December 13, 2024 • 51 mins
Join Sandra as she tells us about the work and discoveries of the late Dr. Peter Fenwick, and takes a look at Near-death and Before-death experiences.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And you're here.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Thanks for choosing the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day
and Paranormal Podcast Network. Your quest for podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural,
and the unexplained ends here. They invite you to enjoy
all our shows we have on this network, and right now,
let's start with Chase of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast, am employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:42):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself. Hi,
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, discuss the reasons we now know that
(01:02):
our loved ones have survived physical debt and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. It is with sadness
today that I report that psychiatrist doctor Peter Fenwick has
recently moved into the world of spirit and today I
want to dedicate this episode to him. Doctor Fenwick passed
(01:26):
peacefully in his home at the age of eighty nine,
surrounded by his family. He was a British neuropsychiatrist, neurophysiologist,
and parapsychologist who studied near death experiences and was convinced
that our consciousness is freed after death. His interest in
(01:47):
near death experiences was piqued when he read doctor Raymond
Moody's book Life After Life. He was initially skeptical of
Moody's evidence, but he reassessed his opinion about these experiences
after one of his own patients described a near death
experience very similar to that of doctor Moody's work. After that,
(02:11):
he collected and analyzed over three hundred and fifty examples
of near death experiences. Doctor Fenwick has had a long
standing interest in brain function and the problem of consciousness
in where it is located, and has published a large
number of research papers related to altered states of consciousness,
(02:35):
abnormalities of consciousness and behavior, MDes, and end of life experiences,
some of which you'll hear on this episode today. In
nineteen seventy seven, doctor Fenwick joined the Scientific and Medical
Network became president of it in two thousand and one
and President emeritus in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is an.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Organization that, for over fifty years, connects spirituality through science
and education. You can find out more about them at
Scientific and Medical dot net. Doctor Fenwick and his wife
Elizabeth gave so much of themselves to this network, and
they wrote several books, including the Art of Dying, The
(03:18):
Truth in the Light, which is an investigation of over
three hundred near death experiences, shining light on transcendence, The
Unconventional Journey of a Neuroscientist, and The Hidden Door Understanding
and Controlling Dreams. Today, I want to present to you
part of a lecture that doctor Fenwick gave to a
(03:39):
group of psychiatrists on the topic of experiences surrounding near
death and dying. I found this talk fascinating and I
believe you'll enjoy it too. And we hear at Shades
of the Afterlife. Well, we're going to do our part
to make sure doctor Peter Fenwick's work stay relevant and
(04:01):
gets to the most amount of people. Doctor Fenwick was
not afraid to die, and today you'll find out why.
Meet doctor Peter Fenwick.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
What I'd like to do today is to talk about
near death experiences and approaching death experiences. And the reason
for that is that I became interested in the near
death experience when I had a patient who had it,
and what I needed to do is to try and
understand them if I could. It seems to me that
(04:32):
the models which we have are really not good enough.
On materialistic models aren't because they always ended the brain.
What was part clearly happening was that this was not
ending at the brain. So I thought that what I
needed to do is to look further into other models,
which we could aide if you like, with the sand
mechanical model. So today we'll set out the problems. I'm
(04:56):
going to look at cardiac arrest, NDEs, end of life experience,
and I'll occasionally drop the word ELI and that end
of life experience, contribution of these to models of our
understanding of consciousness and some sort of conclusion I hope,
and for this talk, mind equals consciousness, because I'm not
going to get into the debate. So that's the position
(05:19):
I'm coming from. Okay, the problem, really it can be said.
It's quite simply the sound in paradigm states that brain
processes and only brain processes are responsible for the generation
experience of consciousness. The transmission theory, our constructs of the
world are in part the transmission of the absolute nature
of reality and part brain processes. So there's the two
(05:42):
sides that I'm going to look at. Now. If you're
going to ask the question what is the relationship between
brain and mind? Then I have worked the whole time
with the cats can fMRIs, magneto and cephilography EEG. And
there's no consciousnessness there. There are magnetic fields, they're electrical fields.
(06:03):
There is the transmission of information, but there's no consciousness.
So that's not going to help me. So I think
you've got to look for art lives. And are there
situations where mind and brain are not the same. Yes,
when there is no brain function but experiences reported e g.
Cardiac arrest NDEs and these thus represent non brain experience,
(06:25):
and I'll support the later. And are there any other artlowers? Yes?
Are the situations when consciousness starts to loosen from the
brain and finally separates and disintegrates. Well, yes, during the
process of death. So subjective experiences of the dying should
show similarities to that of the nd So if there
(06:49):
is a transcendent reality. We'll see it in the nd
we'll pick it up as people slowly attenuate their normal
structures consciousness. So let's look at near death experiences. These
are very familiar to you all, so I'm not going
to go into it. This is just a summary of
NDE paypos by Rousseau, and it's a nice summary. What
(07:13):
I want to draw your attention to is this when
it's being dead is one and out body experiences is another.
You see they color up nicely and bright light. I
want to draw your attention to. That's seventy two percent.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
I want to jump in on this part. Doctor Fenwick
posted a chart that were common features of a near
death experience. I'll read those to you now, and then
we'll get back to his words. First of all, he
says the overall incidence of them is about four percent.
Of people who have cardiac arrests, seventy seven percent of
(07:51):
them feel calmness, thirty eight percent feel joy, ninety percent
feel an absence of bodily sensation, ninety two percent are
aware of being dead. Fifty eight percent have an out
of body experience in a new material plane. Thirty five
(08:11):
percent have out of body experiences or vertical experiences. These
are the ones that they float above their body and
can see people working on them in the operating room.
Thirty four percent have vivid sensory experiences. Thirty one percent
experience esp or telepathy, thirty nine percent feel a dark space,
(08:36):
then a bright tunnel, Seventy two percent experience the bright light,
twenty four percent beautiful music, forty three percent experience a
being of light or a guide and deep knowledge and
wisdom and love. Thirty eight percent experience another realm, which
(08:58):
may be a beautiful country guard, and forty one percent
experience their dead relatives and friends and other spiritual beings.
Eighteen percent have a panoramic life review.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Let's continue, Okay, the being of light, I want to
light up knowledge and wisdom and love, and then the
other realms are enormously important, So being of light and
light and the other realms or the fantastic gardens, et cetera.
In our culture and a lot in others. Of the
(09:33):
near death experience, and this one is terribly important. You
can't actually see it if I can read it to you,
and that is dead relatives and French and spiritual beings
who appear in forty one percent of NDEs. So let's
look at cardiac arrest NDEs. When we got over two
thousand letters from our first film on NDEs, and what
(09:53):
became quite apparent to me was that if you want
to ask serious questions about the end in terms of
its own provenance, what generates it, you can't use an
ordinary nd because you don't know what the brain state is.
There's one thing where you do know the brain state,
and that is during cardiac arrest NDEs. If they came
(10:14):
during the cardiac arrest, well, the incidents during cardiac arrests
varies from about ten to twenty percent. But the main
thing that I want to say is that the phenomena
of the arrest endes are the same as the phenomena
of the non arrest NDEs, which is interesting. So I
(10:35):
can argue from the arrest NDEs to the non arrest endes,
and also that the depth of them varies according to
the closeness to death. This is evidence the non local
functioning of mind during a cardiac arrest. The outer body
experience is ridical remote viewing bright light, which is transcendental
(10:57):
experience of other realms and relatives, friends and spiritual beings,
So keep those categories in mind, out of body, remote viewing,
bright light, experience of other realms, and transcendence. And this
is the standard thing that you walking along, your heart stops,
your consciousness goes down, it restarts, and you have a
(11:20):
confusional arousal, and the NDE is thought to occur at
that time little bit of neurology for you. When the
heart stops, the brain stem goes down, so you have
no heartbeat controlled from the brainstem, no respiration controlled from
(11:42):
the brain stem, and you have no consciousness also controlled
from the brain stem. So in fact, the brain is dead.
Now people who don't really understand brain functional saying this
is just a little bit of brain functioning rubbish. Either
isn't to be. If there is, it's not going to
support consciousness, and it's not going to support clear consciousness
(12:04):
of the sort that occurs in the nd because you see,
there has to be the whole of this sort of
mechanism which is initiated from the brain stem, which keeps
the cortex working, and it's not there because the brain
stem is done. So cardiac arrest and electrical silence indicate
that the brain stem and cortex are inactive, so you
(12:27):
can't go along any of those lines. So then what
is the evidence that during that phase you can intact
experience things. They are over a hundred anecdote with ridical
OBE cases and those during cardiac arrests and the subject
leaves his body and sees the resuscitation, usually from above.
(12:49):
If you're going to test the ritical nature of the ND,
you want a cardiac arrest and an OBE group, an
out of body experience group.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
We have to take a quick break, but you're going
to love where we're going next. You're listening to Shades
of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife.
