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Aug. 2, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
53:52
Edition 473 - Jim Bruton

TV man and engineer Jim Bruton on his a-typical NDE... described in his book "The In Between"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being on my journey, coming along with me on it.
Thank you for all of the emails that you've been sending in recently, especially through the months of lockdown.
It's nice to hear your stories and whatever you're going through at the moment.
And you tell me your stories, good and not so good.
You have my best thoughts coming in your direction, and thank you for the good thoughts you've sent me.
Your emails mean a great deal to me.
You can get in touch with me through the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link for messages, and then you can email me from there.
And when you get in touch, just shoot the breeze or give me a guest suggestion.
Tell me what you think of the show, whatever you want to do.
That's great.
And I do get to see all of the emails that come in.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
The guest on this edition is somebody who he says had a near-death experience.
His name is Jim Bruton.
I think he's had a certain amount of coverage in the US lately.
So I wanted to bring him to our audience, which is international, and of course in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, because I think his story is one that will make you sit down and contemplate your life.
You tell me what you think.
So I'm not going to talk too much now at the beginning of this because I think I've said all there is to be said.
Weather report.
Nothing to report on the weather, really.
It's, you know, kind of mild because it's summertime.
It's a bit cloudy and a bit sunny.
That's about it, really.
So no weather report this time, apart from that.
That's all you're getting.
Let's cross to Connecticut in the U.S. now, and Jim Bruton is there with a story of a remarkable near-death experience.
Jim, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Hi, Howard.
That was great.
This is a great springboard into the rest of the show.
Well, look, you have had an amazing life.
It's all in your book, and we'll talk intensively about that.
Talk to me about you first, then, because I said that you were involved in television, not only documentaries for which you've won awards, but news as well.
So talk to me about life as it was up to the point when you had that near-death experience.
Sure.
I think a good way to approach it is to, you know, in looking for the thread that originates in childhood and, as you say, takes a turn at the near-death experience.
As a child, I was just perpetually curious about everything and had a really vivid imagination.
I was interested in things like, you know, like science fiction and early aviation because my father was a pilot and also world travel and filming animals and things like that.
And somehow, believe it or not, that all did weave together to bring me to that big pivotal moment in my life.
I learned how to film wildlife.
We filmed a lot for Survival Anglia, for the UK and some of its external markets.
And I lived in Africa off and on for 14 years making these wildlife films.
And we have to remind our listener that the survival documentaries were ITV's equivalent of the Attenborough programs that you see on the BBC.
They were in their day, and that was right up until I think the late 80s, they were incredible export earners for the UK.
And they were, like you say, recognized around the world.
Exactly.
And what happened is one day I was filming a sunset on the top of a really tall sand dune and a Disney film crew showed up scouting a location.
Now, I'm about 300 miles from anyone, and I'm wondering, okay, what's this all about?
And they pulled out several cases and unfolded this metalized, like an umbrella.
It was a satellite dish.
And then they pulled out a telephone handset and began speaking in real time to their studios in Los Angeles.
And I was thinking, wow, that's pretty amazing.
Now, anyone who's involved in media knows we're always looking for a new way to tell the story, you know, adopting some new technology, or maybe you take a medical lens that's very small, slide it up a flower, and then when the bee lands on top, it looks as big as a house and everybody remembers that shot.
So when I saw this satellite telephone, I asked, has anyone ever pushed video over that?
Because I was thinking how cool it'd be to be able to go live from water holes or native villages around the world directly, let's say, into the internet and not just have it as one-way broadcast programming, but actually add a layer of interactivity to it to really draw your viewers in.
They didn't know if the video had been pushed over this system or not.
So I said, I'm going to figure out how to do it.
And fortunately, that worked.
It took a little while because we had to wait for some new digital satellites to launch.
But in the end, I was able to pretty much shrink a television truck into a backpack.
And with that, I traveled all over the world producing the Titanic Expedition for Discovery.
Yeah, retracing the journey of the Magi, the Three Kings, for Microsoft through the Middle East.
And I even adapted it for use with telemedical devices that are up on the International Space Station.
So just, it was a great ride.
Eventually, the dot-com bubble burst, and the only people left with any money to hire me to use my system were the major news networks.
So I sort of went from sharing the most beautiful places in the world to some of the worst places as I became a war correspondent for NBC News here in America.
And I was in Afghanistan right after 9-11 and North Africa and some of Eastern Europe.
And then after that, I was in Southeast Asia chasing terrorists there.
And then I was in Iraq all of 2003, embedded with the United States Marines.
So were you there then when Saddam Hussein fell?
When he fell, but not when he was captured.
When he was captured, I had sort of retired from that business and was just taking a little break here in the United States.
And that's when I started building airplanes.
I'd always had a love of vintage aircraft.
As I mentioned, my father was a pilot.
And the first plane I built was a reproduction 1917 World War I fighter from Germany, a Fokker triplane like the Red Baron flew.
But mine wasn't red.
It had really cool black and white.
How do you begin to?
I mean, look, you are an amazing guy.
You just told us that you were effectively the inventor.
I've got your biography here, the inventor of the satellite video phone.
