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May 23, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:20
Edition 637 - Dr Scott Taylor - SDEs
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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 all of your nice emails and for your reaction to the TV show too.
Please support me.
It's not the easiest thing that I've done learning this new medium.
It's very different from what we do here because this is much less structured.
You know, we can just have a conversation here.
There, you've got the bright lights and all the other stuff constantly focusing you.
And of course, the clock is ticking down on you all the time.
But it's interesting to learn that discipline.
You know, it's something that I resisted all of my life.
There were times when I could have moved towards television and people used to say, yeah, well, you don't look too bad.
This is some years ago now.
Then, you know, why don't you go into TV?
You could make better money than you make in radio.
This is back then, of course.
And I always used to say, no, I'm a radio guy, very shy, would rather be heard than seen.
But I'm learning all the time, and thank you for your support and the nice things you said.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his usual sterling work on the website and getting the shows out to you.
Now, the last edition I know was with a medium, and I wasn't going to do a related or semi-related topic after that.
But then this presented itself, and I think it is well worth talking about because it isn't something that we here have ever talked about before.
We've talked about near-death experiences, and they are very much in the news at the moment.
In fact, on the TV show, what, a week or so ago, I spoke with Cal Cooper, Callum Cooper, whole friend of this show, about the latest developments in near-death experience research.
Have you ever heard, because I hadn't, of shared death experiences, the idea that you can travel along with somebody else on their journey to where they're going for a period and then maybe come back here?
The man I'm going to speak with now is Dr. Scott Taylor.
He is the president of the Expanded Awareness Institute.
And I'm quoting here, the EAI helps people interested in near-death and shared death experiences explore what experience means to them and to our culture as a whole.
Now, all of this was sparked by Scott's own experience.
And I wanted you to hear that story, and I'm going to let him tell it exactly as he does in as much detail as he wants to, because his story from 1981 that sparked all of his interest in shared death experiences, and indeed near-death experiences, is astonishing.
I don't think I have words that would adequately explain or adequately describe what he says he went through.
Your thoughts, of course, always welcome, but shared death experiences, something completely new to me.
So, Scott Taylor, Dr. Scott Taylor, is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Scott Taylor has twice served on the board of the International Association for Near-Death Studies and co-moderated their annual conference at least a dozen times.
And there'll be a web address at the end of this if you want to check him out some more.
There'll be an extended, I think, biography for him on his own portal.
So that's that.
That's the topic on this edition.
Thank you for your emails, your responses, your thoughts.
You can always let me know what you think about the show.
Make guest suggestions.
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All right, let's get to the guest on this edition in Minnesota, United States, a different time zone, a different part of the planet, Dr. Scott Taylor and shared death experiences on this edition of The Unexplained.
Scott, thank you very much for coming on my show.
I'm really excited to be here, Howard.
I have been looking forward to this.
Me too.
And there are a number of reasons.
You're a great man to talk to, number one.
But also, number two is that the topic of near-death experiences is in the news now, I think, more than ever.
Why do you think that might be?
Well, I think it's because we have made a cultural shift.
You may think back 10 years, and when somebody brought up the concept of death.
The image that came to your mind was of that robed figure with no face and a sigh.
And, you know, the image of the grim reaper.
And if you were to go and ask anybody now what their image of death was, that wouldn't come up again.
What comes up now is the light at the end of the tunnel.
That metaphor has completely changed in our culture and it has opened up doorways that haven't been available.
People are much more open to talking about all things death and death-related, near-death experiences, shared death experiences, spiritually transformative experiences.
They all kind of fit in the same category.
And I'm very pleased.
I think that's the hard work of people who have dedicated themselves to bringing near-death experiences out into the public and doing the research that says, yes, indeed, they are real.
And the rest of us for accepting it.
And let's not forget, I mean, even Harry Potter had a near-death experience.
So, you know, we're good to go.
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm on your side here.
I totally get what you're saying.
There are two ways of looking at this, though, if we're being balanced and standing back from it.
Number one, and this is the side that I'm inclined towards, is that these things have been happening forever and we're more Willing and able to talk about them.
My own mother, as my listeners, will know because I've told the story ad infinitum.
So I really can't tell the whole thing in full again because they'll be very bored by it.
But my own mother, age 10, very ill, close to death.
The doctor says to my grandmother, her mother, she will, this is going to be make or break tonight.
This is crucial for her.
So she has a crisis.
She has pneumonia and people, you know, decades ago died of pneumonia, kids.
Yes, they did.
And she went to a beautiful place where they met her.
She loved it.
She didn't want to come back and they told her she had to.
Now, that was her near-death experience.
And her story never changed throughout my entire life from when I was a little boy to when she died, age 79, what, 13 years ago now, I think it is.
So, you know, the story never changed.