(13:32):
I'm Sandra Champlain and you're listening to the great doctor
Peter Fenwick. And as we continue in this episode, you'll
hear more about near death experiences and those extraordinary experiences
that many people have seeing loved ones, etc. Just before
we pass, just to recap what he said before we
(13:54):
took the break, basically is that consciousness, if it solely
lives in the brain, cannot exist when the heart stops
and our brain stem goes down. In that case, he says,
the brain is dead. It is in these moments that
the extraordinary out of body and near death experience occurs.
(14:17):
So let's continue.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
There are over one hundred anecdote with ridical OBE cases
and those during cardiac arrests and the subject leaves his
body and sees the resuscitation, usually from above. If you're
going to test the ritical nature of the nd you
want a cardiac arrest and an OBE group, an out
of body experience group you could use as a control
(14:40):
for that. Cardiac arrests and no other body experiences, because
people are going to say, if you ask them after
the arrest what happened during it, We've all seen television
programs and so on. So he says, well, of course
they know. Well. In fact, Penny Sartori, who did her
PhD on NDEs, guided them up into those who said
(15:02):
they could see what was happening and those who said
they couldn't, and then looked at their accounts, and the
accounts of the people who said they could see what
was happening much more accurate than those who couldn't. So
it's just another piece of information. Okay, So what we're
dealing with this fifty year old man not healing well.
Going to hospital. They see that he's got a cardiac problem,
(15:25):
taking up the cardiac cathlab. So this guy's in the
cath lab and he goes into ventri kilar fibrillation. His
heart obviously has stopped. He's unconscious, so he's unconscious on
the table. Everybody sees it. The next thing that happens
is he says he leaves his body. Okay. They put
on something which is called an aed an Automatic external defibrillator,
(15:50):
and this has a protocol with it, so you put
the electrodes on and it measures the heart and sees
whether it's in normalism or not. If it's not in
normal rhythm, it will advise a shark. So that's what happened.
So they give him a shark and there's no response.
(16:11):
In other words, he remains in ventriction fibrillation, deeply unconscious,
and they have to do a full round of CPR.
Other words, they have to pummel his chest, et cetera.
That goes on for three or four minutes. This guy's
unconscious there and then they put it on again and
the machine says advise sharks. So he's still in ventrically
(16:31):
fibrillations throughout this time, and then his heart starts, so
we've got a clear, clear period of unconsciousness, no cardiac output.
It's absolutely solid, and he's unconscious. There's no little bit
of consciousness there. The guys out and we know that
he's unconscious from three to five minutes. But he was
(16:52):
aware during this time. He saw himself leave his body
at the beginning, went up into a corner of the room,
looked back. There was a woman he saw, who he
then later classified as an angel, who said to him
when he was lying on the bed, come up, come up,
and he thought that'd be ridiculous. Next thing he knew
(17:13):
he was up there, and then he looked back and
he had both that and sol the resuscitation process. So
he has clear consciousness during the time of his arrest,
which is monitored. I mean, it's about the best case
you can get. The guy's aye, but he's unconscious, he's
got no consciousness, so it's a really nice solid case.
(17:33):
This case suggests that he was dead to the medical team.
The patient claims to be conscious, so brain and mind
are separated during ventricular fibrillation. So that's really quite a
powerful statement to be able to make okay, so we
can talk about now. Happily, the brain and mind are
separated during the nd so what about the mental states
(17:56):
the dying? Can we gain information as the brain fail?
I got this nice quotes from Stafford Bessie because it
is really good in terms of just setting the feelings
for it. Whether dying persons are telling us of glimpses
of the next world or conversing with people we can't see,
we should consider ourselves immensely blessed when it happens. If
(18:21):
we don't make the mistake of assuming get confused, we're
likely to feel some of the excitement they convey for
your witnessing the momentary merging of two worlds that at
all other times remain tightly compartmentalized and mutually inaccessible. The
merging is what I mean by the spirituality of death.
(18:43):
So I want you to get this feeling of two
worlds slowly starting to merge as the dying process continues.
Let's look at the death process. What is it? How
does it occur? There are lessons for you guys here.
All of you must die, So we're going to look
at the dissolution of consciousness. We have done a lot
(19:05):
of work on this retrospective studies. Prospective studies. We've done
it in England and in Holland. We've got over fifteen
hundred emails of stories and so we've interviewed doctors, nurses,
auxiliary staff, chaplin, volunteers, et cetera, et cetera. So it
built up a lot of information about the dying process.
We gave every a questionnaire looking at deathbed visions, deathbed coincidence,
(19:30):
light surrounding the body, shape, scene, leaving the body, transiting
to new reality and so on. So that's our database
and these are the conclusions really. So first of all,
when we went into this, this just about two thousand
and four, and we couldn't say that they actually occurred
because there wasn't a consensus in the literature. So we
(19:51):
started from the grants then that they may not occur.
And if they did occur, what were they like or
were they just simply fantasis of the dying nan The
present consensus is that over fifty percent of those dying
consciously will have end of life experiences. So please all
(20:12):
of you die consciously, then you get the fireworks and
if you see somebody coming up to you with a
syringe full of madesil Lamb saying have this because you're
obviously in distress. Say no, no, no, no, no, no
no no. I want to watch this whole process, and
it's very important. Otherwise you won't get some of the
things we're talking about. So this is the formulation of
(20:33):
the dying process. And the life experiences may start with
premonitions of own death or another's death. The reason I
say that is from the results of our studies and
emails which are sent in. So premonitions are right at
the beginning. There the dial Alama says two years before
you may get information about death. I assume that's corrected
(20:55):
in this book. And if you look at the stories,
they're not usually that long, and the stories sometimes relate
to promontory visit by dead relatives. So dead relatives come.
I want you just to think about this. My mother
was in the hospital after a fam that fractures her ribs.
One day she saw my dead brother at the door
(21:17):
of her room. She said it made her very happy
to see him. So it's really interesting. There's a changing
consciousness that these things have a different meaning to the
person who receives the vision. I joked that he had
come to take her on to the next world, and
we laughed about it, and two weeks later she died unexpectedly.
(21:38):
So there's a promontory visit. This one is a very
sad one. The mother learns about the fact that her
child is going to die. My third daughter, Roberta, was
just seventy years old on May the seventeenth, nineteen eighty nine,
when I woke up in the morning totally upset and
in mourning over her death. I was so surprised and
(21:58):
confused to see her lying next to me that I
actually gently nudged her to see if she was alive.
So this was a really powerful experience. She apparently had
gotten up during the night and climbed in next to me.
When she moved, I cried uncontrollably with relief that she
was not dead and hugged her. She did not seem
to mind or make any fasts. Perhaps she knew why
(22:19):
I felt relief. I did not tell her I thought
she was dead. Could not remember any dream, so it's
not a dream. But the feelings were so strong and real,
exactly as they were two days later, when she was
the victim of a hit and run accident, so very
clear premonition of what was going to occur. So this
can be the start of the dead process. I say
(22:41):
can be because not everybody has has it. The next
stage our deathbed visions. This is some of our data
really just to show you how common these are in
the retrospective studies between sixteen seventy percent and the prospect
his studies it's about sixty percent approximately, So they're common
much than people are prepared to say. In fact, there's
(23:03):
a split medical people say it doesn't happen the nurse
who say it that the nurses of the patients, they
hear the stories. So who do the dying see? Now,
keep in mind that we're thinking about near death experiences
the same time, the parents are the most common. Persons
unknown or the next ones generally defined as spiritual beings.
(23:25):
A lot of people can't speak at that point, but
you can greet somebody joyfully, houses and siblings, but the
same in our sample, we see very few angels. Pity
and liked an angel. Well maybe I'll get an angel,
like don't they sometimes your NDC friends? And we only
have two examples of dogs and cats. Really sorry about
(23:46):
the dog and cat lovers mainly going to be humans
who come to see you. So compared to NDEs, dead roads,
his friends' spiritual beings appearing forty one percent of those
so very similar transiting to a new realm. This is
the next phase. This is enormously interesting. The work in
(24:07):
Zeric on this is really important. They've just brought out
a paper which shows that these are people who are
dying of cancer in the last fortnight of their life.
Over fifty percent in fact, transit to the new realm. Well,
you know what it's going to be, light, don't you?
