities, family maybe, friends' circles. Yeah. How was it for you? Science is asking questions with an open mind. I was asking questions with an open mind. And it took some time to accept that I was wrong in the dogma I'd learned at university.
34:48 But I was not interested at all in the opinion of others. There were only a few specialists in the hospital who were interested and asked me about it, but most didn't ask me anything. That was enough to know, for me, that they were not interested at all. But we had no funding at all for the research. Ten years of research we did on weekends, in the evenings, taking holidays, and training volunteers for the longitudinal study. Everything we did on our own. No funding at all. There was no funding for such a study, and it was also a challenge to find it. When The Lancet published it. People were surprised.
35:34 And later in England, when I gave a lecture, I met someone who knew someone on the Editorial Committee of The Lancet, who were discussing our article; over the Near-Death Experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands. And the problem was that the methodology scientifically, was totally good. That was alright. But the subject - the Near-Death Experience - that was a little bit of a challenge. So they said, well, we have to publish it because the methodology is right. It's empirical science. But some people were surprised that it was published. It was a worldwide story. It was on the front page of all papers. I just came from India and The Indian Times, I had it in the airplane,
36:25 two-thirds of the front page was about our study. So that was a worldwide story as well. So you - as a cardiologist, as a researcher, as a scientist... do you feel that you've done this, you left no stone unturned from the point of view of traditional mainstream science to explain, to make sense of it? No. There is no more street that we could explore that would give us an explanation. I've been reading everything, which was possible at the time and was discussing it with a lot of people as well worldwide. And there was no discussion left. I just wanted to understand that people had an experience of what should be impossible according to our current paradigm. It should be impossible.
37:11 I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between the consciousness and the body because if I think about it, the phenomena like NDE, terminal lucidity, (you also know that right?), and for example, donor personality transfer (another topic, which is also interesting). They sort of point in the direction that consciousness is sort of independent of the functioning of the brain, right? So they point in that direction. Now, at the same time, we know that brain trauma produces either loss of cognitive abilities or savant abilities. And it sort of hints at some sort of imprint or connection between consciousness and body.
37:57 So it's a bit of a paradox, right? On the one hand, we say - consciousness functions outside of the brain. At the same time, these situations or occurrences tell us: no, but there is a relationship, there is a connection clearly between body and consciousness. So have you, for yourself... Oh yes. That's a good question. explained that... somehow? Yes. Well, the question is when you watch television, is the program a product of your TV set? Nope. When you have your computer and you go to the internet to the iCloud with 1 billion websites or 1 billion YouTube films. You input some code in it, you receive a website or a YouTube film.
38:43 Is it a product of your computer? No. So the computer or the TV set or your telephone... At this very moment, now, there are 1 billion websites going through us, through the walls. And 200-300 thousand telephone calls go through us. It's electromagnetic informational waves. But you need a functional instrument to receive it. That's the same with consciousness. Consciousness is beyond time and beyond space. It's always everywhere, inside and outside. But you receive it when you have a functioning brain. And the brain has a facilitating function and not a producing function to experience consciousness. It is also a kind of filter. There's a lot of information, but it filters it also a bit.
39:36 It's a transceiver: it transmits information from your body, from your senses to your consciousness. It receives information from the consciousness into your body. So, your brain is an instrument. When your TV set is damaged, your program will not be fair or will get lost. When you have brain damage, the function of the brain is damaged. So your waking consciousness will be damaged. When you have Alzheimer's, your waking consciousness is damaged, but your real non-local consciousness cannot be damaged at all because it's over there, in another dimension... without time, without space. So what you see, there is a connection between the function of the brain and consciousness.
40:27 Where's your consciousness when you're asleep? There's always consciousness, but you don't receive it because your brain is in a kind of mode that you don't receive it. When you have general anesthesia, there's still activity in the brain, but you don't receive consciousness. When you're asleep, deep sleep has a lot of activity in the brain, but you don't receive waking consciousness. So you need a functioning instrument to receive waking consciousness. And you have a lot of examples where this... You could prove that say, you mentioned some of it, I will mention more: the end-of-life experience when people are dying. Then you can have periods of enhanced consciousness
41:12 that they see deceased relatives, they see deceased parents, or a partner. They see light, they see a landscape, they feel love or whatever. The difference with the NDE is that they are in two dimensions at the same time, so they can discuss what they've seen. But usually in hospices and hospitals, it is seen as a hallucination or terminal problems or side effects of drugs. But there have been studies done in Switzerland by a lady who went each day to see old patients, listening and making music. And she said, more than 90% of dying patients have end-of-life experiences.
