Hello, and welcome once more to Conscious TV. My name is Ian McNay, and my guest today is Pim van Lommel. Hi, Pim. Hi. And we're in Amsterdam, we're doing a day of filming here, and Pim is from Holland, and he was a cardiologist, he's now retired, but these days he's really interested in the relationship between consciousness and the brain, and has done a lot of research into near-death experience. And he's written a book, which was a bestseller in Holland, that's the Dutch version, and it's also out in English, it's called Consciousness Beyond Life, The Science of the Near-Death Experience. And he also has an important article in a journal called Journal of Consciousness Studies, which came out quite recently. So Pim, let's start with, if you like, your story, and you were working as a cardiologist, and you were obviously faced with sickness and death a lot. And to start with, it must be quite hard to be in that situation, and you care for people, and they die. That must be quite a strain, isn't it, working in those conditions? Well, a lot of people survive as well, but still, cardiac arrest and coronary artery disease and heart disease is still... a lot of people will die as well. Yes. The problem is mostly when they are young people, it's harder to... and to have the discussions with the family when there is a death at a young age, it's difficult, rather difficult to do. But cardiology has changed so enormously in the last 50 years. It was just heart disease, it was just congenital heart disease, and valvular heart disease until 67. And then it just started, coronary artery disease, and the possibility to treat it. It's just a very young specialization. So a turning point in your life, in your career, was you read a book by George Ritchie. Yes. As somebody, I think, who had a near-death experience and survived that, and that got you thinking, didn't it? Yes. Well, the first time I ever met a patient who talked about his near-death experience was in 69. And even near-death experiences were not known. The terminology was by Raymond Mooney in his book, Life After Life, in 75. But I hadn't read it, and it was not published in 69. We should remember that coronary care units, at least in Holland, started in 67. Before 67, we couldn't do modern resuscitation, we couldn't do electrical defibrillation, we couldn't do external chest massage. So that was totally new. Before 67, 45 years ago, all patients died with cardiac arrest. So coronary care units were totally new. And in my hospital, my training hospital for cardiology, I was just a very young doctor, and we had the third coronary care unit in Holland, where I started to work. And that patient had a cardiac arrest, and the resuscitation team came. I was one of them. And we started to resuscitate the patient. We several times did defibrillation, and after about four minutes, the patient regained consciousness. After we resuscitated him, we were very, very happy that we succeeded. And the patient was extremely disappointed. And he told me about beautiful light, and a tunnel, and beautiful landscape. And I always say, I've never forgotten this event, but I didn't do anything with it, because I didn't know that these kind of experiences could happen. In our university, and also the medical study, we had learned that consciousness is a product of brain function. But what was your first reaction when the patient told you this? Surprised. Very surprised. But I didn't know anything about the death experience, or that it could be possible. The only thing we knew, that as long as we believe that consciousness is a product of brain function, it should be impossible to experience consciousness during cardiac arrest. But I forgot it. I was a young doctor in specialization, etc. And then, in 86, I read the book by George Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow, where he writes about his near-death experience in 1943, when he died as a medical student by double pneumonia, and he didn't receive antibiotics. They were not available, hardly available. So he died, and his body was covered with a sheet. And a nurse couldn't accept that his young medical student died, so persuaded the doctor to give him an injection of adrenaline right to his heart, which was quite uncommon in 1943. But after a death of nine minutes, he regained consciousness. He had an extremely intense near-death experience with many, many aspects. And as a medical doctor, he talked about it in university to medical students. And one of the medical students was Raymond Moody. And this was also for Raymond Moody, the stimulus to start studying these kinds of experiences, and he called them near-death experiences. So after reading this book by George Ritchie, I just started to ask my patients who had survived a cardiac arrest if they could remember something of the period of unconsciousness, of the period of cardiac arrest. And to my big surprise, within two years, 12 out of 50 patients I asked, and those 50 patients had survived a cardiac arrest in the past, 12 out of them told me about their near-death experiences. And then my scientific curiosity started to grow, because according to our current medical knowledge, it's impossible to have consciousness, let alone enhance consciousness with the possibility of perception during cardiac arrest. So then in 1988, we started a prospective study in 344 consecutive patients who survived a cardiac arrest to find out if there could be an explanation why patients have these kinds of experiences. So about the cause and content of the ND, because until that time there had only been retrospective studies, which means a high selection of patients who