You were, as a war correspondent, you put yourself in the line of danger and you didn't appear to be afraid of that.
And as a hobby, you liked vintage aircraft, but you wouldn't just go and buy somebody's extensively refurbished vintage biplane or whatever.
You wanted to make your own.
I know.
It was, like I said, it was that curiosity.
You know, I really wanted to feel what it was like in that time, in that era.
I would play period music in my workshop while I worked on my airplane.
And I really wanted to sort of rediscover what it was like to really dive into aviation back when it was only about, let's say, less than 15 years old.
From 1903 when the Wright brothers flew to 1917 was only 14 years.
So it was interesting sort of retracing that process of discovery and then to cap it all off with being able to fly something that, yes, it flew like it was 100 years old.
So it was kind of like I said to someone one time, it's fun like riding a unicycle around the circus tent.
But if you really want to go somewhere, you'll probably use something else.
But anyway, I did do that and then I sold it to an Air Force pilot and I built another plane, a very small plane that was a reproduction of a 1933 French flying flea.
And the reason it was called that, it was just a very tiny, what we call over here in the States, a soapbox derby car.
It's a very simple, you know, no-engine car that's pulled by gravity down the hill and the Boy Scouts sort of race against each other.
So something very small like that with a couple of wings and a motorcycle engine right in front of my face, as I characterize it, it looked like something out of a Disney cartoon.
And it was on my second flight there that I lost my engine.
It simply quit and I couldn't make it back to the airfield.
So I had to aim for a nearby, as I was mentioning, Boy Scout camp that had a small pond in it.
So I was thought, well, that's not rocky.
It's not hilly, and it's within reach.
So that's what I was aiming for.
But I overshot the bank and crashed into the tree trunks at around 70 miles an hour.
Again, in the equivalent of a small wooden crate.
Now, look, 70 miles an hour is quite a speed if you have a bump or a shunt on the road at 70 miles an hour.
That is one that's going to do you some harm, and you may not get out of that.
But in aviation terms, 70 miles an hour is not the fastest speed in the world, is it?
In this plane, it was, but usually you're right.
It's not.
But hitting it with barely a fuselage around me rendered the airplane into nothing more than matchsticks.
When I finished crashing, there was no aircraft left around me, only the part to which I was still seat belted behind me.
And hitting with that much force and coming to a stop in that short a distance, I ruptured both lungs.
I broke all my ribs, had multiple fractures in my right leg, a hole in my lower back.
But other than that, I was fine.
Yeah.
I mean, look, your story sounds an awful lot like my namesake and hero, Howard Hughes.
You know, people talk about Howard Hughes, a weird American recluse, they say.
He was afraid of germs at the end.
You know, he was OCD, all of the things that, you know, history records about him.
But what they forget is that the man was not only an award-winning filmmaker, he was a championship golfer and an aviator and inventor par excellence.
You know, he loved flying, but of course he was like you, when you fly aircraft of the kind that he flew and very much like that one that you flew that crashed, you have to have a knowledge in the back of your mind that this is an inexact science and stuff is going to go wrong.
That's true.
I mean, each moment, especially when you're in vintage aviation, you realize how each moment is a negotiation with gravity.
It truly is.
You don't want to lose the argument, so to speak.
And, you know, the minute you lose power, gravity definitely, definitely takes over in a rather certain way.
Never talk to anybody who's been at the controls during an air crash.
So this is going to sound like a real crass question, but what's it like?
What goes through your mind?
What do you do?
Well, it's interesting.
Perhaps of the shock of the crash and maybe the impact of all the anesthesia I was pumped up with afterwards.
I don't have much of a memory.
I'm going to say even two days before my crash.
While I was recuperating in the hospital later, I was looking through all of my emails to find the last one I remembered either sending or receiving.
And that was about two days before my crash.
But I do remember seeing my propeller come to a stop and the engine quit.
And I didn't panic.
I just, you know, worked it trying to get it started again.
It did restart and then it quit again.
And by then, like I said, I really had to set up for a landing.
So honestly, I don't have much of a memory.
So it's not like I have PTSD or any real concern about hopping in the cockpit and going again.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I mean, as you say, that can have its benefits, that you've forgotten some of the perhaps more harrowing aspects of it.
But, you know, those who try to tell us that flying is safe, and I've been in my share of light planes in my time, and I know what the turbulence can feel like in a light plane as opposed to a big passenger jet.
It's a totally different experience.
Certainly, I remember doing that over the wilds and the coast of Australia.
And, you know, you have to have a strong stomach for that stuff.
I wasn't flying it.
Somebody else who knew their stuff was doing it.
But nevertheless, it's not for the faint-hearted.
It's not a walk in the park.
You know, but people tell us that flying is safe and that when your engine fails, you glide down to what you hope is going to be a safe and secure landing, especially if it's a light plane.
You know, you haven't got the weight of something massive there.
So what you're telling me is a bit of a surprise, actually, Jim.
Well, remember, it was a, being a vintage aircraft, they were still figuring things out at that time, always experimenting.
They'd go fly, they'd come back, go to the hangar, try some new things, and go see how well they worked.