Actually, it's 16 years.
The story never changed.
So, you know, I get that.
But the other side of it might be that because people are wealthier than they were, they are more steeped in popular culture than ever they were, they are more inclined to want to believe in their own immortality than ever they were,
and they want to spend money to prolong their looks of their lives, that maybe there's just more acceptance of these things because people don't want to contemplate the awful possibility that they might die.
I'd put a twist on the second one, and that would be that I think people are more willing to accept that there's something after.
We have significant scientific evidence that that is true.
And there's been a wonderful study that was just done by William Peters, 800 people who had shared death experiences.
This is the idea that when somebody is making their transition, another person accompanies them on that transition, which is what happened to me.
And so we have witnesses to people who are making their actual death transition.
And the stories are remarkable and they're wonderful.
And we go to a benevolent afterlife.
100% of the 800 people that William Peters interviewed in his book At Heaven's Door went to a benevolent afterlife.
So I think the scared part of what comes after is going away.
And people are, if they don't have to be afraid, they're willing to look at the possibility that this is a wonderful transition and it will be just remarkable when we get to the other side.
Can I hear a chiming clock in the background?
There's something that sounds...
It may just have been your heating furnace kicking in.
But let's not my parents' home, and they have a beautiful grandfather clock that's down in the main floor foyer.
And it's five minutes slow.
Yes, I can see it's five past the hour now.
But I could just hear that beautiful sound, which took me back to my childhood.
There's no accident there.
The bells of heaven have opened up just for you, Howard.
I kind of look, my life has been full of strange synchronicities, so I just think that I've experienced another one there.
Now, you're pretty clear then in your own mind that the journey, the part of the journey that people who have near-death experiences take would be the same journey were they to die and not return.
You think it's all the same pathway?
I think it's very similar pathway.
There are those that have less than positive, that's what they call it in the literature, LTPs, terrible name, but less than positive near-death experiences.
And in three beautiful books written by Nancy Evans Bush, she goes into some detail as to why that might be true.
And, you know, for the most part, it's about a wake-up call for those who are having a near-death experience where, you know, it's written into the script that they're coming back, but they needed to be awakened.
And essentially, it's a, you know, a two by four or a spanner across the side of the head saying, listen, you are not fulfilling your contract.
You came to do this, this, or this.
You came to experience these things in your life, and you are nowhere near doing that.
So let's get on the program.
No, well, that's interesting, isn't it?
Because my mother had that experience I told you about, and my listeners, I think, well know about now because I've told the story so many times.
But she was only 10.
You know, she was barely on her life path here.
Why would she be taken aside and told, you're not doing exactly what you're supposed to be, but you're going to go back and get it right?
I'm not sure.
Was that the truth for a 10-year-old?
That would be very rare that they would be told that they weren't following their life's path because it's just beginning more than likely.
Well, indeed, she wasn't.
She was just, she reacted as a kid the way she tells it.
And whatever she met there said, no, you have to go back.
And because it was so beautiful, she didn't want to go back.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, that part's really common that, you know, children are told that they're going back, or even adults are being told that they have to go back.
And, you know, it's not because they aren't fulfilling their Path, more than likely, people have these experiences so that it opens up their life, opens up their perceptions, opens up the realms of possibility to what is.
And, you know, it's a gentle thing.
It's a gift from beyond to us.
And we get a chance to move forward.
We get a chance to look at the world with a new lens.
And I don't think that qualifies as a spanner across the side of the head.
No.
It's part of the journey, but it's a signpost on the journey.
I don't think that's a spanner.
But there's no doubt about it that my mother was a very gracious and calm soul, more or less, through her life, as far as any of us can be.
And she was a tremendous influence upon me.
And I discovered many of the things I now talk about as a broadcaster because of her.
But anyway, this conversation is not about me.
It's about you and your work.
So let's talk about you.
Now, you're a doctor.
You don't have to be, but are you a medical doctor?
Well, thankfully, no.
That is not a profession that I would seek to go.
The whole blood thing is just not great.
My degree is in educational leadership.
So it was a degree about leadership.
And what I studied when I was there were people who had near-death experiences because we know when they come back, they present themselves to the world in a much different way than they did when they were before the incident, whatever that was.
And what we know about leadership and leadership studies is that authentic leadership is an inside-out phenomena.
It starts with how you believe the world works and how you live in the world.
And so if you have a distinctly different view of the world and how it works, you present yourself to the world in a different way.
And that's what I studied.
It was a qualitative research project that looked at how people, what happened to them when they discovered this world of unity that is the near-death experience, and when they came back, how that changed them.
Are you telling me that all of the people who go through these things, and look, I've interviewed a lot of people who've had near-death experiences of one kind and another, and many of whom have been inclined to write books about the experience.
That's usually why we're talking.