(24:27):
An area very like that the nd beautiful region where
they meet other people, spiritual beings there to help them,
dead relatives. Some describe it as a waiting place. So
we now have a match between the experience of the
NDEs and as consciousness slowly slowly disappears, because it's only
(24:48):
in the last few weeks before death, then you go
into this other realm, you come back, go into the
other realm, come back again, etc. Suddenly she seemed to
stare intently at the window. She turned to me and said, please, Pauline,
don't ever be afraid of dying. I've seen a beautiful
light and I was going towards it. I wanted to
go into that light. It was so peaceful. I really
(25:10):
had to fight to come back. Sadly, she died the
next morning. I knew she had seen something that day
which gave her comfort and peace when she knew she'd
only have to live. So again, a very good match
between the ND.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
I never get sick of hearing stories of what people
see just before they pass. No one dies alone. It's
time for our next break and we'll be right back.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back
(26:00):
to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain, and you're
listening to the words of the late doctor Peter Fenwick,
who just passed into the spirit world this month at
the age of eighty nine. From all the interviews I've heard,
he was not afraid to die. In fact, he was
a proponent that we all die consciously so we can experience,
(26:24):
as he said, the fireworks. Let's continue with more stories
from the deathbed and his views on consciousness living outside
of the brain.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Suddenly, she seemed to stare intently at the window. She
turned to me and said, please, Pauline, don't ever be
afraid of dying. I've seen a beautiful light and I
was going towards it. I wanted to go into that light.
It was so peaceful. I really had to fight to
come back. Sadly, she died the next morning. I knew
she'd seen something that day which gave her comfort and
peace when she knew she'd only have to live. So again,
(26:59):
a very good match between the nd. There's the data
the English prospective from the Dutch prospective running at about
fifty percent of the carers had seen these experiences, so
compared to the end where it's thirty eight percent of
people have these experiences. Now the next thing is then
(27:22):
you come up to death itself. Now, death is absolutely fascinating.
It's not just a turning off. There are a whole
set of phenomena which you occur, mainly non local. The
first st one is radiant light in the room of
the dying light which is everywhere in the room. It
can be specifically things, it can be spiritual globules of
(27:45):
light which have seen in the room at that time.
And of course the light with the dying is very
like the light the nd deep knowledge, wisdom and love.
If you are in it, that wisdom and love and
knowledge can transform the person who's dying. And you talk
(28:05):
about transformation and transcendence. Here a couple of light stories.
I took them because they're nice and ple ones. This
is a chaplain. Sometimes I've seen the light which is
in a corner like candlelight. It's a golden light. It's
not electric light, and it's not one of the hospice
lights just appears, sometimes goes when they die, they take
(28:26):
their last breaths, everything settles down, the light goes out.
Another one when her mother was dying, this amazing light
appeared in the room. The whole room was filled with
this amazing light, and her mother died. So there is
this phenomena of light which is part of dying. Now,
I want to go onto the other thing, which happens
(28:46):
at the time of death, and the evidence points to
it all being within a few moments of death, because
we've got a lot of accounts with times, and that
is deathbed coincidences, and they occur like this. You're in
Florida and you have a son who's in the UK,
(29:06):
and you pick up the fact that he's dying and
there's a connection between the two of you. So what
is this connection and how does it work? Well, it's fascinating.
First of all, they're very common. That's sixty percent of
carers had heard stories about it. In all the emails
we've got, a large proportion were devoted to deathbed coincidences.
(29:29):
From that, we can say a number of things. First
of all, they're driven by the person who's dying. They
select who it's going to be. How do we know
that If you have a broken couple, for example, where
the man goes off somewhere and the woman doesn't care
that he's gone, but he in fact still devoted to
(29:49):
his wife and he dies, he will visit the wife,
so it's driven by him. It's those people with strong
emotional attachments. We've got a number of stories of people
who said, my son wasn't there, that's why she came
to visit me when his mother died. So the deathbak
coincitances are fascinating. The form the visit takes depends on
(30:12):
the mental state of the person who's receiving the visit.
If they're awake, it's a feeling, it's a compulsion that
something has happened to this person. You have to garn
ring them up, you have to find out what's happened.
If they're asleep, it's quite different. It's narrative dream in
which the dying come and they do two things. They
(30:37):
first of all, come to be with the person. Then
they give them a message. The messages I'm okay, don't worry.
And quite often the dream ends with them going into
the light. So again similar sorts of things to the NDE.
Now this is also a time of huge parapsychological activity.
(30:59):
We've talked about the light, We've talked about the visits
of the distance. But you get connections with clocks. We've
got many clock stopping stories. Do you all know My
grandfather's clock stopped dead, never to go again when the
old man died. And here's a nice story, because is
it only mechanical clocks? They are the only ones that stopped?
(31:19):
What about electric clocks? So I got you this story.
My father died at three point fifteen am. At about
eight thirty am, I went to tell my uncle Archie,
who had been close to Dad. Noe. The emotional relationship
is always an emotional relationship. His uncle Archie opened the door.
It was clear he was distressed, and as I began
to tell him, he interrupted me and said he already knew.
(31:42):
He said no one had telephoned him. So it's a
bit of a deathbed coincidence here too. But told me
to look at the clock on the mantelpiece that was
stopped at three fifteen, as was indeed his own wrist,
rocher's bedside clock, and all other clocks in the house.
Was even an led display on the flashing three point fifteen.
It's really good. So electronic clock stopped too. It's completely
(32:05):
taken aback. But Artie seemed comfortable with the phenomenon, was
just concerned losing someone close to him. So we got
lots and lots of clock stories. Got also a lot
of animal stories, dogs which howl in different places and
so on. So what I want you to think of
it as is, dying is not just a simple turning off.
There are all these parapsychological effects which occur at the
(32:29):
end of life. And don't forget that we are, in
fact in the transition to this other realm Okay, so
what's the meaning? The cares are very clear, They're all
trons personal I just put into John Eccles. I mean
he has to be aired, doesn't he, because of his
dualistic stance. He puts it nicely. I maintained that the
(32:49):
human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its
claims in promissory materialism to account eventually for all spiritual
world in terms of the pattern of neuronal activity. I mean,
it clearly has to be wrong. This belief must be
classed with a superstition. I rather like that, But this
one I take much more seriously. Do you all know? Penfield,
(33:12):
the neurosurgeon in Canada, spent his life with electrodes in
the brain, taking out various bits of people's brain. This
is his book, The Mystery of the Mind myself after
professional lifetime spent in trying to discover how the brain
accounts to the mind. It comes as a surprise now
to discover, during this final examination of the evidence, that
(33:34):
the dualist hypothesis separation of mind and brain seems the
more reasonable of the two possible explanations. Now, he's coming
from a very wide base of cerebral function. Mind comes
into action and goes out of action with the highest
brain mechanisms. It's true, but the mind has energy. The
(33:56):
form of that energy is different from that of neurinal
potentials of travel the external pathways. So he argues for
mind and brain being separate. You've probably seen this new
transmission theory by Lanza. He says that we carry space
and time around with us like turtles with shells, meaning
that when the shell comes off space and time, we
(34:17):
still exist. It's a nice concept about the limitation of
the body. The theory implies that death of consciousness simply
does not exist. It only exists as a thought because
people identify themselves with their body. And he is the
guy who did a lot of the work on genetics,
so he's got a very high scientific profile. So let's
(34:40):
summarize everything using the death data. How can we conceive
the world. What sort of pattern would it have? Well,
this is the pattern of the dying process as I
see it. Premonitions, deathbed visions. You can negotiate with your visions.
Do remember that when your aunt comes to tell you,
(35:02):
probably your mum actually comes to tell you that she's
going to come back and pick you up, you can
say not this week. You can't say because it's a
great party in the hospice where you won't be taking
part in this anyway, but you can say, because my
son is coming, they wait for that. And we've got
lovely accounts of negotiation with the deathbed visions. It brings
(35:25):
hope and joy. Then you come to this new reality,
total lucidity I haven't talked about, although that's fascinating. And
then you come to actual death itself, deathbed coincidences, and
then all these parapsychological things like clocks, animals, light bells,
And this is a fascinating one. That's shape seen leaving
(35:47):
the body. They're very clear when people see them. They're
described as whist bike or smoke, and sometimes they're more
solid and they come out usually from the top of
the head, sometimes from the chest. We've had one or
two that have come out of the feet. With them,
there is a presence in the room as the shape
(36:09):
is leaving. We're part of the five dimensional manifold. Why
do I like that theory? Bernard Carr really likes this,
the idea of the brain, which is the four dimensional
world and the fifth dimension behind it, and he talks
about Clusi cline and the fifth dimension. Why am I
(36:29):
attracted to that. I'm attracted to it because of the
idea of what people report when they're out of their
bodies during a cardiac arrest. They can remotely view so
space is contained. They can in fact see all round objects,
they can see the bottom, they can see the top, etc.
(36:49):
So again it suggests a different form of reality at
that time. I quite like the idea of a fifth dimension.
We've got to have something like that which will explain
the data. Five dimensions will explain that's noo and and
we find in dying. So you can, if you like,
take the idea that you lose the limitation of the
four dimensions and the fifth dimension is the one which
(37:13):
comes to the four. David Lawton, who I do like
he's worked a lot with near death experiences, argues for
a five dimensional structure for NDEs and argues that death
is simply the withdrawal of the four D part being
the five D intact. So it's an interesting idea again.