report an ND, because mostly people are silent about it, so they don't come to you to talk about it. So why are people silent most of the time? They're silent because, first of all, it's such an overwhelming experience that doesn't fit in our current world view, that they are overwhelmed by themselves, and when they try to talk about it, they say, oh, it's just a hallucination, oh, it's just tomorrow it's over, it's just a side effect of drugs. So in the medical world, it's not accepted, this kind of experience, because we cannot explain it. So those retrospective studies is highly selective for patients, and it's very hard after 20 or 30 years to find out exactly the medical conditions where those experiences occurred. So there had never been done a real prospective study, which means that when patients have survived a cardiac arrest, within several days we ask them if they could remember something of the period of unconsciousness. And then we know that all the medical conditions, the medication, and all the other demographic factors, to find out if we could find an explanation, if this patient had an NDE, if we could explain it. So you must have gotten more and more fascinated by this, because once you get, okay, you get one story, and as you say, you were surprised, but then when you got, because 12 out of 50 is nearly a quarter, nearly 25 percent, it starts to become significant. Exactly, but that is still an aselective group of patients, because you just ask them, the patients I meet are my outpatient clinic. But when you talk to a patient with an NDE, if they are willing to share it with you, it's such an emotional account, what they tell you. And they're still also very emotional. But I now have met patients who had an NDE 50 years ago, and when they start to talk about it, it's like it happened yesterday, with all the emotions. Really? So they still feel the emotions at the time? It's the most impressive experience of their life, always. Always, it's always there. You say, we'll come in a few minutes to actually what happens with an NDE and what some experiences were, but I'm interested in pursuing, first of all, the process where it changed your view of reality, and you say in the book, it raised questions for you, like, who am I? Why am I here? What is the universe made of? So it triggered something fundamental inside you, didn't it? Yes, but this was not in the first years of the prospective study. It changed slowly. When I studied more about it, when I thought more about it, when I met more and more people with NDEs. So first, for me, it was a scientific curiosity that it should be impossible to have these experiences. And it still happened. And later on, there came all the other aspects as well. Okay, so let's go to then, what actually is a near-death experience, both from the physical side and then the details of how somebody has the experience of it. Well, so sometimes people report an extraordinary conscious experience during a critical medical situation, like a cardiac arrest. And the near-death experience is the reported memory of this exceptional conscious experience with universal elements, like being out of the body. They don't have any physical pain anymore. They have the idea, is it dead? I'm dead or not. And when they have an out-of-body experience, they have the possibility to have a perception out and above the body, and they perceive their lifeless body with the resuscitation or operation or traffic accident, whatever. And then sometimes they can come in a dark room and go through a tunnel to the light in an otherworldly dimension with beautiful landscapes and beautiful colors, beautiful music. Then they can meet a light or a being of light. And with this being of light, there is unconditional love and wisdom. You get all the answers before asking the questions. It's incredible for them. And in this atmosphere of unconditional love, they see a life review, that they relive their whole life. And I'll come to it later. Sometimes they can see a flash-forward, a preview of their future life events. Then they can meet deceased relatives and come to a border. And at last, they have a conscious return into their sick body, which is awful for them. So these are the universal elements. And these near-death experiences are reported in cardiac arrest or patients in a coma through a traffic accident or cerebral hemorrhage. You can have a short-term loss of blood around childbirth, young women. You can have it in near-drowning for children. You can have it in a severe traffic accident, which is a fear-death experience, so you're not really dead. You can also have it in severe diseases, not really life-threatening. And you can have it in, let's say, severe depression or meditation or in isolation. So you don't need a non-functioning brain to have these kinds of experiences. They've been mentioned in all times and all cultures and all religions. Plato has written about it. 2,000 years ago, the soldier of Arab who had a classical, and it has been described in the Upanishads and the Hindus and the Tibetans. So I didn't know that at all. The mystical religious experiences in the Middle Ages also have described the same kind of experiences. I was going to stop you there because there's a lot of experiences you've covered. So the first stage of possibility is that they leave their body. So let's say consciousness has left the physical body, and I know some of the accounts in the book you talk about. They're in the operating theater, and they can see their body. They can see the nurses and doctors around the body, and so they're like observing what's happening to their body. So that's one stage, and