And this little airplane was what we call, it wasn't clean aerodynamically.
The minute you cut power, your glide ratio coming down was pretty steep and pretty quick.
So that's the reason.
I mean, certainly some later model aircraft that were more clean would have had a much better glide ratio.
And had I had the benefit of that, I probably could have made it back to the airfield.
So that was just something to consider.
Well, you'll hate me for this question then.
Why did you build one of those then?
You know, as you can tell from my history before, I was not risk adverse.
In fact, if it had a little more risk, it was a little more interesting.
And it certainly required a more full attention to what you were doing.
You couldn't be distracted.
So I think, again, the challenge of building a historically accurate aircraft and then the challenge of flying it was just one of those things that appealed to me.
Okay, and because it's material to what we're talking about, what we're going to talk about, and because we're coming up to some commercials here, this is going to be the last question I'll ask you for a couple of minutes.
What was your attitude, being an aviator and working with planes of that kind, what was your attitude to dying and death?
In general, I mean, having been in war zones for years, I sort of always felt that I'd made my peace with death.
But once you're in the middle of a situation where you could die, the only way you're going to get through it is by staying focused.
If you panic, you will die.
And so that's why we make checklists in aviation and you follow that checklist all the time or you have it memorized.
And if the engine quits, you know what you need to do to get it started.
If it quits again, well, then you really do just have to set up and make the best landing you can.
So you believe in those circumstances, even if you don't remember the specific minutes prior to the accident, prior to the crash, you are convinced that you did all you could?
Yes, because I did go back to my crash site afterwards, and it was standing there and talking to the man who helped me out, who I'll mention in a second.
I was able to sort of reverse engineer how I dealt with losing my engine.
You know, that obviously I was aiming for that lake and it made sense.
And obviously I overshot the bank, which made sense because this was only my second test flight and I hadn't fully learned the aircraft yet.
So I could tell that in retrospect, I had done everything I could to try to come down in the safest way.
The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, we have an amazing guest and a remarkable story to tell you tonight.
Not that near-death experiences are routine in any way, but this is much more than just any story of a near-death experience.
But Jim Bruton in Connecticut, we haven't quite got there yet.
So you have, in this reproduction of a French plane, what was it called?
The Flying Flea?
Yeah.
Yes.
Flying Flea.
You have a 70 mile an hour hell of an accident.
And because this is a plane that is built of wooden canvas, I guess, you said to me that by the time you'd hit, and even though you don't remember the process of hitting, by the time you'd hit, there wasn't much left of the plane.
And the bits of you that were still here and functioning were pretty battered.
Yes, there really wasn't much of a plane left around me.
It was, therefore, pretty easy to pull me out when the helicopter crew landed to fly me up to the hospital.
But when I did see the wreckage that had been taken back to the hangar later, I was truly amazed that I'd survived it all.
Were you conscious, in pain?
What was your state?
All right.
There was a man fishing nearby who saw everything.
And luckily, he had the presence of mind to not only come over and help and then call in for assistance, but he didn't panic, you know, which would have probably gotten me killed.
He was able to prop me up, and since I had two ruptured lungs, I was just gasping for air more than breathing, but he was able to support me during that time.
And so as we, you know, we just waited out for the helicopter to come and pull me out and then fly me up to the trauma center.
Okay, that sounds remarkably smooth.
And you were very lucky that there was somebody around who effectively saved your life.
I think that's the strength of it, isn't it?
It really is.
And I mean, the crash was complicated further by the fact that I, in overshooting at about a height of six feet, actually went under the trees.
So some friends of mine who were flying looking for me from the air couldn't see me because I was underneath this dense canopy.
So had this one person not been there at that one moment, I'm pretty sure I would have died right then and there.
Okay.
And that's not the only miracle or claimed miracle about this story, I don't think.
So look, tell my listener again the extent of your injuries.
By the time you got to hospital, obviously they'd have triaged you, checked you over.
What did you have?
Sure.
I had two ruptured lungs.
All of my ribs were broken.
My right leg looked like a pretzel.
I had a hole in my lower back and my chin was badly cut as well.
And when my friends arrived about an hour and a half later, they saw me there in a breathing machine with a breathing tube down my throat, all kinds of tubing coming into and going out of me to keep me alive.
And I was restrained because they didn't want me in my delirium to start grabbing hoses and pulling them out.
So it was a bit of a mess.
Right.
I mean, traumatic for your friends.
Hell for you.
Yeah, I'm sure it was.
Again, you know, I don't have much of a memory due to the physical shock and painkillers.
And I'm sure they were already putting me into some type of anesthesia.
But it was a bit of a mess.
And, you know, I was able to converse with them afterwards, and they could tell me, yeah, you weren't making much sense.
Were you at risk of death?
Yes.
In fact, when they spoke to my family later, they said, okay, he escaped his restraints one time and we had to re-restrain him.
And we have multiple, we have a week's long worth of day-long operations, and we recommend just putting him into a medically induced coma.
And that was agreed to.
And as far as I'm concerned, when they put me into the coma here, that's when I had my near-death experience there.