Or you can have consciousness part of a non local
(37:36):
informational field, no space and no time. And person who
likes that is Stephen Schwartz.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
We'll find out about Stephen Schwartz when we get back
from the break. Some of what he says goes right
over my head. We must remember he's speaking to a
group of doctors who may have had a little bit
more schooling than myself. So let's go to the break
and we'll be back with more. Doctor Peter Fenwick, you're
listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and
(38:07):
Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to
(38:31):
Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and you're listening
to the words of the late and great doctor Peter Fenwick.
Just a reminder of some of his book titles. One
is called Past Lives, an investigation into reincarnation memories, also
shining light on transcendence, an unconventional journey of a neuroscientist,
(38:54):
The Hidden Door, Understanding and Controlling Dreams, The True Truth
in the Light, an investigation of over three hundred near
death experiences, and the art of Dying. These stories of
people being there to greet us when we migrate to
the other side are so comforting to me, and I
(39:17):
love thinking that we live now in a four dimensional universe,
but there really is five dimensions, and when our bodies die,
we get to tap into everything that exists. We do
live in an intelligent universe. To think that we are
living and breathing with consciousness, just to add a little
(39:41):
food and water and sunlight and exercise, and look at
the great things that human beings have done over the
course of the many years on this earth. With so
much intelligence, why wouldn't there be an intelligence in dying.
Let's continue with a few more words from doctor pa Fenwick.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
You can have consciousness part of a non local informational field,
no space and no time. And person who likes that
is Stephen Schwartz played a little with that and published
in Neuroquontology. I don't know whether it makes a coherent
story or not, but it's a model of non local
consciousness with no space and no time, and the required
(40:24):
features for that model is an intention or directed attention,
emotional linking, terribly important transition of consciousness which you get,
and an entrance into a newminal reality which you suddenly
get in that as well.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
There were a few questions that doctor Fenwick was asked
near the end of his presentation, so I'm just going
to include him speaking on a few various topics.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
We have not had any stories of hellish experiences. Let
me be clear. That is that some people certainly have
spiritual anxiety when they die, and always it's been related
to unfinished business. But talking to hospice cares and so on,
you know now it isn't hellish at all. The picture
(41:11):
that I've given you of the other realm I think
is correct. I find it interesting in the near death experience.
People who have talked to about the life review sometimes
they will say I had this fantastic life review, but
when you question them on it, they no, it wasn't.
It's just specific things which have come up. Other people
have a panoramic life review, and they really do. And
as soon as you get that sort of experience, it
(41:33):
raises questions about the nature of memory and whether memory
is in fact all in the brain, or whether in
fact you have to think in terms of external storage
of the memory in some sort of way, particularly of
course in the near death experience, when we arguing there
is some proper brain function anyway. But I haven't seen
a full analysis done of the cardiac arrest ND life
(41:58):
reviews that would be where we could start actually to
understand these more So, I don't think the data is
all there yet?
Speaker 4 (42:08):
Has there been some data about the if you like,
the levels of consciousness of him, person who.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Is dying or has us wizardly dyed?
Speaker 4 (42:18):
For example, if Ramen Maricchi, if we had a data
about him, it's likely to be quite different from somebody
who has had never had any sort of his spiritual
training or excuritience or any So is.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
There some data? Very little? It moves on on to
a thing which I did in an area I didn't
talk about at all, and that is, in fact, sudden
recovery of consciousness from coma. And this occurs. I think
one figure I saw from a New Zealand hospice is
in about six percent. And there's a very nice paper
(42:52):
by Bruce Grayson and Norn on the subject is to
be called lightning up before death in the victory or
in literature. And what happens is the person who is
deeply chermatosed and then he suddenly alerts. The other point
is that when they alert, it's usually just before death.
(43:14):
It's called ternal lucidity. And so what happens is you
go unconscious, then you alert, greet your relatives living, greet
your relatives dead, then fall back and die. Well, that's
interesting enough, but they're much more interested to it, and
(43:35):
that is that we've got accounts from people in nursing
homes when the dying had profound Alzheimer's and haven't recognized
their family, and yet when they come out of lucid
interval or tone, luciviy or other, they in fact recognize
the family. The other thing that they do is their
bodies are totally paralyzed from strokes, but yet they sit
(43:58):
up and hold out hands which they haven't used before.
So there are a lot of interesting scientific things about that.
But as to measuring the actual level, no, we haven't
really got far enough with that yet. But what I
would like from you are a whole lot of high
practitioners who are happy for us to examine them when
(44:18):
they die. So let's end with the great inventor Edison,
just hours before his death, emerged from a coma, opened
his eyes, looked upwards and said, it's very beautiful over there.
Now we've got lots of those stories. We've also got
stories in which the dying say, or the people who
(44:39):
are next to the dying report that the dying say
just before they die. Particularly the non believers that the
last of life. I was quite wrong. It's quite different
from what I thought. So you got a lot of
those stories. We've got a lot of stories too of
people who don't know that a relative has died and
(45:00):
the relative comes in the deathbed vision and they say
to them they behave as you would do to a
relative who you don't know has died. Hi, nice to see.
What are you doing here? So you've got a number
of those stories too, which again sort of goes in
with these models which we're putting forward. And finally you
all know this one. Steve Jobs said wow, wow, wow,
(45:24):
as he died, and so you should. If you're going
into that reality, that's exactly what you'll do. It's very positive,
very very of farming. So with thanks to my colleagues,
don't forget I like stories, so we have a huge
bank of stories. Matt, thanks very much.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Thank you doctor Fenwick for your over fifty years of
service into consciousness. If you go on YouTube you can
find a video called the Final Border Peter Fenwick at
TEDx Berlin. There's over a million views and close to
fourteen hundred comments. I want to read to you a
(46:05):
few of them. My ninety year old mother saw her
deceased mother in the dining room of her nursing home
less than a week before she passed. She told the nurse,
my mother's here. I want to go with her. Another.
Just before my mom died, she had Alzheimer's disease, and
she had not spoken a word in five years and
(46:28):
had to be turned in her bed. She suddenly turned
on her own and looked up towards where the ceiling
meets the wall and made the wow with her mouth.
She didn't speak in words, but had a look of
amazement and joy. It was really wonderful to see that happen.
(46:50):
Another My eighty seven year old grandmother was speaking and
laughing at the ceiling for three days. My grandfather said
thought she had lost her marbles. My aunt, which was
her daughter, was the only one who believed my grandmother
when she said, it's my mom and all the others
(47:11):
they're telling me they're getting things ready for me. She
then passed peacefully. Here's another. A few days before my
father passed away, I had an unusually vivid dream. My
father's deceased brother visited me. I was so happy to
see my uncle. He put his arm around my shoulder
(47:32):
and turned me where he showed me a bright, beautiful
tunnel of light. Then I saw my father walking into
the tunnel. I looked at my uncle and he was
smiling and so happy and comforting. My father passed away
two days later. Another says, my grandma has never acted
(47:54):
crazy in her life. She was very down to earth,
and right before she fell asleep for the last time,
she said that my grandpa had come to get her,
and he told her it's time to go home and
stop talking about being an old lady. Another says, my
dad said he could see the light and feel the
(48:16):
love coming for him. He was lucid until the end.
And another my mother was dying and my brother and
sister were traveling across three states to get to the hospital.
My sister got to the hospital and then my brother arrived.
My mom had been sleeping all day, but then she
sat up and said, good, you're all here. Then she smiled,
(48:41):
laid her head back on the pillow, and died. Here's another.
When my ninety three year old grandmother was dying, my
mother visited her. Bertha said to my mom, Betty, you
should have been here. An amazing cat was here and
looking at me. He was so beautiful. The next day
she died. Then many years later I went to see
(49:03):
my father in a nursing home. He said, you just
missed the most amazing thing. A huge and beautiful cat
was here and gazing at me. And two days later
he died. Apparently, in my family you get to see
the cat. And one more, my grandpa saw his brother
who had passed away twenty years prior, which of course
(49:26):
made him so happy. From his side of the conversation,
they were going fishing, which was their favorite activity when
they were both alive. Grandpa died just a few days later.
It's not easy for us human beings, is it. There's
a lot of worry in our life, a lot of fear,
there's guilt. What I recommend for all of us is
(49:50):
spend time listening to these kinds of stories, reading good books,
but most importantly, talking to our loved ones, keeping them
part of our lives and included in our lives. The
day will come and we'll be able to see that
fifth dimension and realize they've been a part of our
lives all along. Slow down, talk to them and trust
(50:14):
those loving feelings are coming from them. I want to
remind you to come visit me at We Don'tdie dot com.
Come to one of our free Sunday gatherings with medium
demonstration included. Come about fifteen minutes early and you can
say hello, I would love to meet you. I'm Sandra Champlain.