And yes, most of them have said that they came back either with skills that they didn't have before or they view the world a different way, but not all of them that admit it.
At least in my, and I've studied over 6,000 cases, something on that order.
It changes people, and it may change them in ways they don't recognize.
And if it changed them early in their life, the personality wasn't set.
So remembering what they were before versus what they were later, it becomes really fuzzy.
I think it changes everybody.
I would be a very rare individual who wasn't changed.
And are you saying that you personally studied 6,000 cases?
Yes.
That's a lot of cases.
Your life was changed, wasn't it, by one event?
Yes, it was.
Would you like to hear it?
I would.
So I was in love with a woman.
Her name was Mary Frances Randall.
And she and her son Nolan had been out sailing.
It was a beautiful day.
And on their way home from that lovely day at the beach and on the sailboat, they were involved in a horrific car accident.
Mary Fran was killed outright, and Nolan sustained a mortal head injury.
And it took Nolan six days to make his transition.
They were both transported to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, so they received the best health care in the world.
And because it took Nolan six days to make his transition, there was plenty of time for the family to arrive and give him comfort and support.
Mary Fran was number three of nine children, and so that meant that there were quite a lot of people that had the time to come to the hospital.
And so what that meant was that we had the ability to divide ourselves up into shifts and to be able to stay with Nolan and comfort him and talk to him and that sort of thing.
So it was the morning of the sixth day and I had the shift with Jani, who was the number one child, the oldest child in the family.
And from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., we were with him and we told him stories and we laughed about some of the funny things that the siblings were doing and that the aunts and uncles were doing.
One of which was they went around the hospital and raided the sofas so that there would be cushions for people to sleep on in the waiting room.
So we laughed, but Nolan was in a coma.
He Never came out of that coma.
But we know with people who've had near-death experiences and people who are in coma that the last sense to go is the sense of hearing.
So we were on, knew that and took advantage of that.
Well, it gets to be about quarter to five in the morning.
It's nearing the end of our shift.
And Jani, who was a trained trauma nurse, she did a number of stints in emergency rooms, went to the end of the bed, looked at the charts, looked at all the monitors that were surrounding Nolan's head, and she just held her hand out to me and said, Scott, it's time for us to say goodbye.
So we pulled up a couple of chairs next to Nolan's head, and we told him that he had been a very brave boy, that he had really been fighting to stay with us.
And for that, you know, we loved him dearly.
But if his mother should show up, reminder that she had died six days before, but if his mother showed up and wanted to take him with her, that it was okay for him to go.
And we hugged him and said our goodbyes, and then it was the end of the shift, and we left the room, and the next two people came in.
Well, it wasn't 45 minutes later when the nurse of the floor came on, and she entered into the waiting room and woke us all up and said, it's time.
This must have been, I'm sorry to interrupt here, but I have to say this because I've listened.
This must have been for all those personal reasons that you were involved in this.
Very, very traumatic for everybody there.
Very.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Which is why there were so many people.
I mean, there were siblings and spouses and friends and aunts and uncles and grandparents.
I mean, there had to be 40 or 50 people who were in that waiting room, and we all filed into Nolan's hospital room and gathered around the bed.
And as it just turns out, I was one of the last people who entered into the room.
And, you know, it's already four deep around the bed.
So I wound up sitting on a windowsill next to Willie, who is Mary Fran's youngest brother.
And, you know, you just kind of wait.
And you can watch the heart monitor.
And it, you know, slowly, slowly goes down to zero.
And then when he flatlined, what I experienced was Mary Fran coming across the veil and scooping Nolan up out of his physical body.
And they had this exquisite reunion, as you can only imagine, between a mother and son.
And somehow, I was able to participate in that.
I felt what was going on between the two of them.
And it was a love between two people that was extraordinary.
And they were coming together again.
And then, to my surprise, the two of them then turned to me and embraced me.
And then the three of us left and went to the light.
You were the only other person there.
So there were 50 other people in the room.
And I was what I experienced was Mary Fran, Nolan, and I going to the light.
And what was the other, I mean, look, this is so moving, literally.
But what were the other 49 people seeing?
You said that you were experiencing this.
Yes, 48 of them had a normal reaction to their nephew, their friend, their grandson, passing.
So they were hugging each other and crying on each other's shoulders and being with each other as he made his transition.
And you?
And I was with Mary Fran and Nolan in the light, and it was this extraordinary experience because at once I felt connected to all things.
I felt the loving nature of the universe.
I was overwhelmed with the nature of the love that is the non-physical universe.
And then the three of us had a chance to be with each other and we had a chance to express our affection to each other.
We had a chance to say our goodbyes and we had a chance just to be, the three of us.
And at some point, it felt complete.
And they turned and left and went further into the light.
And I came back to my physical body, which was sitting on the windowsill there in the hospital room.