that's similar, I guess, to an out-of-body experience. People will have an out-of-body experience where they can leave their body and see not only their body, they can travel and look at other places or whatever. So you've got that. Then you've got, for some people, the process where they then go further through a tunnel, and they see a light, and then they might also then see dead relatives, what they feel are dead relatives, and can communicate with them. And then you also mentioned about memories of their life and also about a possible future. So tell me more about that, how you see that. What do you want to hear? About the memories. The memories. Yes. Well, they experience that all acts or words or thoughts you ever had are kept with the influence of others. So it's like I see with all seeing eyes. You experience every act from the past, either as a young child or as a baby, and you experience also what happened to the people surrounding those acts. If you took some plaything from your little sister, you feel how awful it was for her. You feel her sorrow. So you're connected with everybody in the past as well. And you see that if you gave love or you didn't give love, which is the most important thing when they come back, it's about the intention of your thoughts and words and acts, which is important. Trying to give love. So it's a life inside experience as well. You really experience how you lived. And it's an insight. It's no condemnation or whatever. You know now how you lived and how you should change if you would love to do it better. So your inside experience. So through that, as you say, you then have some kind of ability to see where you could handle things different in the future if you come back, how you would have a different way of handling the same experience and living your life. But the experience that you're connected with everybody else. And this connection is always there. You're also still connected with deceased relatives. You're always connected. So sometimes people tell me it's about an experience of unity, an experience of oneness. And when they come back, they still have the same kind of feeling that you're connected with everything and everybody, with the planet Earth, with nature, whatever. You're always one with them. You see, I want to come back to my previous question to you about the effect this had on you. Because here you are a conventional doctor, cardiologist, and you're medically trained. And to have this possibility open to you is so different from the way you've lived your life, I presume, and also your training. Yes. It changed me a lot. It changed me a lot. I always say that people with an ND who are willing to share the experience with me were my greatest teachers. Yes. It must be very touching also. It's very touching. It's very emotional. And they're so reluctant to share it with you. When I ask, do you remember something from the period of encounter, then they say, no. Or you say, why? And then you know it will take at least an hour. Okay. So they're shy, I suppose. Because of all the negative responses they get. There's so much prejudice, so many comments they get about these kind of experiences. For most medical doctors, it's impossible that they have these kind of experiences. So they don't accept it as well. It doesn't fit in our ideas. So I always say that these kind of experiences where you listen to those patients, where you hear hundreds and hundreds of those patients, and I've written accounts of more than thousands of those people, then you have to reconsider again the never-proven assumption that consciousness is a product of brain function. Because that consciousness would be a product of brain function. It should be impossible to have an enhanced consciousness during cardiac arrest with self-identity, with cognition, with emotions, with possibility of perception, with memories. And also impossible to have the conscious return into the body. So it's impossible with our current medical knowledge. So that was a challenge for me as well. And you also said in the book, I thought was interesting, was that people that had these experiences, most of them lost their fear of death. Yes. Because obviously they've had an insight into what possibly happens when they die, so they realize they're not just rooted to this body in this lifetime. You said death happened to be not death at all. It was another way of life. So there's no death anymore for them. There's no death for them. No, no death for them. So they are convinced that there's a continuity of their consciousness. Yes. They're convinced of it. Yes. Because they experienced it. Yes. They know. It's not a belief anymore, they know. Yeah, I'm looking for a quote here from the book that I wrote out, that one person said, my body, my life, and the whole world suddenly hit me like a prison. Yeah. So that was interesting. They realized the restriction of the physical form, and not only the physical form, but the mental attitude of society and their emotional restrictions. Well, when they have the conscious return into the body, they have a huge problem because they are too much extended in their consciousness to fit in this small body, which still has a problem with the disease as well. When you had a heart attack, you have the pain again. When you have a traffic accident, or when you have a cerebral hemorrhage, they have so many limitations in your body, and you were just a few minutes ago without any limitations at all. Now there is, you were saying in the book, a small percentage of patients that find it frightening. Yes. Well, first of all, let's say that what we found in our study of 344 