Thank you so much for listening to Shades of the
(50:35):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to iHeartRadio dot com. Spils
And you're here.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Thanks for choosing the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day
and Paranormal Podcast Network. Your quest for podcasts of the paranormal, supernatural,
and the unexplained ends here. They invite you to enjoy
all our shows we have on this network, and right now,
let's start with Chase of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast, am employees of Premiere Networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:42):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself. Hi,
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been
on a journey to prove the existence of life after death.
On each episode, discuss the reasons we now know that
(01:02):
our loved ones have survived physical debt and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. It is with sadness
today that I report that psychiatrist doctor Peter Fenwick has
recently moved into the world of spirit and today I
want to dedicate this episode to him. Doctor Fenwick passed
(01:26):
peacefully in his home at the age of eighty nine,
surrounded by his family. He was a British neuropsychiatrist, neurophysiologist,
and parapsychologist who studied near death experiences and was convinced
that our consciousness is freed after death. His interest in
(01:47):
near death experiences was piqued when he read doctor Raymond
Moody's book Life After Life. He was initially skeptical of
Moody's evidence, but he reassessed his opinion about these experiences
after one of his own patients described a near death
experience very similar to that of doctor Moody's work. After that,
(02:11):
he collected and analyzed over three hundred and fifty examples
of near death experiences. Doctor Fenwick has had a long
standing interest in brain function and the problem of consciousness
in where it is located, and has published a large
number of research papers related to altered states of consciousness,
(02:35):
abnormalities of consciousness and behavior, MDes, and end of life experiences,
some of which you'll hear on this episode today. In
nineteen seventy seven, doctor Fenwick joined the Scientific and Medical
Network became president of it in two thousand and one
and President emeritus in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
This is an.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Organization that, for over fifty years, connects spirituality through science
and education. You can find out more about them at
Scientific and Medical dot net. Doctor Fenwick and his wife
Elizabeth gave so much of themselves to this network, and
they wrote several books, including the Art of Dying, The
(03:18):
Truth in the Light, which is an investigation of over
three hundred near death experiences, shining light on transcendence, The
Unconventional Journey of a Neuroscientist, and The Hidden Door Understanding
and Controlling Dreams. Today, I want to present to you
part of a lecture that doctor Fenwick gave to a
(03:39):
group of psychiatrists on the topic of experiences surrounding near
death and dying. I found this talk fascinating and I
believe you'll enjoy it too. And we hear at Shades
of the Afterlife. Well, we're going to do our part
to make sure doctor Peter Fenwick's work stay relevant and
(04:01):
gets to the most amount of people. Doctor Fenwick was
not afraid to die, and today you'll find out why.
Meet doctor Peter Fenwick.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
What I'd like to do today is to talk about
near death experiences and approaching death experiences. And the reason
for that is that I became interested in the near
death experience when I had a patient who had it,
and what I needed to do is to try and
understand them if I could. It seems to me that
(04:32):
the models which we have are really not good enough.
On materialistic models aren't because they always ended the brain.
What was part clearly happening was that this was not
ending at the brain. So I thought that what I
needed to do is to look further into other models,
which we could aide if you like, with the sand
mechanical model. So today we'll set out the problems. I'm
(04:56):
going to look at cardiac arrest, NDEs, end of life experience,
and I'll occasionally drop the word ELI and that end
of life experience, contribution of these to models of our
understanding of consciousness and some sort of conclusion I hope,
and for this talk, mind equals consciousness, because I'm not
going to get into the debate. So that's the position
(05:19):
I'm coming from. Okay, the problem, really it can be said.
It's quite simply the sound in paradigm states that brain
processes and only brain processes are responsible for the generation
experience of consciousness. The transmission theory, our constructs of the
world are in part the transmission of the absolute nature
of reality and part brain processes. So there's the two
(05:42):
sides that I'm going to look at. Now. If you're
going to ask the question what is the relationship between
brain and mind? Then I have worked the whole time
with the cats can fMRIs, magneto and cephilography EEG. And
there's no consciousnessness there. There are magnetic fields, they're electrical fields.
(06:03):
There is the transmission of information, but there's no consciousness.
So that's not going to help me. So I think
you've got to look for art lives. And are there
situations where mind and brain are not the same. Yes,
when there is no brain function but experiences reported e g.
Cardiac arrest NDEs and these thus represent non brain experience,
(06:25):
and I'll support the later. And are there any other artlowers? Yes?
Are the situations when consciousness starts to loosen from the
brain and finally separates and disintegrates. Well, yes, during the
process of death. So subjective experiences of the dying should
show similarities to that of the nd So if there
(06:49):
is a transcendent reality. We'll see it in the nd
we'll pick it up as people slowly attenuate their normal
structures consciousness. So let's look at near death experiences. These
are very familiar to you all, so I'm not going
to go into it. This is just a summary of
NDE paypos by Rousseau, and it's a nice summary. What
(07:13):
I want to draw your attention to is this when
it's being dead is one and out body experiences is another.
You see they color up nicely and bright light. I
want to draw your attention to. That's seventy two percent.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
I want to jump in on this part. Doctor Fenwick
posted a chart that were common features of a near
death experience. I'll read those to you now, and then
we'll get back to his words. First of all, he
says the overall incidence of them is about four percent.
Of people who have cardiac arrests, seventy seven percent of
(07:51):
them feel calmness, thirty eight percent feel joy, ninety percent
feel an absence of bodily sensation, ninety two percent are
aware of being dead. Fifty eight percent have an out
of body experience in a new material plane. Thirty five
(08:11):
percent have out of body experiences or vertical experiences. These
are the ones that they float above their body and
can see people working on them in the operating room.
Thirty four percent have vivid sensory experiences. Thirty one percent
experience esp or telepathy, thirty nine percent feel a dark space,
(08:36):
then a bright tunnel, Seventy two percent experience the bright light,
twenty four percent beautiful music, forty three percent experience a
being of light or a guide and deep knowledge and
wisdom and love. Thirty eight percent experience another realm, which
(08:58):
may be a beautiful country guard, and forty one percent
experience their dead relatives and friends and other spiritual beings.
Eighteen percent have a panoramic life review.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Let's continue, Okay, the being of light, I want to
light up knowledge and wisdom and love, and then the
other realms are enormously important, So being of light and
light and the other realms or the fantastic gardens, et cetera.
In our culture and a lot in others. Of the
(09:33):
near death experience, and this one is terribly important. You
can't actually see it if I can read it to you,
and that is dead relatives and French and spiritual beings
who appear in forty one percent of NDEs. So let's
look at cardiac arrest NDEs. When we got over two
thousand letters from our first film on NDEs, and what
(09:53):
became quite apparent to me was that if you want
to ask serious questions about the end in terms of
its own provenance, what generates it, you can't use an
ordinary nd because you don't know what the brain state is.
There's one thing where you do know the brain state,
and that is during cardiac arrest NDEs. If they came
(10:14):
during the cardiac arrest, well, the incidents during cardiac arrests
varies from about ten to twenty percent. But the main
thing that I want to say is that the phenomena
of the arrest endes are the same as the phenomena
of the non arrest NDEs, which is interesting. So I
(10:35):
can argue from the arrest NDEs to the non arrest endes,
and also that the depth of them varies according to
the closeness to death. This is evidence the non local
functioning of mind during a cardiac arrest. The outer body
experience is ridical remote viewing bright light, which is transcendental
(10:57):
experience of other realms and relatives, friends and spiritual beings,
So keep those categories in mind, out of body, remote viewing,
bright light, experience of other realms, and transcendence. And this
is the standard thing that you walking along, your heart stops,
your consciousness goes down, it restarts, and you have a
(11:20):
confusional arousal, and the NDE is thought to occur at
that time little bit of neurology for you. When the
heart stops, the brain stem goes down, so you have
no heartbeat controlled from the brainstem, no respiration controlled from
(11:42):
the brain stem, and you have no consciousness also controlled
from the brain stem. So in fact, the brain is dead.
Now people who don't really understand brain functional saying this
is just a little bit of brain functioning rubbish. Either
isn't to be. If there is, it's not going to
support consciousness, and it's not going to support clear consciousness
(12:04):
of the sort that occurs in the nd because you see,
there has to be the whole of this sort of
mechanism which is initiated from the brain stem, which keeps
the cortex working, and it's not there because the brain
stem is done. So cardiac arrest and electrical silence indicate
that the brain stem and cortex are inactive, so you
(12:27):
can't go along any of those lines. So then what
is the evidence that during that phase you can intact
experience things. They are over a hundred anecdote with ridical
OBE cases and those during cardiac arrests and the subject
leaves his body and sees the resuscitation, usually from above.
(12:49):
If you're going to test the ritical nature of the ND,
you want a cardiac arrest and an OBE group, an
out of body experience group.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
We have to take a quick break, but you're going
to love where we're going next. You're listening to Shades
of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife.