41:58 So they are already a little bit out, and then they are back in the body. Then, what you said - terminal lucidity, especially in patients with Alzheimer's disease. When you know how a brain looks like when you die of Alzheimer's, there's just some stuff left but no brain. And there have been a lot of examples of patients with terminal lucidity. People who don't recognize their children for years or even in a coma...Or, don't speak for days or weeks, at once sat up in bed, look at the children, call them by name, say 'think you' and die. Which is impossible, when you really know how the brain functions at the end-stage of
42:50 Alzheimer's disease. They have this consciousness experience around the deathbed when people die in a distance. When you're at home, at 4:00 you wake up and think of your father. And say: "Oh, I miss my father!". And the next morning you get a telephone call that your father died at that very moment. Pre-mortal experience. And sometimes you really are taken by them or you see them as a being of light. So they show their Near-Death Experience as well. Then you have a shared death experience. That is when you are at a deathbed of a loved-one, there's sometimes the room changes, you see a lot of light. You see a light bulb go out of their body, out of their head.
43:38 But you don't see it, you perceive it. You don't see it with your eyes. Not everybody will perceive it. And sometimes they're taken with the death of loved ones. So you go through a tunnel to the light, sometimes see really even a life review of deceased relatives. And then you're back in the body, at the bed of just died loved-one there. So you're a normal person who is taken as a matter of, out of love for the people who are dying, to show them... They show you their death experience. And then the next thing is the after-death communication. Then you are in contact with the consciousness of deceased relatives in the first days, weeks, or months after the death of a loved one.
44:25 In the Netherlands, about 2 million people have after-death communication. In Europe, 125 million people. In the U.S., 100 million. But usually, people don't talk about it. They say they had a dream because usually, it happens in sleep. Because when you sleep, the threshold of consciousness is lower. So people who have died can easily contact you because they make the decision to contact you. But it's not a sleep, not a dream, because they remember it always. It's life-changing. They can see them, feel them, touch them, smell them, communicate, or have communication with them. It's different. But then you know that the consciousness of a deceased loved one is still there, somewhere.
45:13 So consciousness, when you have contact with the consciousness of the deceased loved one, consciousness cannot be a product of brain function. They've died, and usually, they come here, usually, they come just once and say: "Don't worry, it's good with me." But sometimes they... I know a story of children who have died. And then for years, they come back where there's a problem with the man or the woman. The child who has died comes back to help them or to advise them. So there's still a connection with the loved ones as well. So all these examples are... Let's say hard to explain by 'consciousness being a product of brain function'.
45:59 I would say impossible. I always remain open, of course... Then the discussion is: it's not science at all to discuss these things. And then I'd say: What do you mean by science? I told you before, for me, the definition of science is asking a question with an open mind. But people who talk about science, they talk about materialist science. And in materialist science, only that is true that you can objectify, what you can measure, what you can duplicate, or what you can falsify. Then it is true. Now what you feel and what you think, your consciousness, you cannot objectify, you cannot duplicate, you cannot measure, and you cannot falsify.
46:47 Consciousness - the essence of who you are, what you feel, what you think is beyond our current materialist science. So they call it an illusion. But it's the essence of who we are. And we have to change. We have to expand science into post-materialist science. We have to change the paradigm to include subjective experiences. Materialist science has done a lot of good. But it's not enough for subjective experiences, so we have to expand science into post-materialist science. Now, you say the primary or the key change that needs to occur is that science should include subjective experiences into the scientific method. And do you think that perhaps we then are running a risk of losing science
47:38 altogether because we are opening a sort of Pandora's box, right? Because currently , science is... It's about objectivity, it's about reproducibility. And, you know, the scientific method worked well for us. That's what any scientist would tell. That's why we achieved what we've achieved. We are just not sharing opinions. The moment we include subjective, it becomes my opinion versus your opinion. So we'll destroy something, which worked for decades for humanity. What would you say to that? It's not instead of materialist science but it's expanding science. So the materialist aspect of science is still important. But it's not enough. So you expand science to include subjective experiences, which is the essence of who we are.