Okay, so for your recovery's sake, which is fairly common in such situations, I mean, we see people who are afflicted with COVID-19 now, and sometimes they have to be put into a coma simply to aid their recovery.
So you were put into that situation.
Presumably they plied you with some fairly heavy drugs.
Yeah, in my medical report, I have what the names of those are, but I think I need a degree in bioengineering or something to pronounce them.
But yeah, they put me into the coma and I was there for, like I said, about a week.
But for you, you didn't just go fade to black.
Something else happened.
Right.
And it's interesting because, you know, you will hear of people who, you know, either are unconscious or are put into a medically induced coma or something like this, and they have a near-death experience.
And what's interesting is within a one in a million population, it seems like I had a one in a million experience, even among that small population, because you'll hear a lot of the common hallmarks of a near-death experience where people travel through a tunnel or they may see deceased loved ones or they'll have a life review or see angelic beings and beautiful scenes.
I didn't get any of these little perks.
It was like I was just teleported to this instantly, to this location that looked like a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Imagine London or New York, maybe a thousand years after a meteor strike or a nuclear blast, just a totally dead and destroyed city.
Well, yeah, the illustration in your book, it does look like somewhere where the bombs hit.
Exactly.
And that's what it looked like.
And as I stood there taking it all in, I wasn't fearful or anything.
I was just accepting of what I was seeing.
And these huge storm clouds were above me that looked like they were about to unload with the mother of all storms.
And as I looked around, I suddenly was hit by this wave of nausea.
And I said, wow, I don't think I can stand this.
And when I said that, I could hear some motion off to my left.
And I looked over and I saw a large lattice work that was shaped like an egg on its end.
I would say it was about 50 feet high.
And as I looked at it, I could see some slight motion within the lattice work.
So I made my way over to it and looked through that open lattice work.
And suspended freely in the air in a rather impossible manner were all of these tiny gears that are a special kind of gear you see in clocks or clock-like mechanisms.
When we think of a gear, you think of a circle with little teeth all the way around it.
These are called sector gears because they're a section of that circle.
And they're designed to move back and forth, meaning their motion has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And that's significant for a reason I'm about to explain.
As I looked at them, they were in various degrees of focus.
It was very strange.
And as I looked at them, I could see in my mind, it's like a video feed playing in my head of what each one represented.
And I realized these are events of my future because I might see myself as an older man or I might see my children with their children who aren't yet born.
So I realized these are events in my future.
So I put my hand through the lattice work to just sort of see, could I touch them?
Do they have any feel?
And when I did, one brushed by my hand and caused me this immediate, nauseating pain in my stomach.
And I reflexively grabbed it, pulled it out of the lattice work and threw it away.
And as I did that, all the other gears started spinning around.
And that's when I asked a question.
I said, you know, what is this thing?
And a disembodied voice that stayed with me throughout the entire experience responded.
And I remember saying, you know, what is this thing?
And it said, this is the future birthing into the now.
A song came into my head.
And when I'm doing these conversations, that never happens.
But the song that's just come into my head about this and might explain this weird device, this kind of mechanical, huge Fabergé egg thing that looked like something that had been created by an artist in Vienna or Paris or something.
But the words that come into my mind are the circles of your mind, the windmills of your mind, round like a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel.
And basically that song, for those who remember it, the images unwind in the circles of your mind.
Well, this was not, you don't think the circles of your mind, but these were concentric circles of fate almost.
Yeah, that is a great reference.
Now I'm going to have to go listen to that song and listen more closely.
You know, I've also thought The Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfon.
Noel Harrison sang it.
He was the guy.
He was, God, am I old enough to remember this?
He was in The Girl from Uncle.
He was the assistant of The Girl from Uncle.
And he had that hit with that amazing record.
But that is exactly what you're describing.
Yeah, I love it.
And you're right.
It was, so as I'm watching these things, I said, you know, what is this?
And I said, this is the process of becoming.
And as I saw the gears essentially resetting themselves, I said, what's happening now?
And it was, and the voice said, each gear is the probability of a thought, word, or action in your future that your destiny is now resetting itself around what you have removed.
And then I said, well, how did I know I could do that?
You know, pull that out.
And it said, why else are you here?
And I said, I have no idea.
I don't even know where I am.
And that's when it said, you are in the in-between.
And that's what I've called it ever since.
And I said, in between what?
And it said, everything, the impossible now between the past and the future, that it's impossible in its short duration.
Yet here you are standing inside the eternity of a single moment.
And then it challenged me.
It said, do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
And I'll tell you, Howard, I thought, I strained and I could not remember.
If someone had come up to me at that moment and said, if you stay here any longer, you can't go back.
I'd say, go back where?
To your family.
What family?
I didn't even know who Jim was.
I was really depersonalized down to zero, just in this, I would almost call a perfect state of non-being.
Right.
So all you were was consciousness, consciousness without experience.
Bingo.
Absolutely.
That's the best way to put it.
Just a conscious, non-judging being, just taking it all in.
And I think at one time I said, like, where are the gears that feel good?
And it said, you're not here to feel good.
And it wasn't threatening.
It was just saying, you know, you're here with a specific mission.