(13:32):
I'm Sandra Champlain and you're listening to the great doctor
Peter Fenwick. And as we continue in this episode, you'll
hear more about near death experiences and those extraordinary experiences
that many people have seeing loved ones, etc. Just before
we pass, just to recap what he said before we
(13:54):
took the break, basically is that consciousness, if it solely
lives in the brain, cannot exist when the heart stops
and our brain stem goes down. In that case, he says,
the brain is dead. It is in these moments that
the extraordinary out of body and near death experience occurs.
(14:17):
So let's continue.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
There are over one hundred anecdote with ridical OBE cases
and those during cardiac arrests and the subject leaves his
body and sees the resuscitation, usually from above. If you're
going to test the ritical nature of the nd you
want a cardiac arrest and an OBE group, an out
of body experience group you could use as a control
(14:40):
for that. Cardiac arrests and no other body experiences, because
people are going to say, if you ask them after
the arrest what happened during it, We've all seen television
programs and so on. So he says, well, of course
they know. Well. In fact, Penny Sartori, who did her
PhD on NDEs, guided them up into those who said
(15:02):
they could see what was happening and those who said
they couldn't, and then looked at their accounts, and the
accounts of the people who said they could see what
was happening much more accurate than those who couldn't. So
it's just another piece of information. Okay, So what we're
dealing with this fifty year old man not healing well.
Going to hospital. They see that he's got a cardiac problem,
(15:25):
taking up the cardiac cathlab. So this guy's in the
cath lab and he goes into ventri kilar fibrillation. His
heart obviously has stopped. He's unconscious, so he's unconscious on
the table. Everybody sees it. The next thing that happens
is he says he leaves his body. Okay. They put
on something which is called an aed an Automatic external defibrillator,
(15:50):
and this has a protocol with it, so you put
the electrodes on and it measures the heart and sees
whether it's in normalism or not. If it's not in
normal rhythm, it will advise a shark. So that's what happened.
So they give him a shark and there's no response.
(16:11):
In other words, he remains in ventriction fibrillation, deeply unconscious,
and they have to do a full round of CPR.
Other words, they have to pummel his chest, et cetera.
That goes on for three or four minutes. This guy's
unconscious there and then they put it on again and
the machine says advise sharks. So he's still in ventrically
(16:31):
fibrillations throughout this time, and then his heart starts, so
we've got a clear, clear period of unconsciousness, no cardiac output.
It's absolutely solid, and he's unconscious. There's no little bit
of consciousness there. The guys out and we know that
he's unconscious from three to five minutes. But he was
(16:52):
aware during this time. He saw himself leave his body
at the beginning, went up into a corner of the room,
looked back. There was a woman he saw, who he
then later classified as an angel, who said to him
when he was lying on the bed, come up, come up,
and he thought that'd be ridiculous. Next thing he knew
(17:13):
he was up there, and then he looked back and
he had both that and sol the resuscitation process. So
he has clear consciousness during the time of his arrest,
which is monitored. I mean, it's about the best case
you can get. The guy's aye, but he's unconscious, he's
got no consciousness, so it's a really nice solid case.
(17:33):
This case suggests that he was dead to the medical team.
The patient claims to be conscious, so brain and mind
are separated during ventricular fibrillation. So that's really quite a
powerful statement to be able to make okay, so we
can talk about now. Happily, the brain and mind are
separated during the nd so what about the mental states
(17:56):
the dying? Can we gain information as the brain fail?
I got this nice quotes from Stafford Bessie because it
is really good in terms of just setting the feelings
for it. Whether dying persons are telling us of glimpses
of the next world or conversing with people we can't see,
we should consider ourselves immensely blessed when it happens. If
(18:21):
we don't make the mistake of assuming get confused, we're
likely to feel some of the excitement they convey for
your witnessing the momentary merging of two worlds that at
all other times remain tightly compartmentalized and mutually inaccessible. The
merging is what I mean by the spirituality of death.
(18:43):
So I want you to get this feeling of two
worlds slowly starting to merge as the dying process continues.
Let's look at the death process. What is it? How
does it occur? There are lessons for you guys here.
All of you must die, So we're going to look
at the dissolution of consciousness. We have done a lot
(19:05):
of work on this retrospective studies. Prospective studies. We've done
it in England and in Holland. We've got over fifteen
hundred emails of stories and so we've interviewed doctors, nurses,
auxiliary staff, chaplin, volunteers, et cetera, et cetera. So it
built up a lot of information about the dying process.
We gave every a questionnaire looking at deathbed visions, deathbed coincidence,
(19:30):
light surrounding the body, shape, scene, leaving the body, transiting
to new reality and so on. So that's our database
and these are the conclusions really. So first of all,
when we went into this, this just about two thousand
and four, and we couldn't say that they actually occurred
because there wasn't a consensus in the literature. So we
(19:51):
started from the grants then that they may not occur.
And if they did occur, what were they like or
were they just simply fantasis of the dying nan The
present consensus is that over fifty percent of those dying
consciously will have end of life experiences. So please all
(20:12):
of you die consciously, then you get the fireworks and
if you see somebody coming up to you with a
syringe full of madesil Lamb saying have this because you're
obviously in distress. Say no, no, no, no, no, no
no no. I want to watch this whole process, and
it's very important. Otherwise you won't get some of the
things we're talking about. So this is the formulation of
(20:33):
the dying process. And the life experiences may start with
premonitions of own death or another's death. The reason I
say that is from the results of our studies and
emails which are sent in. So premonitions are right at
the beginning. There the dial Alama says two years before
you may get information about death. I assume that's corrected
(20:55):
in this book. And if you look at the stories,
they're not usually that long, and the stories sometimes relate
to promontory visit by dead relatives. So dead relatives come.
I want you just to think about this. My mother
was in the hospital after a fam that fractures her ribs.
One day she saw my dead brother at the door
(21:17):
of her room. She said it made her very happy
to see him. So it's really interesting. There's a changing
consciousness that these things have a different meaning to the
person who receives the vision. I joked that he had
come to take her on to the next world, and
we laughed about it, and two weeks later she died unexpectedly.
(21:38):
So there's a promontory visit. This one is a very
sad one. The mother learns about the fact that her
child is going to die. My third daughter, Roberta, was
just seventy years old on May the seventeenth, nineteen eighty nine,
when I woke up in the morning totally upset and
in mourning over her death. I was so surprised and
(21:58):
confused to see her lying next to me that I
actually gently nudged her to see if she was alive.
So this was a really powerful experience. She apparently had
gotten up during the night and climbed in next to me.
When she moved, I cried uncontrollably with relief that she
was not dead and hugged her. She did not seem
to mind or make any fasts. Perhaps she knew why
(22:19):
I felt relief. I did not tell her I thought
she was dead. Could not remember any dream, so it's
not a dream. But the feelings were so strong and real,
exactly as they were two days later, when she was
the victim of a hit and run accident, so very
clear premonition of what was going to occur. So this
can be the start of the dead process. I say
(22:41):
can be because not everybody has has it. The next
stage our deathbed visions. This is some of our data
really just to show you how common these are in
the retrospective studies between sixteen seventy percent and the prospect
his studies it's about sixty percent approximately, So they're common
much than people are prepared to say. In fact, there's
(23:03):
a split medical people say it doesn't happen the nurse
who say it that the nurses of the patients, they
hear the stories. So who do the dying see? Now,
keep in mind that we're thinking about near death experiences
the same time, the parents are the most common. Persons
unknown or the next ones generally defined as spiritual beings.
(23:25):
A lot of people can't speak at that point, but
you can greet somebody joyfully, houses and siblings, but the
same in our sample, we see very few angels. Pity
and liked an angel. Well maybe I'll get an angel,
like don't they sometimes your NDC friends? And we only
have two examples of dogs and cats. Really sorry about
(23:46):
the dog and cat lovers mainly going to be humans
who come to see you. So compared to NDEs, dead roads,
his friends' spiritual beings appearing forty one percent of those
so very similar transiting to a new realm. This is
the next phase. This is enormously interesting. The work in
(24:07):
Zeric on this is really important. They've just brought out
a paper which shows that these are people who are
dying of cancer in the last fortnight of their life.
Over fifty percent in fact, transit to the new realm. Well,
you know what it's going to be, light, don't you?