consecutive patients who survived cardiac arrest, that 18% of those patients reported clear memory and near-death experience of the period of cardiac arrest, and 82% did not have any memories at all. So the first thing we wanted to know, could it be an explanation why only 18% have these memories, this near-death experience? To our big surprise, there was no difference at all between the group of patients with and without an ND in the duration of cardiac arrest, two minutes or eight minutes, just how much lack of oxygen there was in the brain. It didn't matter at all. If you were unconscious for five minutes or three weeks in coma, it didn't matter at all. They give you medication, it didn't matter at all. You have sometimes an electrophysiological stimulation in the cath lab, where you resuscitate patients after induced cardiac arrest within 30 seconds. It didn't matter at all. Pre-knowledge about this kind of experience, fear of death or religion, education, didn't matter at all. So the surprising finding in our study was that until that time, it was always said this kind of experience are just caused by lack of oxygen in the brain. They're just hallucinations, just side effects of drugs. It's just psychological explanation. We could tell now, because we could do statistical analysis in this study, that there is no explanation why people have this ND, and we could exclude physiological, psychological, pharmacological explanations, which was very important. And then we found all the classical elements. In our study, we didn't find frightening NDEs, and I know quite a few patients who had a frightening NDE. But first of all, about 15% of patients who have a positive NDE have a frightening moment when they are in a dark room. The dark room is frightening, and then they see a small point of light where they're attracted to, and they describe it as a tunnel or a spiral or something. So staying in a dark room is frightening for them, and then later it becomes positive. But perhaps about 1% or 2% of those patients stay in this dark room or go down, like Dante has written in this Divine Comedy. They can describe the same things as Dante has written. And when they come back, they are afraid of dying again. And so it really does change people's lives, doesn't it, when they get back? So the second part of our study was a longitudinal or long-term study to see if the changes of the people described, let's say the transformation, which is the loss of the fear of death, a new life inside, what is important in life. Important life is unconditional love and compassion, first towards yourself. Accept your own negative aspects as well. This is hard enough. Unconditional love and compassion towards others and towards nature and towards the planet Earth. And the third aspect of transformation, which they're very reluctant to talk about, is to enhance intuitive sensitivity, which means that they feel what other people feel or think, which is awful for them. They're connected with other people. So what we wanted to know is if this kind of transformation was due to the cardiac arrest itself or due to the NDE that hadn't been studied before in a prospective design. So what we did is after two years and eight years, we interviewed all patients with NDE who survived with a matched control group of patients who survived cardiac arrest without NDE. And what we found is only patients with an NDE had this transformation, which is important because it is the objective part of the subjective experience. You can never prove that someone has a subjective experience. We cannot prove what you think or what you feel, but we can prove the objective transformation. And we found that only the patient with the NDE had this classical transformation, which is very intriguing as well. Yeah, and also it's interesting when you say that they feel what the other person's feeling, and that's unsettling for them. I guess it's unsettling because it's unfamiliar to them. It is totally unfamiliar. It's totally new for them. The enhanced intuitive sensitivity, we can perhaps come to it later. We can try to explain it now as well. The question is where is our consciousness? Let's talk about it now. That's the interesting thing. And then we can explain later this enhanced intuitive sensitivity. We know, and that's the important aspect of this prospective studies in patients with cardiac arrest, because they all have been clinical deaths. A clinical death is the period of unconsciousness when heartbeat stops, blood pressure stops, and breathing stops. And you have to resuscitate them within five to ten minutes, otherwise the brain is so damaged that they all will die because of irreversible derailment. It's the first stage of dying. They're all dying, these patients. And you have to be very alert to start CPR within several minutes, otherwise you are too late. So these patients, when we look to these patients, then we know that the clinical findings, they lose consciousness within seconds. When you measure the blood flow to the carotid arteries, it's zero within one second. There's no blood flow going through the brain. The clinical findings are that the body reflexes are gone, which is a function of the cortex of the brain. The brainstem reflexes are gone, which is the gag reflex or the corneal reflex of widened pupils who don't react to light anymore. The breathing stops. The breathing center is close to the brainstem. So the clinical findings are there's no function of the total brain anymore, and there have been studies done in induced cardiac arrest in humans, let's say for threshold testing in internal defibrillators, ICDs, or in animals as well. And