So that's part A. There's a part B, too.
Just before we get to part B, and this is one heck of a story, and I'm sure you've been told that before.
The people who were in the room with you, the 48, 49, whatever, the others who were in the room, they were there in the same timeframe as you.
And yet you are saying that an awful lot of things happened to you while they were all there, presumably some of them looking at you.
What was that experience like for them?
How much time did elapse?
I'm just trying to get a sense of what was going on in that moment.
Well, that's very perceptive of you, Howard, because part B of this is that as I was with Mary Fran and Nolan in the light, I was also physically present in the room with the other grieving relatives.
And there was in my physical body, it was like the ecstasy of the universe was trying to break out of my physical body.
And I had an expression on my face that was, it was joy, it was ecstasy, it was this profound happiness that, anyway, the point of it is I was, because I was also in my physical body at the same time, I didn't have language for it then, but now we can call it bilocation.
I was in, I had both of my consciousnesses, I had two of them, both fully functional in separate locations.
And the one that was in the room, I realized that I was totally inappropriate and I wound up covering my face with my hands so that...
That was the point.
I didn't.
I did it right away.
Because if anybody had looked at me, it would have been entirely inappropriate.
Sure.
Or it would have been misinterpreted.
And I knew that the second that it happened and was able to cover until both parts of me reunited again in my physical body.
And then I took my hands away and I could be present for the other relatives in the room and hug and be with them.
And all of those things that happen in that situation that all of us will go through at some time.
You speak with it with great fluency now, but you must have been wondering then what the hell is happening to me.
Yeah, I've had 40 years to think about this.
I've talked to hundreds of near-death experiencers and read thousands of cases.
So I didn't have a vocabulary for it then.
I do now.
I really didn't know what happened.
I grew up in a mainline Presbyterian church.
They were nowhere in the lexicon of the church do they talk about the moment that you are in your greatest grief, you are in your greatest joy, that you can witness people coming across the veil.
You can be in two places at once.
I mean, this was all outside of the experience for a young man.
I was 27 at the time, who had this extraordinary experience.
And I didn't have any words for it.
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota.
It's just in a farming community.
It just, I didn't know what to do about it.
And I didn't tell anybody for 15 years.
But in the meantime, you were experiencing, as all of those other people were experiencing, loss.
But because of what happened there, your experience of that loss was different.
Yes, it was.
And we now know why.
The research into shared death experiences, I told you about William Peters and his book, confirms what happened to me.
And essentially what it is, is that people who have shared death experiences, there has to be a heart connection with the person making the transition.
So in my case, that was Nolan.
And just as a little FYI here, Nolan's father had never acknowledged paternity, and he wanted nothing to do with this child and was not ever present in Nolan's life.
And Nolan never knew who his father was.
So he was the closest thing in that room to all of them.
Yes.
I had both of them.
I had dated Mary Fran long enough, and Nolan and I had, you know, started this relationship.
So, you know, I was as close to a father figure as he ever had.
And, you know, I relish that.
But it's, so there has to be a heart connection between the person making the transition and the one who's having the experience.
In that case, it was me.
There also needs to be an invitation.
So the invitation comes from Nolan to me, or Mary Fran to me, or both of them to me.
And so there is this invitation for me to come and be with them on their journey as they go into the light.
And that indeed happened.
You know, they turned and embraced me, and together we went into the light.
So that was also present.
The third thing that needs to be present Is that the experiencer, me, needs to be in a mental state where they're receptive to the invitation.
And in my case, I was sitting on the windowsill, and, you know, we'd been waiting for some time.
You know, people don't, or at least Nolan, don't die like in the movies, you know, where they look up and say, oh, I'm leaving, and poof, you know, it happens really quickly.
It took him, I don't know, half an hour, 40 minutes or something for that, for his heart to give out.
And during that time, you know, what do you do?
I mean, I just sat there and closed my eyes and was kind of in this calm meditative state.
So I was open to receiving that.
People who are in emotional distress, like maybe the people standing around the bed, that makes it much more difficult for them to accept an invitation.
Did you ever ask yourself the question, I'm sure you did, this was an extraordinary experience, an unforgettable experience, a life-transforming experience, but did you ever ask yourself the question, could this just have been the response to my incredible grief?
In other words, could that have been a coping mechanism?
I had wondered that, but it also didn't feel like that.
I mean, because I was transported into a space that was extraordinary.
And, okay, so here's part of the story I hardly ever tell people, but you ask such good questions, Howard.
I'm going to tell you.
The second person in the room who was closest to Mary Fran was her younger sister, who has asked to remain anonymous, so I'm just not going to tell you her name, but to tell the story is okay.
As I was doing my research with people who'd had near-death experiences, I found out that the sister had had one.