(24:27):
An area very like that the nd beautiful region where
they meet other people, spiritual beings there to help them,
dead relatives. Some describe it as a waiting place. So
we now have a match between the experience of the
NDEs and as consciousness slowly slowly disappears, because it's only
(24:48):
in the last few weeks before death, then you go
into this other realm, you come back, go into the
other realm, come back again, etc. Suddenly she seemed to
stare intently at the window. She turned to me and said, please, Pauline,
don't ever be afraid of dying. I've seen a beautiful
light and I was going towards it. I wanted to
go into that light. It was so peaceful. I really
(25:10):
had to fight to come back. Sadly, she died the
next morning. I knew she had seen something that day
which gave her comfort and peace when she knew she'd
only have to live. So again, a very good match
between the ND.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
I never get sick of hearing stories of what people
see just before they pass. No one dies alone. It's
time for our next break and we'll be right back.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back
(26:00):
to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain, and you're
listening to the words of the late doctor Peter Fenwick,
who just passed into the spirit world this month at
the age of eighty nine. From all the interviews I've heard,
he was not afraid to die. In fact, he was
a proponent that we all die consciously so we can experience,
(26:24):
as he said, the fireworks. Let's continue with more stories
from the deathbed and his views on consciousness living outside
of the brain.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Suddenly, she seemed to stare intently at the window. She
turned to me and said, please, Pauline, don't ever be
afraid of dying. I've seen a beautiful light and I
was going towards it. I wanted to go into that light.
It was so peaceful. I really had to fight to
come back. Sadly, she died the next morning. I knew
she'd seen something that day which gave her comfort and
peace when she knew she'd only have to live. So again,
(26:59):
a very good match between the nd. There's the data
the English prospective from the Dutch prospective running at about
fifty percent of the carers had seen these experiences, so
compared to the end where it's thirty eight percent of
people have these experiences. Now the next thing is then
(27:22):
you come up to death itself. Now, death is absolutely fascinating.
It's not just a turning off. There are a whole
set of phenomena which you occur, mainly non local. The
first st one is radiant light in the room of
the dying light which is everywhere in the room. It
can be specifically things, it can be spiritual globules of
(27:45):
light which have seen in the room at that time.
And of course the light with the dying is very
like the light the nd deep knowledge, wisdom and love.
If you are in it, that wisdom and love and
knowledge can transform the person who's dying. And you talk
(28:05):
about transformation and transcendence. Here a couple of light stories.
I took them because they're nice and ple ones. This
is a chaplain. Sometimes I've seen the light which is
in a corner like candlelight. It's a golden light. It's
not electric light, and it's not one of the hospice
lights just appears, sometimes goes when they die, they take
(28:26):
their last breaths, everything settles down, the light goes out.
Another one when her mother was dying, this amazing light
appeared in the room. The whole room was filled with
this amazing light, and her mother died. So there is
this phenomena of light which is part of dying. Now,
I want to go onto the other thing, which happens
(28:46):
at the time of death, and the evidence points to
it all being within a few moments of death, because
we've got a lot of accounts with times, and that
is deathbed coincidences, and they occur like this. You're in
Florida and you have a son who's in the UK,
(29:06):
and you pick up the fact that he's dying and
there's a connection between the two of you. So what
is this connection and how does it work? Well, it's fascinating.
First of all, they're very common. That's sixty percent of
carers had heard stories about it. In all the emails
we've got, a large proportion were devoted to deathbed coincidences.
(29:29):
From that, we can say a number of things. First
of all, they're driven by the person who's dying. They
select who it's going to be. How do we know
that If you have a broken couple, for example, where
the man goes off somewhere and the woman doesn't care
that he's gone, but he in fact still devoted to
(29:49):
his wife and he dies, he will visit the wife,
so it's driven by him. It's those people with strong
emotional attachments. We've got a number of stories of people
who said, my son wasn't there, that's why she came
to visit me when his mother died. So the deathbak
coincitances are fascinating. The form the visit takes depends on
(30:12):
the mental state of the person who's receiving the visit.
If they're awake, it's a feeling, it's a compulsion that
something has happened to this person. You have to garn
ring them up, you have to find out what's happened.
If they're asleep, it's quite different. It's narrative dream in
which the dying come and they do two things. They
(30:37):
first of all, come to be with the person. Then
they give them a message. The messages I'm okay, don't worry.
And quite often the dream ends with them going into
the light. So again similar sorts of things to the NDE.
Now this is also a time of huge parapsychological activity.
(30:59):
We've talked about the light, We've talked about the visits
of the distance. But you get connections with clocks. We've
got many clock stopping stories. Do you all know My
grandfather's clock stopped dead, never to go again when the
old man died. And here's a nice story, because is
it only mechanical clocks? They are the only ones that stopped?
(31:19):
What about electric clocks? So I got you this story.
My father died at three point fifteen am. At about
eight thirty am, I went to tell my uncle Archie,
who had been close to Dad. Noe. The emotional relationship
is always an emotional relationship. His uncle Archie opened the door.
It was clear he was distressed, and as I began
to tell him, he interrupted me and said he already knew.
(31:42):
He said no one had telephoned him. So it's a
bit of a deathbed coincidence here too. But told me
to look at the clock on the mantelpiece that was
stopped at three fifteen, as was indeed his own wrist,
rocher's bedside clock, and all other clocks in the house.
Was even an led display on the flashing three point fifteen.
It's really good. So electronic clock stopped too. It's completely
(32:05):
taken aback. But Artie seemed comfortable with the phenomenon, was
just concerned losing someone close to him. So we got
lots and lots of clock stories. Got also a lot
of animal stories, dogs which howl in different places and
so on. So what I want you to think of
it as is, dying is not just a simple turning off.
There are all these parapsychological effects which occur at the
(32:29):
end of life. And don't forget that we are, in
fact in the transition to this other realm Okay, so
what's the meaning? The cares are very clear, They're all
trons personal I just put into John Eccles. I mean
he has to be aired, doesn't he, because of his
dualistic stance. He puts it nicely. I maintained that the
(32:49):
human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its
claims in promissory materialism to account eventually for all spiritual
world in terms of the pattern of neuronal activity. I mean,
it clearly has to be wrong. This belief must be
classed with a superstition. I rather like that, But this
one I take much more seriously. Do you all know? Penfield,
(33:12):
the neurosurgeon in Canada, spent his life with electrodes in
the brain, taking out various bits of people's brain. This
is his book, The Mystery of the Mind myself after
professional lifetime spent in trying to discover how the brain
accounts to the mind. It comes as a surprise now
to discover, during this final examination of the evidence, that
(33:34):
the dualist hypothesis separation of mind and brain seems the
more reasonable of the two possible explanations. Now, he's coming
from a very wide base of cerebral function. Mind comes
into action and goes out of action with the highest
brain mechanisms. It's true, but the mind has energy. The
(33:56):
form of that energy is different from that of neurinal
potentials of travel the external pathways. So he argues for
mind and brain being separate. You've probably seen this new
transmission theory by Lanza. He says that we carry space
and time around with us like turtles with shells, meaning
that when the shell comes off space and time, we
(34:17):
still exist. It's a nice concept about the limitation of
the body. The theory implies that death of consciousness simply
does not exist. It only exists as a thought because
people identify themselves with their body. And he is the
guy who did a lot of the work on genetics,
so he's got a very high scientific profile. So let's
(34:40):
summarize everything using the death data. How can we conceive
the world. What sort of pattern would it have? Well,
this is the pattern of the dying process as I
see it. Premonitions, deathbed visions. You can negotiate with your visions.
Do remember that when your aunt comes to tell you,
(35:02):
probably your mum actually comes to tell you that she's
going to come back and pick you up, you can
say not this week. You can't say because it's a
great party in the hospice where you won't be taking
part in this anyway, but you can say, because my
son is coming, they wait for that. And we've got
lovely accounts of negotiation with the deathbed visions. It brings
(35:25):
hope and joy. Then you come to this new reality,
total lucidity I haven't talked about, although that's fascinating. And
then you come to actual death itself, deathbed coincidences, and
then all these parapsychological things like clocks, animals, light bells,
And this is a fascinating one. That's shape seen leaving
(35:47):
the body. They're very clear when people see them. They're
described as whist bike or smoke, and sometimes they're more
solid and they come out usually from the top of
the head, sometimes from the chest. We've had one or
two that have come out of the feet. With them,
there is a presence in the room as the shape
(36:09):
is leaving. We're part of the five dimensional manifold. Why
do I like that theory? Bernard Carr really likes this,
the idea of the brain, which is the four dimensional
world and the fifth dimension behind it, and he talks
about Clusi cline and the fifth dimension. Why am I
(36:29):
attracted to that. I'm attracted to it because of the
idea of what people report when they're out of their
bodies during a cardiac arrest. They can remotely view so
space is contained. They can in fact see all round objects,
they can see the bottom, they can see the top, etc.
(36:49):
So again it suggests a different form of reality at
that time. I quite like the idea of a fifth dimension.
We've got to have something like that which will explain
the data. Five dimensions will explain that's noo and and
we find in dying. So you can, if you like,
take the idea that you lose the limitation of the
four dimensions and the fifth dimension is the one which
(37:13):
comes to the four. David Lawton, who I do like
he's worked a lot with near death experiences, argues for
a five dimensional structure for NDEs and argues that death
is simply the withdrawal of the four D part being
the five D intact. So it's an interesting idea again.