48:24 This is a totally different approach when you realize that everything has its subjective aspects as well. When you realize that consciousness is fundamental, that everything comes from consciousness, and that your body comes from consciousness. Plants have subjective aspects. Animals have as well. The planet Earth has subjective aspects because everything is formed by consciousness together with information and energy. So it all has some kind of subjective aspects. And you cannot talk about it when you have just the material aspects of it because you exclude a lot of essential. And a living being is much more than just matter.
49:10 A living being has a body. But a living being is conscious as well, especially human beings, but also animals, plants, and whatever. So when you talk about a living being, then it's more than just matter. So you have to include consciousness, subjective aspects, to understand living beings. A friend of mine sent me a quote by Nikola Tesla. Yeah, I know. The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. Would you agree to that? What could science that really invests in studying non-local consciousness lead to
49:57 in your view? I totally agree with him, with this quote. I think, is very important. The only thing that is not that positive. Let's say quantum physics came in 1910, about that, and it took about 70 years to be accepted worldwide because it was a new paradigm. And I think the paradigm of consciousness being a non-materialist aspect will take time to get accepted. And Max Planck has said, the founder of quantum physics has said: A new idea will not be easily accepted by convincing scientists. But you have to wait until they die. And the new generation will grow up and think it's totally, totally easy to understand.
50:47 And the younger generation, which is much more open for the new approach to science, the new approach to consciousness than the older generation; they're still in their dogma. What I call, would like to call - 'willful ignorance'. 'Prefer not to know'. And it's also a lot of prejudice. And it is also the same as neuroscientists, a lot of prejudice and willful ignorance. Because if it could be true, the other theory, your world will collapse. And that's frightening, isn't it? And especially if you graduated, your thesis (you wrote), you published books about... within this specific framework. I never will try to convince people. I just come with the facts and have to think about it. And when they don't want to accept it - it's their problem.
51:34 It's not my problem. We play our role, right? And we hope that somehow the impact is there for other people to receive it. If they want to know about it. And that's where it starts. And the younger population is much better for it. Yeah. But I think NDE is becoming less of a taboo already, in my feeling. Oh Yes. If you look back a couple of, I don't know, ten years or so, you know. I mean, to begin with, NDE is a fairly recent term, right? It was coined in 1975 or something. Yes. And we are... gradually... I am now 86, so I'm doing it now for 37 years. Yeah. And it's more accepted. Also, among doctors, I think. The most important aspect of Near-Death Experience is the study
52:22 prospect (study) of survivors of cardiac arrest because then we know that consciousness does not... Can't be a product of brain function, because the brain doesn't function at all. But there are a lot of other circumstances that Near-Death Experiences can occur. Let's say, a critical medical situation like lots of blood(loss) in complicated childbirth, or a coma by a traffic accident, or cerebrovascular problems, near-drowning in children. But you can also have this kind of enhanced consciousness experience in meditation, in isolation: shipwrecks, astronauts. You can have it in severe depression.
53:07 Just walking in nature you can have the same experiences. End-of-life experiences - what I told you. Fear-Death Experiences when you have an impending traffic accident. When you see on the road there's a car passing the other car. You say, well, this will be in the end a mountaineering accident. Then you get an out-of-body experience, have a life review etc., and then it went just well. So Fear-Death you can have as well. So not always you have to have a critical medical situation to have this kind of experience of enhanced consciousness. But for the scientific aspect, it's important to study patients with a Near-Death Experience in cardiac arrest.
53:52 I like your quote from D.A.Hammarskjöld: Yeah. "Our ideas about death define how we live our life." Yeah. And for me, it's definitely true because many years ago, I watched a documentary with Dr. Eben Alexander. And my life was on a completely different trajectory. And after I watched that, I was like: "Wow!", you know? And you don't think about your next career move or a bigger car or bigger house. You start thinking - what is this life all about, you know? It's not about the toys, right, in life? It must be something bigger to this picture. But what needs to happen for real change to occur in the hearts and minds of people? Not only scientists but in general, to do this paradigm shift.