when you measure the electrical activity of the brain, of the cortex, the EEG, you find that within 15 seconds the EEG is flatlined. So there's no electrical activity anymore. So what we know from the clinical findings and these kind of studies, the brain function has ceased within 15 seconds, and no patients will be resuscitated within 20 seconds. It's always at least 60 to 120 seconds. In a well-organized CCU and on a cardiac ward or out of hospital rest, it's even much worse. So in all the studies, there have been four prospective studies with a total of 562 patients who survived cardiac arrest. We found the same percentage of NDEs, and we know that all these patients must have had a flatlined EEG and no function of the total brain. So then with our current medical knowledge, we believe that consciousness is a product of brain function. So it should be impossible that patients should have enhanced consciousness with the possibility of perceptions and memories. It's impossible, but it still happens. So we have to change our ideas about the relationship between consciousness and the brain. And in my concept, the brain has not a producing function, but a facilitating function, which means that it makes it possible to experience consciousness in your body, which is awakened consciousness. And this is only a small part of this enhanced consciousness. And in this enhanced consciousness that people experience, there's no time and no space. It's a non-local realm, what we know from quantum physics. Everything is there at the same time. Everything is always connected without time, without space. No beginning, no end. There's no beginning nor end to consciousness. So this non-local consciousness or endless consciousness is always there, and we receive just when we awake just a small part of this consciousness as our awakened consciousness and still part of these memories as our memories we can know. But the brain has a transceiver function. It transcends the information from our body and transcends information from our sense organs to our consciousness. And we receive information from consciousness into our body. It's a kind of interface function. You can compare it also with your computer. There are one billion websites also here in this room at this very moment, but you need an instrument to receive them. And you can change the websites as well, but you know the codes. So the one billion websites are not produced by your computer. They're received by it. And also the mobile telephone. There are hundreds of thousands of mobile telephone calls now going through this place where we are here. But we need an instrument to receive it. So what you're saying is that the brain is like a computer or a television set, which on the one hand is receiving information from our consciousness, and on the other hand it's feeding back to the consciousness the sensations that we have, which begs the obvious question, where is our consciousness? You've mentioned non-local. Just explain more what you mean by non-local. You can understand it when I ask you the question, where are those one billion websites? Well, they're in a... A lot of them are stored in a desert somewhere in America. Well, they're just encoded in electromagnetic informational waves. They're always there. The information is stored somewhere tangibly. It's not a drive somewhere. So it's transmitted by the speed of light. But it's kind of non-local. You can understand that about the same time, not the same time, about the same time, you can receive these one billion websites in Australia and China and Europe and the United States. It's always there. It's encoded in waves. And so the non-local consciousness is also encoded in waves, but they are scalar waves. Waves are something else. This non-local realm, everything is there, encoded. We can tap from this. I mean, we have more reception ability. The threshold of consciousness can be lower, and it is lower where you had an NDE, which means that you not receive only channel one, your own consciousness, but you also receive channel two, three, four, five, the consciousness of others. And this is what I call the enhanced intuitive sensitivity. You receive information not by your senses and not by your body. It's non-local information exchange. And this is the enhanced intuitive sensitivity. People can have prognostic feelings, premonition. They can know that someone will die in three weeks, and to their surprise, they will die. And you know, most people know about an incoming phone call. You think of someone. Most people have this, but this is also non-local information exchange. You can feel the sorrow of people. You feel the pain of people. You can know that they have cancer. You don't want to know it. So when they have had an NDE, and this enhanced intuitive sensitivity, they stay at home, because when you go in public transportation, you feel all those people there coming in. So having this NDE, which is a positive experience, is a trauma. It's a spiritual crisis, which is a trauma. They have homesickness for this beautiful experience, but they're depressed because they cannot share it with others, and they feel overwhelmed by this enhanced intuitive sensitivity. So they're lonely as well, and it takes years and years and years to accept it. And the second stage is to integrate it, to change your life as well. And you say again in the book that it's very helpful to have relatives or friends who are sympathetic and understanding, because otherwise they feel even more isolated. And that's the practical problem as well, because most friends and relatives are not open for it. The fact is that more than 50% of