Or you can have consciousness part of a non local
(37:36):
informational field, no space and no time. And person who
likes that is Stephen Schwartz.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
We'll find out about Stephen Schwartz when we get back
from the break. Some of what he says goes right
over my head. We must remember he's speaking to a
group of doctors who may have had a little bit
more schooling than myself. So let's go to the break
and we'll be back with more. Doctor Peter Fenwick, you're
listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and
(38:07):
Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to
(38:31):
Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and you're listening
to the words of the late and great doctor Peter Fenwick.
Just a reminder of some of his book titles. One
is called Past Lives, an investigation into reincarnation memories, also
shining light on transcendence, an unconventional journey of a neuroscientist,
(38:54):
The Hidden Door, Understanding and Controlling Dreams, The True Truth
in the Light, an investigation of over three hundred near
death experiences, and the art of Dying. These stories of
people being there to greet us when we migrate to
the other side are so comforting to me, and I
(39:17):
love thinking that we live now in a four dimensional universe,
but there really is five dimensions, and when our bodies die,
we get to tap into everything that exists. We do
live in an intelligent universe. To think that we are
living and breathing with consciousness, just to add a little
(39:41):
food and water and sunlight and exercise, and look at
the great things that human beings have done over the
course of the many years on this earth. With so
much intelligence, why wouldn't there be an intelligence in dying.
Let's continue with a few more words from doctor pa Fenwick.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
You can have consciousness part of a non local informational field,
no space and no time. And person who likes that
is Stephen Schwartz played a little with that and published
in Neuroquontology. I don't know whether it makes a coherent
story or not, but it's a model of non local
consciousness with no space and no time, and the required
(40:24):
features for that model is an intention or directed attention,
emotional linking, terribly important transition of consciousness which you get,
and an entrance into a newminal reality which you suddenly
get in that as well.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
There were a few questions that doctor Fenwick was asked
near the end of his presentation, so I'm just going
to include him speaking on a few various topics.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
We have not had any stories of hellish experiences. Let
me be clear. That is that some people certainly have
spiritual anxiety when they die, and always it's been related
to unfinished business. But talking to hospice cares and so on,
you know now it isn't hellish at all. The picture
(41:11):
that I've given you of the other realm I think
is correct. I find it interesting in the near death experience.
People who have talked to about the life review sometimes
they will say I had this fantastic life review, but
when you question them on it, they no, it wasn't.
It's just specific things which have come up. Other people
have a panoramic life review, and they really do. And
as soon as you get that sort of experience, it
(41:33):
raises questions about the nature of memory and whether memory
is in fact all in the brain, or whether in
fact you have to think in terms of external storage
of the memory in some sort of way, particularly of
course in the near death experience, when we arguing there
is some proper brain function anyway. But I haven't seen
a full analysis done of the cardiac arrest ND life
(41:58):
reviews that would be where we could start actually to
understand these more So, I don't think the data is
all there yet?
Speaker 4 (42:08):
Has there been some data about the if you like,
the levels of consciousness of him, person who.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Is dying or has us wizardly dyed?
Speaker 4 (42:18):
For example, if Ramen Maricchi, if we had a data
about him, it's likely to be quite different from somebody
who has had never had any sort of his spiritual
training or excuritience or any So is.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
There some data? Very little? It moves on on to
a thing which I did in an area I didn't
talk about at all, and that is, in fact, sudden
recovery of consciousness from coma. And this occurs. I think
one figure I saw from a New Zealand hospice is
in about six percent. And there's a very nice paper
(42:52):
by Bruce Grayson and Norn on the subject is to
be called lightning up before death in the victory or
in literature. And what happens is the person who is
deeply chermatosed and then he suddenly alerts. The other point
is that when they alert, it's usually just before death.
(43:14):
It's called ternal lucidity. And so what happens is you
go unconscious, then you alert, greet your relatives living, greet
your relatives dead, then fall back and die. Well, that's
interesting enough, but they're much more interested to it, and
(43:35):
that is that we've got accounts from people in nursing
homes when the dying had profound Alzheimer's and haven't recognized
their family, and yet when they come out of lucid
interval or tone, luciviy or other, they in fact recognize
the family. The other thing that they do is their
bodies are totally paralyzed from strokes, but yet they sit
(43:58):
up and hold out hands which they haven't used before.
So there are a lot of interesting scientific things about that.
But as to measuring the actual level, no, we haven't
really got far enough with that yet. But what I
would like from you are a whole lot of high
practitioners who are happy for us to examine them when
(44:18):
they die. So let's end with the great inventor Edison,
just hours before his death, emerged from a coma, opened
his eyes, looked upwards and said, it's very beautiful over there.
Now we've got lots of those stories. We've also got
stories in which the dying say, or the people who
(44:39):
are next to the dying report that the dying say
just before they die. Particularly the non believers that the
last of life. I was quite wrong. It's quite different
from what I thought. So you got a lot of
those stories. We've got a lot of stories too of
people who don't know that a relative has died and
(45:00):
the relative comes in the deathbed vision and they say
to them they behave as you would do to a
relative who you don't know has died. Hi, nice to see.
What are you doing here? So you've got a number
of those stories too, which again sort of goes in
with these models which we're putting forward. And finally you
all know this one. Steve Jobs said wow, wow, wow,
(45:24):
as he died, and so you should. If you're going
into that reality, that's exactly what you'll do. It's very positive,
very very of farming. So with thanks to my colleagues,
don't forget I like stories, so we have a huge
bank of stories. Matt, thanks very much.
Speaker 3 (45:41):
Thank you doctor Fenwick for your over fifty years of
service into consciousness. If you go on YouTube you can
find a video called the Final Border Peter Fenwick at
TEDx Berlin. There's over a million views and close to
fourteen hundred comments. I want to read to you a
(46:05):
few of them. My ninety year old mother saw her
deceased mother in the dining room of her nursing home
less than a week before she passed. She told the nurse,
my mother's here. I want to go with her. Another.
Just before my mom died, she had Alzheimer's disease, and
she had not spoken a word in five years and
(46:28):
had to be turned in her bed. She suddenly turned
on her own and looked up towards where the ceiling
meets the wall and made the wow with her mouth.
She didn't speak in words, but had a look of
amazement and joy. It was really wonderful to see that happen.
(46:50):
Another My eighty seven year old grandmother was speaking and
laughing at the ceiling for three days. My grandfather said
thought she had lost her marbles. My aunt, which was
her daughter, was the only one who believed my grandmother
when she said, it's my mom and all the others
(47:11):
they're telling me they're getting things ready for me. She
then passed peacefully. Here's another. A few days before my
father passed away, I had an unusually vivid dream. My
father's deceased brother visited me. I was so happy to
see my uncle. He put his arm around my shoulder
(47:32):
and turned me where he showed me a bright, beautiful
tunnel of light. Then I saw my father walking into
the tunnel. I looked at my uncle and he was
smiling and so happy and comforting. My father passed away
two days later. Another says, my grandma has never acted
(47:54):
crazy in her life. She was very down to earth,
and right before she fell asleep for the last time,
she said that my grandpa had come to get her,
and he told her it's time to go home and
stop talking about being an old lady. Another says, my
dad said he could see the light and feel the
(48:16):
love coming for him. He was lucid until the end.
And another my mother was dying and my brother and
sister were traveling across three states to get to the hospital.
My sister got to the hospital and then my brother arrived.
My mom had been sleeping all day, but then she
sat up and said, good, you're all here. Then she smiled,
(48:41):
laid her head back on the pillow, and died. Here's another.
When my ninety three year old grandmother was dying, my
mother visited her. Bertha said to my mom, Betty, you
should have been here. An amazing cat was here and
looking at me. He was so beautiful. The next day
she died. Then many years later I went to see
(49:03):
my father in a nursing home. He said, you just
missed the most amazing thing. A huge and beautiful cat
was here and gazing at me. And two days later
he died. Apparently, in my family you get to see
the cat. And one more, my grandpa saw his brother
who had passed away twenty years prior, which of course
(49:26):
made him so happy. From his side of the conversation,
they were going fishing, which was their favorite activity when
they were both alive. Grandpa died just a few days later.
It's not easy for us human beings, is it. There's
a lot of worry in our life, a lot of fear,
there's guilt. What I recommend for all of us is
(49:50):
spend time listening to these kinds of stories, reading good books,
but most importantly, talking to our loved ones, keeping them
part of our lives and included in our lives. The
day will come and we'll be able to see that
fifth dimension and realize they've been a part of our
lives all along. Slow down, talk to them and trust
(50:14):
those loving feelings are coming from them. I want to
remind you to come visit me at We Don'tdie dot com.
Come to one of our free Sunday gatherings with medium
demonstration included. Come about fifteen minutes early and you can
say hello, I would love to meet you. I'm Sandra Champlain.
Thank you so much for listening to Shades of the
(50:35):
Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to iHeartRadio dot com. Spils
Host
Sandra Champlain
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com