And so I realized what my mission was, was to keep reaching inside this gear and the gear, I mean, this egg and these gears themselves would tell me which ones were painful.
And I learned that those that caused me pain were unfortunate choices I could make in my future.
So I was being given the opportunity to sort of clean up my future by removing, let's say, temptations to do bad, therefore improving my chances to become a better human being, that these choices would be to my spiritual detriment.
So just sort of over and over and over again, I kept reaching in there to remove these obstacles from my path.
And as I characterize, it's like stacking the deck, you know, of cards so that you get a better hand when they are dealt.
And at one point, I saw this growing pile of gears and I said, oh, gosh, it looks like if I don't have a bad future, I have no future at all.
And it said, you know, your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren't meant to be and that your number of breaths are already counted.
I will worry about your last one.
And I said, you know, I don't know how comforting that is, but what am I missing here in my lack of understanding?
And it said, what is clearly before you?
Grace.
No one deserves salvation.
It can only be given by grace.
It is your birthright, but it must be chosen at the expense of the world that separates us.
And at some point I said, you know, it's like this place has been designed for one thing and one thing only with no chance for me to screw it up.
And then I think the in-between said something to me that might have been the most profound thing I've ever heard.
It said, if those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
Wow.
I know, right?
And then it said, you know, I watched one gear disintegrate as it went from the present to the past.
And it said, you can't change the past, but you can make better choices in the future.
Everything is interconnected and pay more attention to your relationships.
Be gentle with everyone as I'm gentle with you.
And I remember at that point saying, what's gentle about all this?
And it said, the final thing was, you prayed for something for which being here is the answer.
And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
And with that, it pretty much booted me out.
Okay.
Now, this is interesting.
Why do you think your fate and your future and the possibilities within your future that you apparently had some say over, why do you think it was presented to you like that?
I'm asking you this for a reason, and part of that reason is a little bit of skepticism, although I don't want to hose doubt all over your great story.
But, you know, you're a guy who likes adventure.
You were in Baghdad, Afghanistan, places that parts of them raised to the ground.
So that was part of what you saw.
Also, you are an inventor.
And what you saw in that egg device that controlled your fate was something that somebody with a mechanically oriented mind might create.
So I suppose I'm asking you two twin questions that are kind of related, I think, but I may be wrong.
You know, number one, why do you think you were presented with this?
And the corollary to that is, are you sure that this isn't just something that the unique and specific mind that you have created for you?
All good questions, and you're right.
They do tag together nicely, Howard.
First of all, you know, in all my adventures, in all my daring do, if you will, one of the things you do realize sometimes is just how little you have control over things.
I think your ability to survive isn't always your ability to control the environment, but your ability to flexibly respond to it.
And if all of a sudden everybody goes left, you know, either you go left or you have a reason to go right or just stand still.
And so I'll say that first of all, that aids in sort of bringing a certain humility to the experience, a certain letting go of trying to control outcomes.
I was just responding to what was there.
And I think the other thing is that here in our world that we live in, we see life through the filters we want.
You know, we look in a mirror and we see a great looking person looking back at us or a very competent person.
There's no sweeter sound than the sound of our own name.
However, on the other side, I believe we see life through the filters we need.
That if we look into a mirror there, it's the mirror of honesty and we see ourselves worts and all.
Again, it's a very humbling experience.
As to why the in-between looked the way it did, I'm absolutely certain it's because of, again, understanding that I was seeing things through the filters I need, it was speaking to me in a language I would understand, a highly mechanical looking version that someone else might see as a beautiful garden in need of weaving.
And those weeds would be my bad gears.
So I think it was just being tailor-made to me so that I would get the most out of the experience.
And I'm pretty sure that when I left, that place just sort of turned back into the vapor perhaps it was before I arrived.
But the difference between you and somebody else who has a near-death experience, my mother had one.
I've told the story on the show before.
But my dear late mother, when she was 10 years of age, this was an era when kids got very sick sometimes.
And, you know, sometimes kids didn't recover from things that in our generation we would recover from.
So my mother had very bad pneumonia.
And the doctor told my grandmother, her mother, that your daughter will go through a difficult time tonight.
This is the crisis.
And she will either live or not live as a result of this.
So please be prepared.
She has a fight.
Well, my mother to her dying day told the story of where she believed she went during that Fight, and that was a beautiful garden of a place, and she loved it so much.
And this story is often told by people who think they've had near-death experiences.
She basically was told that she had to come back, she wanted to stay.
But your experience was completely different.
My mother didn't have the chance to opt for what she wants on returning.
And of course, what happened ultimately was she married my father and here I am and a lot of other stuff along the way, too.
She didn't have any choice in any of that.
But you are saying that you, through this device, were given a chance to opt for different scenarios.
That's right.
And I think the reason the in-between looked the way it did was what better way to create an environment that is absolutely without distraction?
I was there for a specific time, even though time there I'd say was measured differently than here.
But it was a momentary opportunity to actually do something that would be evolutionarily important to my growth as a human being.
And so by not having beautiful scenes, by not having angelic music or dead loved ones or whatever, I was able to remain entirely focused on my purpose there to clean up my future.