And so I went to interview her one day, and her story is actually kind of cool.
She had been visiting her parents and had changed some medication, and she went upstairs to lie down and take a rest, take a nap.
And while she was taking a nap, she had this adverse reaction to the new medication that she had.
And the next thing that she knows, she has lifted up out of her body and is floating in this world of gray.
And Mary Friend comes upon her and with her hands on her hips and she's got her finger out in front of her and she's wagging it at the sister saying, you have to go back and you have to go back now.
And the sister very playfully says back to her, well, Mary Friend, really nice to see you too.
Mary Fram had none of it.
And more firmly on hips, bigger finger wags, she said, I'm not kidding.
You have to go back and go back now.
And when she said that second now, it was done with such force that it knocked her back into her physical body.
And when she did, she opened up her physical eyes and what she witnessed was an EMT, you know, ambulance guy, who had, he was turning to his partner and he said, I've done everything I possibly can.
She's gone.
And the partner looks down and says, oh my God, she opened her eyes.
And they work on her and take her to the hospital and she's fine.
So that's her story.
And I'm documenting this in my interview.
And I've got the tape recorder on and I turn it off and I'm packing up my things.
And I said, say, when, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, when we were at Nolan's bedside, something very unusual happened to me.
I wonder if anything unusual happened to you too when he made his transition.
And the sister looked at me and her eyes got just big as saucers.
And she said, and I took that as a yes.
I turned back on the recorder, so I got this recorded.
And what Mary Fran's sister told me was that she was standing bedside.
And she said, Scott, you know, you were on the windowsill and I was across the bed from you.
And what I witnessed when Nolan made his transition was Mary Fran coming across the veil, scooping Nolan up out of his physical body.
They had this exquisite reunion that I was able to participate in.
Then the two of them turned to me, meaning the sister, and the three of us went to the light.
She used the exact same words.
So she had the same experience, but you didn't find out about it until how long later?
I'm thinking 15 years, if I remember right.
It would have been 18 to 199 to 2000.
Oh my God, it was like 19 years later.
That's astonishing.
I couldn't begin to explain that.
But she didn't see you there.
No, and I didn't see her There.
So either there were four of us going to the light and it didn't register, or what we know about the non-physical universe is that it exists outside of time and space.
So, you know, those two could have been very separate events happening at the same time, which makes it hard to describe.
I really don't have a sense of whether or not we didn't know each other or if it was just two events.
I mean, look, it's an astonishing story.
Sorry you were saying that.
Howard, when I heard that story, you know, any doubt that I had in my mind that this was real just completely vanished.
I knew it, that this was absolutely something that happened.
We witnessed it for each other.
So, you know, we can say this really did happen to us.
And now subsequently here in 2022, the kinds of descriptions around shared death experiences, it exactly matches what William Peters discovered in his research.
So it's, I think it was a normal thing to question whether or not this was a result of extreme grief.
And, you know, part of me says, well, yeah, because it set me up for this shared death experience that completely changed my life.
So did you then, and winding back those 15 years after you'd had your experience and you didn't know anybody else in that room had had that experience, as you said, till 15 years later, what was it that spurred you on to want to find out whether other people experienced the same thing?
So So I came back, or I had this shared death experience with Mary Fran and Nolan, and it was so profound that I had to figure out a way to touch that space again because I knew if I did it once,
that means I could do it again.
And I searched all over the world to try to find a way to do that.
And, you know, I visited the sacred sites of Egypt and Greece.
I went to the pyramids and the Sphinx, and I went to the Oracle of Delphi, and I went to more cathedrals than you could shake a stick at, looking for a spark of energy that would propel me back into that space again.
That didn't work, and I studied different kinds of meditation traditions from TM to shamanism to the Yamoto religion in Japan.
And none of that really got me where I needed to go until I found the meditation tradition at the Monroe Institute that uses binaural beat technology to assist you into entering into expanded states of awareness and has the ability to hold you in that space long enough so that you can learn the skills that you need to move around and navigate the non-physical universe.
What is binaural beat technology?
The slightly worried part of me thinks that sounds a little bit like brain manipulation.
Well, it is, sort of.
This is a very old technology, meaning it was discovered back in the 1800s, the late 1800s.
And what it is, is if you're wearing headphones and you put one tone into one ear, like 100 hertz, and you put another tone into the other ear, like 104 hertz, the brain tries to equalize the two.
It can't because it's inherently different.
And so what happens is that the brain then does two things.
One is that both hemispheres start to work together.
They call it hemispheric synchronization.
So instead of two hemispheres, it's one hemisphere.
And it begins to vibrate at the difference between the two tones.
So in this case, you know, with 100 in one ear and 104 in the other, the brain would hear a third tone, which would be four.
And if you agree, you begin to have your brain vibrate at that four.