54:38 From consumerism, you know, from materialism. Most people still believe that death is the end of who we are: ... there's nothing left. If you have this idea then you live in this world, then this life will be everything. Then it's about power, about money, about a big car, about a young body, about a lot of clothes, about whatever; just external factors. They don't think about the future of our planet. Because they will be gone. So when you know that there is a continuity of consciousness after the death of the body. That consciousness has always been there; before birth and after death.
55:24 That consciousness is the essence of who we are. That everything that we perceive is a product of our consciousness. What we call reality - is a subjective reality based on the state of consciousness we have: when you're in love - the world is beautiful, but you're depressed - the world is awful. And it's the same world. So it's a subjective aspect of your consciousness, how you experience it. So it starts with consciousness. So you have to change your consciousness to change the world. But you cannot change someone else. You cannot change the world. You can only change yourself. That is when you realize that the essence of who you are is still important to change things. It has an eternal aspect.
56:10 It's all about love. Everything is connected: what you do to others will come to you back. Positive things and negative things will come back to you because everything is connected. How you treat other people will come back to you. How you treat animals and plants and nature will come back to you as well. So when you change the way you treat others, it will be better for the world as a whole. How did it impact your life? Your life. Was it a gradual change? Or just like that, one day you woke up and say: "That's it, I understand." No, no. It was a gradual change. My wife is very open as well. She started with physiotherapy, but then she did Tai Chi and Qigong. She does acupressure and then she did yoga.
56:59 The practice was in the attic. We have a huge attic. It's sort of around ten patients could be there as well for her. She knows a lot about the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. But we've been in Tibet. We've read a lot about Tibetan Buddhism, the Vedas, Upanishads, Gnostic Christianity, whatever. Uh-huh. I started to read the Bible. I had never read the Bible as a child. I was not, had not any religious education at all. So it changed a lot. So my wife is a strict vegetarian. Here at home, we're vegetarian. In a restaurant, sometimes I eat some fish, but we're just vegetarians.
57:47 We are eating biological dynamic food based on Anthroposophy. We have here a center, where each Saturday about 15 families come for vegetables, from a biological dynamic farm close by here. It brings vegetables for about 15 families. They do it already for 25 years. We love the garden. We love nature; always try to be there in nature each time, walking. We have silence in the house, always silence. Just when we want to listen to music - we do it. But mostly it's just silence: I work in silence, I think in silence, I read in silence. So that's the way we live now. A lot outside, a lot in nature; in the morning we hear the birds.
58:38 And I'll never be able to live in a city. Sounds great, actually. But so we feel privileged. Yes. I mean, we're grateful to have two children and they're wonderful. We have five grandchildren. They're doing wonderful. So we're just grateful each day. We live by day and day. What is the most important insight you could share with people from your life, from your research, from your own learnings? I think the most important thing to realize is that everything it's about love: love towards yourself, love towards others, love towards the planet, love towards animals... Because we are connected. We're always connected here in this life. And we are connected when we die as well.
59:26 We are always connected in a non-local conscious realm we are always connected as well. So the way you live changes everything. Should try to change the way you live. And it is also by changing your consciousness. It's about love. Interconnectedness. Empathy. Compassion. Nature. And how do you yourself see death? What is death then in your view? I don't think I'm afraid of death. Perhaps people with NDE have 100% no fear. I think I have 98% no fear at all.
1:00:11 I'm just curious. I'm just curious to know. That's it. Wonderful. That's the motto of your life: 'I'm just curious' ...about NDE... I am just curious... I think it is a great attitude to life, it's fantastic. Enjoy each day. Exactly. Tomorrow I can be dead, you too, everybody. Everybody. Anybody can be. Enjoy life, each day you can, and be happy. And be grateful...That's it. Dr. Pim van Lommel, thank you very much for this interview. You're welcome. Are we already finished? Yes, I think so. No more questions left? We just started... no, we can... Let's do it again!