As to why I was given that specific opportunity, I mean, for all I know, that opportunity is before everyone.
We just are so wrapped around the axle here in the world that we don't see those opportunities.
But whether that's true or not, I think we can all agree that like whether it's out of the desire to become a better person or a desire to atone for the past, it all boils down to split second decisions we're making, choices we're making, because we're presented with a myriad number of choices every moment.
Why do we choose some over the others?
How much of those choices are the fruit of our desires, hopes, and dreams, or even our fears?
So I think being able to, like I said, depersonalize out of that for a moment allowed me to use the purest guide I could to choose what things to remove.
And, you know, as sadly as it was, it wasn't some great moral compass like scripture or a mantra or something.
It was pain.
But you know what?
If that's what it takes, that's what you use.
An amazing story.
We are not done by any manner.
I mean, it's Jim Bruton in Connecticut, USA.
So, Jim, you had this bizarre and unique, tailored-to-you near-death experience.
When you woke up then from your induced coma, did you wake up with a memory of what had happened, you thought, and an idea of what it was you had to do next?
That's a good question, Howard.
I would say it was about another week after I came out of the coma before my head was screwed on straight enough to start to think lucidly and have any memory whatsoever.
I had already been transported to the rehabilitation hospital when I, like I said, sort of realized, okay, you know, here I am and here's what happened.
And people had to kind of explain to me what happened.
And I will say this, as I was laying there, you know, taking it all in, hearing about my medical case, this memory of the in-between, the near-death experience, was surfacing in my mind.
And it was just sort of almost repeating over and over and over as its own video loop.
And with each iteration, there was more detail.
There was more oomph to the experience.
There was more of an impact, even emotionally.
And it was just consuming my mind.
And finally, I talked to my morning nurse who was really great.
And I said, can I tell you something that's been going over in my mind?
She said, sure.
So I shared it with her.
And as I did, she started crying.
And I said, okay, why are you crying?
And she said, I don't want you to die.
And I said, well, you're a nurse in a hospital.
You see it all the time.
She goes, yeah, but you're magical.
And that was the first hint I had as to one of the after effects.
As we've all heard, when people have near-death experiences, if you weren't psychic before, you become psychic after.
If you were before, you're more so.
While I'm not sitting here reading tea leaves or glowing in the dark or anything like that, I would say one of the turn volume up attributes was my empathy.
And she said that everybody in the hospital as a patient gets like 15 minutes of a doctor's time per day because the medical staff are very busy.
For some reason, I had three to five doctors in my room for an hour and an hour and a half every day, and we were just talking about life in general.
They just wanted to be in my space.
It's a remarkable part of the story because, you know, we all know that medical people, their time is precious and sometimes they don't have very much of it to give to you.
But you had this weird, weird's a bad word.
You had this strange empathy with not only your nurse, but all the doctors.
Weird is fine.
It was weird.
But it was wonderful.
I even had one of the nurses in the middle of the night, an older lady who just had a very nice maternal sense to her.
I just remember one time she kissed me on my forehead.
I mean, it was just amazing how people were bent over backwards nice to me.
And honestly, Howard, that superpower, if you will, of feeling connected to people and maybe through me, they feel connected to something bigger than themselves continues to this very moment.
And I'm just so grateful for it because, you know, the opportunity to see people lifted up even an inch is just worth so much.
But these aren't the only aftereffects.
You know, as I came home and was rehabilitating at home and started to really dig into the research of, you know, what was this I had and learning it was a near-death experience, I was able to, you know, further dig into what some of the other aftereffects are.
And they're classic in that regard.
Electronic anomalies, light bulbs blowing, computers acting funny, television turning.
Cash registers in supermarkets are always going offline when you go near them.
There was one week, five days in a row, five different stores.
Every time I walked up to the counter, the cash register just went dark and they're all standing there.
And what was funny is in one case, there were two young girls there and I said, it's due to my MDE.
And they looked shocked.
And then I told two women in the pet store the next day that, and they all wanted to hear the story.
So, you know, the reactions have been pretty varied.
So you think you have some kind of energy around you and about you now?
It's interesting.
You would think that with the real world effects of this, they would have come up with a way to measure it other than just looking at brain scans.
But it seems to be conventional wisdom within the NDE community that we all have this bioelectric field and that something is going on with that at certain moments.
And it seems to be rather spontaneous and rather random.
It's not like, oh, you got angry.
So all of a sudden, you know, things started blowing up.
I wish it was that much of a one-to-one relationship so we could better understand it.
I would say the only emotional state I've been in consistently that seems to generate those type of effects is, and you're going to love this, annoyance.
Just being annoyed.
Well, I'm glad this is a cordial conversation.
Conversation.
We're having a good time.
All systems are go.
So let's be very clear about this then.
If you find yourself in a state of annoyance, if you find yourself arguing with somebody over a car parking spot or something like that, will that person's car break down?
You know, it's hard to say.
Again, it's a new discovery every time it happens.
But the other day, to speak further to empathy and how that builds that sense of connection, I have my own small community of near-death experiencers here in the state.
And just yesterday, in fact, I was dealing with something that was incredibly annoying.
And she suddenly sent me a text.