That's deep sleep, four hertz.
And the magic of Bob Monroe was that he's famous for writing the very first books about out-of-body experience.
And he was trying to teach people how to do what he did.
And so he started messing around with this technology.
And he started layering.
That was his genius.
He started layering these tones.
So if you did 104 and 100, you set up the deep sleep.
And then you add another tone, which would be awake.
So if your body's asleep and your mind's awake, he called it focus 10 for no particular good reason.
And that was the vibration that allowed him to do most of his out-of-body work.
And that's how he trains others to do that.
Okay, and this is all new to me talking about this now.
Obviously, I did a certain amount of reading about this, but not much.
Before we had this conversation, I wanted to see how it was going to go.
I would think that people would, if they were going to start doing this kind of thing, then they would need to take a little bit of medical advice first, I would have thought.
Well, we know that this has been studied For 40 years now.
And it's safe, it's very effective.
And the nifty thing about the brain is that if you do it a couple of times, you don't need the technology anymore.
You can just remember what it feels like to be in that state of mind awake, body asleep, and your brain immediately goes there and you can do it on your own.
It's like any other skill that we learn.
Like my bad golf swing for one.
It's an assisted meditative state by the sounds of it.
And I'm just, while we've been talking, I've just put it into a search engine and I'm seeing an article that the Washington Post wrote about the Monroe Institute here in 2012, 10 years ago.
Yeah, there's a very famous article.
It was in the Wall Street Journal.
There's a Zillian.
The technology, he named it Hemisync, like HEMI for hemispheric synchronization.
So in your case, where do you think this took you?
Life-wise or reality?
When you started to experiment with this technique, you wanted to go back to that place.
You wanted to see it again.
Did you go back there?
Did you find it?
I did.
And I was able to re-establish communication with both Mary Fran and Nolan, and then later with other relatives that have passed on.
And it's been a joy in my life that I have them in it.
And, you know, the veil is very, very thin.
And the more that I am living, the more I begin to realize how thin that veil is and how open we can be to having that kind of communication if we desire it.
And what are the...
I mean, you can talk to me about what that discovery was like.
Presumably, were they surprised to see you?
No.
So they knew you were coming.
They let's see, how to put this.
You know, they have the ability, the people on the other side have the ability to check in on us all the time if they want to.
And so, you know, they were just waiting for me to figure it out.
Like, you know, well, hi.
Nice to see you.
And you have to remember that this is the hardest part, is that on the other side, there's no time.
So it doesn't really pass for them like it does here, you know, in a linear kind of way.
So, you know, what do they, did you get a sense of what they do on this other plane?
What is an average day like for them?
I mean, you said time has no meaning, so that's a bad way of putting it.
You know, what does their existence consist of?
It's better.
They are learning about themselves and about others.
And, you know, the main purpose of coming into physical existence is to experience contrast.
You know, in the non-physical world, there isn't such a thing.
You know, everything is connected to everything else.
And so you have instant access to the knowledge of the universe.
And it's this strange place where you have this individual consciousness.
You know, I am Scott Taylor.
And yet at the same time, I am also a part of the collective that is the human race.
So, you know, the non-physical universe is run by the words both and, as opposed to either or.
In physical matter duality, you know, we're here and I'm going, oh, I'm me and Howard is Howard and we are different and we're separate.
But in the non-physical reality, in the reality of the unity universe, I am me, Howard is Howard, you are you, but we are also together.
We are also part of the same collective that is the human consciousness.
So it's both and runs that, and down here it's either or, where we recognize our separateness.
You were able to meet them again, and they were not surprised to see you.
That kind of does away with the idea that there's reincarnation, because if you believe in reincarnation, they would already have been back here.
I actually do believe in reincarnation.
I believe that we have the ability to come into the physical world and live multiple lifetimes.
The tricky part, because I keep going back to time, is that from their perspective, all of these lives happen at the same time.
So, you know, for me, you know, here I am talking with you today, but I'm also a Roman soldier and I'm also a fisherman, you know, in the Asiatic Sea, and I'm a Neanderthal, and I'm a, you know, I have all these other lives.
So we're all strands of the same thing.
Not all strands of the same thing.
So from what you've been saying, presumably, are you popping backwards and forwards Between this plane and that plane.
And if you do, and it's wonderful, those closest to you, you were able to find and see.
That's what I would do first.
I would try and locate my wonderful parents and know that they are still in existence.
That would be a wonderful discovery.
But then I would start to ask things like: please can I meet John Fitzgerald Kennedy?
Or, you know, is Abe Lincoln here?
Yes, yes, yes.
Have you done that?
I have met some very interesting people.
I think my mentor in the academic world, my dissertation chair, who passed from ALS, Bruce Kramer, I've had a chance to meet him, historical figure, Saul or Paul from the Bible.