patients with an NDE get a divorce, because it's not the same person I was married with for the last 20 years. He isn't interested in money anymore. He isn't interested in power anymore. He wants to help people. It's not the same person. So they get a divorce. So it's a real practical problem. About 85% of physicians are not open for it. Nurses are a bit better, happily. And it takes years mostly to find a person who is open and willing to listen. And you need to share it to accept it as well for yourself, because you cannot accept it yourself as well, and you think you're crazy. As long as you don't know that this is called a death experience, that this kind of experience is possible, you think you're crazy. And you feel things. You're crazy. So you're totally changed. I still want to go back to pursue this question of where is the consciousness stored? Now I understand you used the word non-local, and you've explained briefly what that is. But do you have an understanding or the beginning of an understanding of how it works insofar as you, Pim, have got your history and experiences somewhere it's stored? Yes. We know with websites and everything else, we know somewhere it's stored on a hard drive somewhere, and through a wire or through the air we're getting that information. Yes. But how is it working with us as human beings? Yes. Well, I always try to understand it when I talk about the gravity fields which influence our solar system and influence the whole universe. We don't know what it is. We cannot measure it. We only can measure the physical effects of gravitation. It's the same, but it is all in the whole universe, there's gravitational fields. So also the consciousness is everywhere in the universe, and we only can measure the physical effects by neuroimaging techniques like fMRI or PET scan or EEG. But we cannot measure consciousness itself. We cannot measure the content of consciousness. We cannot measure what you think or what you feel. So with the current materialistic science, neuroscience, it's not possible to prove that you have consciousness or that I have consciousness. And that's the reason the materialistic scientists call it and just consciousness is an illusion because we cannot measure it. So when this non-local domain, non-local realm, is not in this physical world, it's outside. It's another dimension like gravitational fields. It's always there. Could this be dark matter or dark energy which they're now just beginning to discover and quantify a little bit? The problem is we cannot measure it. We can't discuss it. 20 years ago, we thought we knew everything about the universe, and now we know 4% is well-known and 96% is dark matter and dark energy. We don't know what it is. We thought that we knew what DNA was. We know only 4% of DNA is important for proteins, and 96% is called germ DNA because we don't know what it really is doing. I don't believe that nature makes junk. So it has a function. For me, DNA has the local interface function in each cell. So each cell of our body has contact with this non-local field as well. It's always there. So this interface function changes, is enhanced, when you have the near-death experience. So the threshold of consciousness. William James, one century ago, already mentioned this threshold of consciousness. People like Frederick Myers from England, Henri Bergson, the philosopher from France, have written this. It is nothing new. Plato has written about it, and the Upanishads 5,000 years old have written about it. It's nothing new. People have always known it because of this kind of experience, have been there during all times, all religions, and all cultures. People have always had this kind of experience. So people knew it. And with our current fantastic medical science and naturalistic science, we have learned a lot, but we've missed a lot as well. Yes, the thing that we do know now, and you would talk about this in the book, is that the brain could not possibly, there isn't enough capacity in the brain to hold the information from all the experiences that we've had. So physically that throws out the theory that our mind is in our brain, and our brain stores all the information. That cannot be the case. And a very interesting aspect as well is neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is that by changing your consciousness, you can change the function and structure of your brain. So talk more about that. So what you call scientifically non-local perturbation, that means that the consciousness has effect, has influence on matter. When you do long-term meditation, the structure and the function of your brain is permanently changed. We know it by EEG. But also a short-term meditation gives rise to changes. There's been an interesting study done in England by London taxi drivers. They had to learn the London plan. That's right, yes. And it's about three years of hard study to know it. And when they got a scan, they saw that the hippocampus, the part where it plays a role, it's just a correlation, a role for consciousness, and all these patients were enlarged. It has become bigger because they have used it more. Yes. Then you do, it's also interesting, mindfulness training. You change your structure and the function of your brain. Interesting also, placebo effect. When you give patients with Parkinson's disease a placebo and they believe that they get medication, they improve. You see more dopamine in the brain. You see them moving better. You see the change in the brain by fMRI and PET scan. When you do chronic pain patients, you give them a placebo and they believe that they get real medication. You see changes in the brain