She said, you must really be angry today.
And I said, why did your light bulbs blow?
She goes, no, I could just feel it from here.
And she's 30 miles away.
So we had a little laugh about that.
But you do, it's interesting amongst near-death experiencers, when you get them together, you can see, amplify these very effects.
I'll just one quick example.
I went down to an international conference last September for near-death experiencers.
And I'm standing in what seemed to be a longer than usual line to register in the hotel.
And when I got up to the counter, they said, yes, because all of our computers and credit card readers went down.
And I dug in a little bit and found out it started with the very first person who checked in that day from our group.
And I told the lady behind the counter why, like, basically, this is like a hackers convention.
As soon as we check in, everything goes crazy.
She actually stopped working and came out from behind the counter because she wanted to hear all about it.
So these really do happen.
All right.
If you think you have this power, can you use it in a targeted way?
I would like to think that we could.
And like I said, I think we first need to find out what reliably causes it.
You know, sort of using the scientific method to procedurize, this is what you do to make that happen.
And then to repeat it, and then to be able to predict those outcomes when we create those same circumstances.
So I'm sure there are a lot of people that are working on that.
Maybe some have solved it and maybe they're staying quiet about it.
But I think the further thing that happens to sort of take us out of that mindset is the next stage of realizing that this isn't just a hallucination.
This actually has some real world effects.
And that deals with integrating the experience into our daily lives.
And that's a real challenge.
It can be a real challenge for us and the people around us.
I'll give you an example.
78% of people who have near-death experiences get divorced because you look like your former, you know, who you were before to your spouse, but you're different in every way.
Your values change, your reference points change.
Just everything about you changes so much that it doesn't create good and bad people.
It just creates overwhelmed people.
And sometimes dealing with that new ambiguity in the relationship is just easier done by parting ways.
I'm sorry to say that's true, but it is definitely something that we're still struggling with.
So how, this is a hard and big question, but how do you think that apart from being able to blow light bulbs and make cash registers misbehave for a while, how has your life been affected?
How have you changed?
You know, it's interesting.
You become more honest with yourself.
You know, if you're doing things that just don't feed your soul, you really start to look at those and think about how you can change them.
And a lot of times that might take place, yes, through changing your personal relationships.
You know, beyond marriage, just your friends, the people you find you feel a certain amity with.
You also may change your professional relationships.
You might change your job, something that just seems a little more in tune and seems a bit more of a fit.
And for me, I would say the greatest direction of growth I've experienced this then is in sharing my experience with groups, small groups or large groups of people, is the feedback I get from them.
When we really get into that state of flow, something fills the room and people will come up and talk about it later.
And it just, it's so rewarding.
And like I said, it really does feed my soul.
So from that, I was encouraged to write my book, which I wrote in only three months.
And now I'm working on book two and I already know what book three is going to be.
And I'm participating in greater sized meetings with more and more people who have much more credibility than I do in this part of life.
And I'm just feeling like one step at a time, I'm being guided to continue to walk in that direction.
But it seems to me that it's much more than, hey, I survived this accident and now I'm going to live every day like it was my last.
Isn't life great?
Your experience seems to be more profound than that.
You said that you felt you'd been left psychic.
How so?
Well, mostly along the lines of what I was told, you know, pay attention to your relationships and everything is interconnected.
It's as if those two statements from the in-between, which I remember so clearly, are the road upon which I'm walking.
Every interaction with people in some way shows me our interconnectedness.
And in paying attention to the relationships, it's just sensing what that relationship dynamic is all about.
And sometimes that's by standing back and looking at the world at large and realizing, you know, so many of our relationships are transaction-based and full of codependency.
And yet now I feel very self-contained and full.
And I'll be honest, At one conference, one woman challenged me.
It was a good question, honestly.
She said, Are you sure that in sharing this experience in some way, you're not feeding your ego?
And I said, You know, that is a good question because I'm certain there are a lot of people out there for whom that answer would be yes, that's exactly what's going on.
Well, you know, that one was coming.
It's like everybody wants to feel that they're special.
And some people in this world can't be special.
And sometimes they have varying degrees of frustration because they're not special.
I mean, they're special to the people around them.
Of course, they are.
And everybody's special in some way.
But, you know, they can't be accomplished.
They can't be great psychics.
They can't be musicians.
They can't be whatever.
And sometimes I get the sense that perhaps people have to make up for that in some way.
So I guess there are those who might level that kind of accusation towards you, but then that falls flat in your case because you were an accomplished man before all of this.
That's true.
And what I said to this woman was, again, it was a good point to be made.
And certainly, as you're struggling with your near-death experience and how differently you are as a person now over what you were, that's reinforced by people looking at you and saying, you know, where's my coworker?
Where's my father or mother or my husband or my wife?
And you realize, well, I'm not any of those things anymore.
That person died in the crash.
This is what you have left.
And so sometimes as your ego is taking these bruises on a daily basis, some people might say, well, this must be because I was chosen.
Okay, that might be true, but is it important to feed the ego that way?
But I responded to this woman saying, okay, look, I'm not here to really sell you anything.
I'm just here to share my story.