We had to have several really heartfelt conversations because he didn't treat women very well.
And are you sure you meant that?
So we actually had quite the debate, and he reminded me that he was also a product of his age.
So that's also.
So over there, he realized that the way he was behaving down here was wrong, and it took him to go there to work it out.
Work it out.
Yeah.
He said, I got some things right and other things I didn't get quite right.
So, you know.
Spoken to the human race, Taylor.
From all of the people that I've spoken with, I know that a lot of people say that they've experienced near-death experiences.
And, you know, in the news only, what, a week or two ago, we read that an international team of researchers, experts from universities of New York, King's College London, Harvard, California, and Southampton in the UK, they've set out a standard definition for near-death experiences, and they are going to adhere to that and investigate them more systematically.
I've got to say, until this conversation, I'd never had a discussion with anybody about shared death experiences.
Indeed, until I found out about you, I would have had no idea what they were.
How come we don't know more about them?
They're extremely rare.
And as you could well imagine from the description of why they are, there is still some reluctance for people to step forward because you have to admit, it's a little odd, meaning it doesn't fit with our culture.
It hasn't been talked about much.
And that has started to change.
I've been talking about it for a long time, but it really took, I mean, this book was only released in January.
So this is new research that really nails down what are the common elements of a shared death experience and why do they happen.
And I think most encouragingly is, you know, can you program yourself to have one?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, you can.
And why would you want to?
Because it's extraordinary.
It's like a man who climbed Everest, isn't it, who said, why would you climb Everest?
Because it was there.
Okay, so I'm making my transition and my wife, who I love dearly, wanted to know that I was okay and that to have a taste of what our transition is like, you can program that.
It's one of the sweetest gifts that we could give each other as human beings is that recognition that we don't have to be afraid of death.
In fact, it's really something to be looked forward to when the time comes.
Now, the one thing that would separate all the things you've been talking about from hallucination and artifacts of the brain would be if everybody who did this had the same experience.
And indeed, if people who were in the right mental state were close to somebody who was near to them, who was dying, maybe they had that experience too.
If it was all repeatable and all the same, then we're talking.
That is a phenomenon.
And do you say that it is so common, even though it's rare, within the experiences, do the people who have the experiences experience what they experience in the way that you did and do?
Oh, that's a really good question.
Because let's take, it's easier to describe it with near-death experience, there are like 19 common elements.
And so if I was saying, okay, Howard, you're going to have a near-death experience and you're going to go through the tunnel to the end of the light.
Well, the tunnel for me is going to look entirely different than the tunnel for you, which looks entirely different than the one for Fred and Mary and Sam and Alice.
But there's still a tunnel.
And so the individual experience is different, but the element is the same.
And this is all metaphorical anyway.
So if you're having this experience, it's like saying, okay, for me, a tunnel is walking down a cobblestone street with these beautiful trees arching overhead.
And in the distance, when the trees give out, there's this beautiful light.
For somebody else, I just read this great, great story just a couple weeks ago.
This guy was having a near-death Experience and he was a trucker, you know, a long-haul, a lorry driver, right?
And he described going through the tunnel as going through a tailpipe.
You know, well, of course.
Right.
I understand.
So, what basically what you're saying is that the chassis is the same, but it might be a different vehicle on the outside.
Yes.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
I might experience a VW Beetle, a bug, and you might experience a Porsche, but it's basically underneath the same thing.
Underneath, it's the same thing.
So the elements are the same, but how we experience them is different because the experience is designed to aid us in whatever way we need aiding.
So if we need comfort, we're shown scenes from our life that bring us comfort.
If we need this sense of divine connection, that's what will happen.
If we need a slap alongside the head, that's what will happen.
But the element is still the same.
And that's true for shared death experiences too.
But what's going on there that makes it a little different is that Nolan is going through his actual transition.
I'm witnessing it, and he's allowing me to share it.
So I am sharing in his experience.
It's not my, the origin of the experience isn't mine.
It's his.
So that's how it's different than a near-death experience, where the origin of the experience is with the person who's having a near-death experience.
What kind of research is going to be done on this, Scott?
You know, it would seem to me that if it is possible to enter a state that gets you to this place and you've been there many times and it's repeatable for you, then surely science should be able to repeat it.
And then we're all going to learn something that's going to be on the front page of every newspaper.
You know, not just the Washington Post.
It'll be on all the newspapers because we'll have cracked the mystery of death.
We'll have broken through the veil.
We'll have explained all the unexplainable.
It will be done.
So that's the next stage, isn't it, for you?
That you've got to involve what they called academia.
Yes, and academia has been involved in near-death experiences for 40 years, and it has nailed down that it's real, that it's repeatable, that it's, you know, what the common elements are.
I think, this is Scott Taylor talking, I think the science on this is nailed down tight.