exactly the same as they got the medication. And when you do it in depression patients, they're really depressed and they believe that they get medication. You see changes in the brain also with compulsive disorder. There have been interesting studies done. So you can change the function and the structure of your brain, neuroplasticity, by changes in your consciousness, and that could never be possible when just conscious of the product of brain function. Yes, it seems there's two parts for that. There's the belief system and then there's the focus as well because you may mention about placebo effect, which is more the belief system. Which is also a change of conscious. It's a belief. You think something in your consciousness. Yes. And it influences your brain. Yes. Now, this is a question. Maybe it's going to another level. Where is that thought ultimately coming from? Because we've established that... Where consciousness is coming from? Where is the thought to change something coming from? It's always there. But it's, let's say, you also ask, why do we receive or have this breaking consciousness? The personal consciousness. When you have a mobile phone, you have a code in it. And that's the reason you only receive your personal phone calls. Yes. So you have also a code in your body, which for me is the DNA. Each person is unique. And each DNA is person-specific. So this is your code for your person-specific consciousness as well, which is a part of this huge hole of non-local consciousness. Yes. But I'm wondering, you see, where the motivation comes from. The personal, the individual, the motivation relating to the human being comes from. So I understand. It's interesting. With the taxi drivers, I forget the word they use for it. They call it the knowledge, I think. They call it the knowledge. And they do have incredible knowledge. Because you get in a taxi in London, you will probably know this when you go there. They don't. And you say a street, and they nearly always know where it is, unless it's in the outskirts. Which is incredible. It is incredible. Because a lot of them, you start talking to them, and their knowledge of the world is quite limited. They all talk about football, almost without exception. And they'll talk about current affairs or whatever, or their wives and everything. But you don't think these are people with great brains. You're right. They have learnt this knowledge. And it's interesting. You can quantify that in the brain. That shows. The hippocampus. It shows in the brain. Yes. And also for musicians, you see changes, whether they're violin players or players, you see changes in the brain. These parts of the brain are larger than my or your brain. Yes. Because they train it. Yes. The music, they train the muscles, but they train the music as well. Yes. Some parts are larger. Yes. Yeah, and I think it's, Bruce Lipton talks about this. He calls it epigenetics. Epigenetics is something else. Good. Explain that then. How is it different? Well, we always thought that, since Darwin, that everything is genetic. It's in your DNA. I believe the DNA is the interface, the transceiver. So DNA can change the open or close connections in the DNA by influences from outside. This is called epigenetics. So when you have influence by your environment, by your grandfather, by your parents, grandparents, it will change your DNA, which can be inherited by your children as well. So epigenetic means that influence from outside change your DNA, which is genetic. So it's not just inside your DNA. It also is influenced by outside factors, and I've written about it as well in my book about epigenetics. It's a very interesting aspect that we're connected with our environment as well, and it changes also our body, not only our brain, but also our body, also our DNA. Yes. That's what is called epigenetics. But it comes down to the fact that we have a power to change our potential. Exactly. And that's the fascinating thing, and that's what a lot of us, including myself, forget at times, that there is an inherent power there. And that is the unconscious aspect, like epigenetics. It's not conscious, but you can also consciously change it by meditation, mindfulness, or whatever. Yes. So by training yourself. Yes. I was looking at my notes, and I wanted to cover some other things, because I know time is finite, and we have to finish in about ten minutes, but I still want to get as much as I can in this program. And you also mention in the book that in a way the near-death experience and the concept of non-local and endless consciousness, that explains things like deathbed visions, which we cover with a program with Peter Fenwick on Conscious TV, heightened intuitive feelings, which you've talked about a little bit, and also remote viewing, which I've always found fascinating. And I read this book a few years ago, where... Stephen Schwartz. About Stephen Schwartz. It was... It wasn't Stephen Schwartz, it was somebody else. It was somebody who had worked for the U.S. military and had this... Putoff. Yeah. I don't know the name, but he'd been... Yeah. He'd been shot. It was friendly fire. He'd been hit on the head, and he was wearing a helmet, so it didn't kill him, but it changed something in the way he saw reality. And then he had all kinds of powers, including remote viewing. He had the near-death experience. I'm quite sure. Yes. Must have had. Yes. So it changes your reception ability, what I said. Well, first, when you have the end-of-life experience of deathbed visions, the people can have, in the end stage of their disease, can have also this period of enhanced consciousness. They are... They see the