And if it resonates with people, great.
But I said, but right now, I don't know who you are.
I'm not asking you for money or for a job.
I don't want to date you.
I'm just here to share.
And then I had two psychologists come up afterwards and say, you just solved codependency.
But in the in-between, they gave you a sense, didn't they, that you were coming back to do something.
And I appreciate that part of that is telling people this story, and it's a great story to hear.
There must, I mean, you had a fair amount of choice, you said, over what became of you in the future.
There must be more than that.
I think, well, in terms of, yes, but in a strange way.
I think having been objectified, depersonalized, it made me more aware of the processes that, and this was also in terms of seeing how that machine inside the egg just recycled over and over, because I said, you know, I don't know where any of this occurs.
And it said, that's not important.
And knowing the answers to what comes tomorrow are not important.
It's better to understand the process of how things fit and refit together.
So you might say I was just being bathed in these reiterative processes so that when I came back, I was perhaps more process-oriented myself.
And so sort of standing back from whether someone's angry or someone's happy or whether it's a give and take relationship is it's important to understand the dynamics of what's going on underneath the surface.
That is the difference between having answers and having understanding.
Answers to questions can be important and they can give rise to purpose, but they can also be kind of a one-shot deal.
Expanding that out further to meaning and understanding allows for a much broader lifelong appreciation of what's really going on here.
And that's also been part of my new understanding and what I'm talking about.
And that's the difference between linear thought, you know, A leads to B, leads to C, and non-linear thought that's actually standing back and looking at the processes in motion around something and seeing multiple entry points to understanding exactly what's going on.
Okay.
And you said to me that obviously this has been very profound for you.
I can hear that.
And it is a remarkable story.
But you also said you still get angry.
Now, if you were such a changed person, wouldn't you have gone beyond anger?
Actually, it's not, I really don't get angry.
If I said that, I actually misspoke.
But I can get annoyed.
Frustrated.
How about that?
Well, yes, you nailed it.
Yes.
I mean, only when you're working towards some purpose and it's being interfered with by circumstances, really sometimes beyond anyone's control.
It's like, okay, this is annoying.
And I'll allow that I'm still human.
And like someone said one time, well, you're not perfect.
And I said, no, but my feet have been pointed in the right direction.
I still have to do the work and I still have to walk the path, but at least I know, I think, more where I'm going now.
So perhaps we can just walk side by side for a while.
Again, I'm not trying to sell anything.
No, and you know, you had a good life before all of this.
You know, there was no reason, I guess, for you to come out with this story because you could have resumed the life that you had.
It was perfectly nice by the sounds of it.
Last question.
I have some skeptical listeners, and they may be saying this was just a hallucination medically induced.
What do you say?
And again, that's a legitimate question, isn't it?
However, in that maybe 5% of the world has had a near-death experience, that's 60 more million people than live in the United States.
That's a hell of a population.
And for that many people to have had a statistically significant number of these hallmarks, again, the tunnel, the loved ones, the coming back to wanting to be a better person or just being a better person, that seems to indicate something beyond what I would think of as a certain randomness that I would associate with a hallucination.
I don't know if there's anything out there that can create a hallucination for which we can say there's that kind of statistical significance.
And the bottom line to it is I don't think anyone's ever come back from an NDE saying, well, nine out of 10 people have been told to be a better person.
On my visit, I was told to be a serial killer.
I haven't heard that one yet.
Well, I haven't either.
That's an interesting way of looking at it.
Okay, last point then here.
You say that you're going to be working on this some more, two more books in the works.
Are they on the same sort of theme?
Yes.
You know, as I mentioned, when I've shared my experience and had wonderful responses, a lot of times people ask another great follow-up question.
That's how do we put this into practice?
How do we have some of this in our lives?
And so my second book is called The Practice in Between, The Art of Letting Go.
Because if you think about it, in Our society, you know, through all the media and hype in the society, it's like we always need one more thing.
I need one more car, one more suit, one better degree, or one new job opportunity to be better than I am because what I have isn't enough.
Well, we're going to be chasing that last thing with our last breath.
What if we actually turned it around and said, you know, maybe I really do have everything within me I need to be spiritually happy, to have enough in this world to be of greatest service to others?
What if we just turned it around and thought like that for a moment?
We might actually be able to become still within ourselves, see what we have to work with, see the situation for what it is, and better understand what people before us need.
And then in being with them as a good evolving human being, we'll want to provide that to them.
And the world might be a better place.
That would be nice, Jim.
What's the book called?
Well, the first one that I have out right now is The In Between, A Trip of a Lifetime.
It's available on Amazon in audio, digital, and print.
Jim Bruton, a fascinating story, and you've left me with a lot of food for thought.
Thank you very much indeed.
Have a good day in Connecticut.
Thank you, Howard, and thank you to all your listeners who joined us.
The remarkable Jim Bruton, obviously very much at peace with himself, which I think is what a lot of us aim for.
Most of us probably in our lives.
Jim seems to have got there.
Your thoughts on Jim Bruton and what he has to say and the contents of that book, which I think is well worth reading, please go to my website.
You can send me an email from there, theunexplained.tv.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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