Of course, if you talk to academicians, they'll say, oh, there's always stuff we don't know.
Well, yeah, but it's the science on the main points, our consciousness does not exist.
Its origin isn't in the physical brain.
It exists within our non-physical bodies, and those physical bodies, you know, inhabit our physical body, and then we leave.
When we're done, we shed this physical body, and our non-physical body goes back to our home in the non-physical universe.
That's been really well documented now, and there's three, six, nine, ten thousand cases that I can easily put my hands on in about 20 minutes that document this, and it's all been written up in scientific papers.
So the near-death experience part, yep, it's done.
Shared death is just starting.
I mean, I've been telling you about William Peters' first paper, and more people now, the next thing is for other people to duplicate it.
My particular interest is in educating people how to experience it for themselves.
I am an educator at heart.
And so I went on a quest to learn how to do that for myself.
And then later that turned into a quest for how do I teach other people how to do this?
And we can.
And we can.
I'm very sympathetic to all of this because I've never really believed that this existence here is all there is.
I'm kind of hoping that that's the case because there's more to do and I'm not sure whether I'm going to be able to do it here.
What do you say, just finally, what do you say to those who might be listening to this saying, this is a festival of self-delusion?
I haven't heard it quite phrased that way.
That's funny.
Just made it up.
Well, you get a star for that one.
Okay, so for those people who are like just dipping their toe into the water right now and they're going, man, you know, what Scott's talking about is really quite extraordinary.
What does he mean there's, you know, scientific papers and this has been nailed down.
The lead guy in near-death research comes from the University of Virginia.
He's an MD-PhD.
His name is Dr. Bruce Grayson.
As he finished his academic career two years ago, he wrote a summary of what we know about near-death experience.
It's in a nice, tight little volume.
I've got the book.
In fact, I've been trying to get him on my show, but by the time I got around to it, he'd done all the interviews for now that he wanted to do, but I know the book.
I have it.
Yes, it's called After.
And it's extraordinary.
And it's completely footnoted or end-noted.
And so if anybody is looking at this and going, well, how do you, oh, yeah, here's the paper, and here's where I can find it.
The International Association for Near-Death Studies, their website, iANDS.org, has a ton of these papers on the website.
You can just look them up and read them for yourself.
And there's also an organization, isn't there, the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, I think it is, the NDERF.
Oh, the NDERF.
Yes, that's another one.
It's run by Dr. Long, Jeffrey Long.
He's got 3,500 cases that he has documented on his website and summarized.
And he talks about it.
Those are good starting points.
Sorry to jump in.
I'm just conscious of time here.
Oh, how much time do we have left?
Very, very little.
But I have to say, I haven't noticed the time that we've been speaking.
It's been quite extraordinary, really.
This hour, I haven't noticed pass.
And that's absolutely strange.
I'm normally watching the timer.
I just have not noticed.
I think I've been so absorbed in all of this that I don't know about you, but I just didn't notice the time pass.
And I'm used to, you know, I know the value of 60 seconds.
It's the field I work in.
So there you go.
All right.
So what are you going to do next, then, Scott?
What's the next stage of your journey?
So I have recently retired from being executive director of the Monroe Institute.
I taught there for 35 years and have now created an organization called the Expanded Awareness Institute, where I talk about all things, near death and shared death experience, all about the afterlife.
I've learned to become a podcaster.
Oh my goodness, did I have things to learn?
It's called the Afterlife Files.
I'm learning how to put this information out on TikTok.
I've reinvented myself.
And it's like, how do I take the education step one, step further?
I've got a five and a half day class that I teach people about near-death experiences.
And we make that transition 25 times during the course of the week between physical world and the non-physical world.
Okay, so if people would check you out online, where would they go?
Neardeathmeditations.com.
It's a fascinating field.
There's a contact page there and people can email me and I actually will write back.
So go for it.
Okay, well, in this day and age, that's a rarity.
It's a fascinating field.
It's controversial, of course it is, but then, you know, anything good is controversial in my experience.
Now, your people sent me, I think, 13 or I'm just looking at them here, 13 or 14 suggested questions, none of which I looked at in the course of this conversation.
And I don't think we suffered for it.
I think we plowed our own furrow here, Scott.
And thank you very much.
I hope we talk again.
Howard, this has been a true delight.
And I also, this hour just went poof, gone.
That's a sign of a wonderful conversation.
Well, hugely absorbing.
I found it.
I don't know about you.
Really interesting food for thought.
Of course it's controversial.
These things have to be, because we can't sit down and draw up a scientific formula and say, well, actually, that's right, and it's just been proved.
It doesn't work that way.
Your thoughts about the guest you just heard and all guests gratefully received?
Please go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send me an email from there.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained Online, so until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the Unexplained Online, 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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