diseased partner or diseased parents coming together. They see a light or a tunnel of light. Sometimes children who are dying see angels. The difference with the near-death experience is that they have at the same moment their waking consciousness and this enhanced consciousness, so they can talk about it at the same moment. When you're unconscious in cardiac arrest, you cannot communicate about it. But in end-of-life experience, you can communicate about it. And they sometimes just say, oh, what a beautiful light, and then they die. So they have the same kind of experiences. And sometimes, there's a recent book by Raymond Moody, Shared Death Experiences, that people who are at the deathbed of a loved relative who dies, that they are taken with their consciousness, with the death experience of this dying relative, and they go also through the tunnel, through the light, sometimes see the life review of the people, the person who just died. But the body is still at the bedside, and then they come back with their consciousness in the body again. And they're just normal, healthy people who are, by the love of the dying patient, are taken with their death experience, which is the same as the near-death experience, which contains the content. And what also can happen is the premortal experience, that you are seeing someone or feeling someone who is dying at a distance. I know a story from a woman who was in a Japanese concentration camp in the Dutch Indies, in Sumatra, and her husband was in a Japanese concentration camp in Java. And in the night, her husband came to her and said, don't worry, I'm fine. And then six months later, it happened to be the exact death moment of her husband, which is a premortal experience. Some people come to visit you, to comfort you. And then you have the post-mortal experience or after-death communication, which is perhaps a greater taboo than the near-death experiences. People are in contact with the consciousness of these relatives in the days, weeks, or months after their death, mostly during sleep. But it's not a dream because you never forget it. It's also a life-changing experience, and they can see them or feel them or communicate with them. And there have been some studies, for instance, in the British Medical Journal that 50 percent who have lost a partner have contact with them. And when you lose a child, it's 75 percent. When I give lectures, so many people are sitting there because they have this kind of experience, and they cannot believe it themselves. They sometimes receive information that couldn't be known, so it's also objective information they receive. And then the remote viewing, I call it non-local perception, which is you can perceive, not by your senses, not by your body, but by a long distance. And that is what people with enhanced intuitive sensitivity also can do. You can see things in the future. So it's independent of time and independent of space, of distance. So you can see also, there have been with remote viewing, they found in Egypt old graph tomes they didn't know, but they could see also back in time. So it's also non-local perception. And they used it for the CIA many times, but Russia did it as well. So this kind of, let's say, when you have the concept, the idea of non-local consciousness, it's all so simple. It's just you have contact with these non-local aspects of consciousness. Then you have the non-local perturbation, neuroprecision, non-local perception, which is remote viewing, enhanced intuitive sensitivity, which is called telepathy, whatever. But for me, it's old-fashioned terminology. You shouldn't use it anymore because people don't believe it. It's called paranormal, but it is normal where you have a different kind of approach, scientific approach. Yes. It just proves more and more that we're basically these receivers. Yes, and that we have a body and we are conscious. It's our vehicle. So without a body, we still are conscious beings. We still have conscious experiences. Someone wrote to me, I can be without my body, but my body cannot be without me. So you need a connection. But there's no connection in your body. And death is just the end of your physical aspects. It's just a continuity of consciousness. And that's what I've learned from all those people who had a near-death experience. Actually, the more I talk to you, the more I realize that how we die is very important somehow. Our ideas about death define how we live our lives. So when we think that death is the end of everything, we invest in the materialistic, external aspects of our life. But when we know there is a continuity, we invest in what is really important, which is love and compassion and empathy towards others and towards our endangered planet as well. Yes, and as you said earlier, we also have a realization that we are all an expression of the same thing. And everything you have done to others will come to your back as well. Yes. The positive as well as the negative aspects. You'll meet them all again when you die. Yeah. Pim, I'd like to go on, but I'm looking at the clock and we need to finish. But it's been fascinating and it opens up so many other doorways to look at reality. And it's such important work that you're doing. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate you also coming to talk to us on Conscious TV. And thank you everyone for watching. I remind you, Pim's book is called, in English, Consciousness Beyond Life, The Science of the Near-Death Experience. And of course, as we've discussed, the ramifications of what he talks about are pretty mind-blowing in many ways. Thank you for watching and I hope we see you again soon. Goodbye.