December 26, 2025 • 50 mins
Join Sandra for a home invasion survival story that defies logic and hear how a hospice worker went from skeptic to believer!
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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 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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, we'll discuss reasons we now know that
our loved ones have survived physical debt and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife on our episode today,
(01:11):
we have a collection of stories that I think will
really excite you. We're going to dig deep into a
brand new report from the newspaper The Washington Post that
shows how near death experiences are finally hitting the mainstream news.
You'll hear about a young mother and her experiences during
a c section, and a man who traveled out of
(01:33):
his body to visit his hometown while in a coma.
We're also going to explore the story of Scott Jansen,
a hospice social worker and a die hard atheist who
thought deathbed visions were hallucinations until he saw something impossible
that changed his life forever. And later we have the
(01:56):
scary and miraculous story of Greg Morris. He was the
victim of a brutal home invasion, died for fifteen minutes,
and traveled to a paradise so real, so physical, that
coming back to earth was the hardest part. But before
we get into those incredible stories, I came upon a
(02:19):
special clip of doctor Laney Leary describing her own near
death experience. She is the author of the book No
One Has to Die Alone, and her story explains exactly
why she does the work she does. I'll play her
words for you now.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I was twenty nine years old. I went to the
dentist's office. They were using laughing gas at the time,
I had never had a drink, never used drugs, never
smoked hardly ever took aspirin. I think my body just said,
what is this? And I went into anaphylactic shock. So
one minute I was in the dentist's chair, the next
minute I was up on the ceiling looking down at
(02:59):
this body. And as I looked at my twenty nine
year old body, I felt as though it was just
a piece of clothing. I had a fondness for it,
I knew it, I had used it well, but it
was time to go to the Salvation army. I wasn't
connected to it. I felt no fear, no pain, no anxiety.
The dentist was freaking out, and I was trying to
(03:20):
talk to him from up there and say it was okay,
but of course he didn't get it, and I had
also within this. I had no sense of time. There
was no anxiety, there was no sense of passing time.
So I don't know how long I was up there
in the corner. But the next thing I knew, it
was as though I had turned around and I was
going into a tunnel, and my mother, who had been
(03:42):
dead for fifteen years, was right at the tunnel I
can still see it. And she was beautiful and whole
and vibrant and healthy, and she did not die that way.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
She was healed.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Her arms were outstretched to me, and we communicated telepathically,
so our mouths didn't move. But I thought and she received,
and she thought and I heard, and I thought, I
miss you. And what came back to me was I know,
as though her arms were around me, and I was
not able to tell her I loved her before she died,
(04:16):
and I said I love you, and she said, I know.
And my ego was not present, because my ego here
would have said I wanted to stay with my mother
for years and years and tell her every single first
date I had in my wedding and all about my child.
The ego was not present because I knew from a
(04:38):
soul level at that moment that she had always been
with me, We had never been apart. I knew that
I still know that, and so with that, I was
drawn into a tunnel that to me, the words I
can describe it are almost an opalescent blue, beautiful, And
at the end of the tunnel was a pinpoint of light,
and I couldn't do anything but go towards it. And
(05:01):
so I went toward this light. And as I got
to this light, it became bigger and brighter, almost like
looking into the sun. But it wasn't painful to look
into this light. And the light was in front of me,
and then the light was around me, and then I
was in the light, and then I knew I was
the light that as a drop of water in the
ocean is not separate, the light and I were made
(05:21):
of the same substance.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
And I was home.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Bliss doesn't come close to the word, but I knew
in that moment that I was forgiven for anything I
thought was unforgivable. I was loved beyond all measure in
a way that I'd never been loved before, and I
wanted to stay there. And again, in the same telepathic
way as with my mother, I heard a voice that
said to me, and you can call this light whatever
you want, because words really get in the way of
(05:48):
what it was. But this light said to me, you
must go back. And with all the kutzpah I had,
I responded and said, and the light said, you have
work to do, you must go back, And again I
yelled with everything I had. Oh And then I felt
and I heard like a churning, like I was in
(06:10):
a blender coming back down through the tunnel. And the
next thing I knew, I was in the dentist's chair,
and the dentist thought that he had resuscitated me so
he can have the credit. And my life changed as
a result of that. Now, when I came back, I
was disoriented in a way of now what, because I
(06:30):
wanted to stay there, and my sense was if I
got to be back here, it better be good. And
because it really the difference, the comparison was that this
is like sledging through mud compared to the ease and
the love that's there. And it was shortly after that
experience and I was having these feelings of now what
(06:52):
that I was reading a newspaper fully open. I turned
the page and there was a full page article on
hospice and there were yes, just came up off the page.
And I've been working in hospice ever since.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Laney's story is so moving because it shows us the
purpose of these experiences. She came back with a mission
to help others transition without fear. Just recently, the Washington Post,
one of the most respected newspapers in the World published
a major feature titled These people experienced near death. Here's
(07:29):
how it changed their lives. One of the most beautiful
stories they reported is about a woman named Krista Gorman.
Years ago, Christa went into cardiac arrest while giving birth
to her daughter. She describes being on a hospital bed
feeling a sense of peace, and then suddenly her vision switched.
(07:50):
She wasn't looking from her eyes anymore. She was looking
down at the scene of her daughter's birth from up above.
She told the reporter, I didn't know it was my body.
It was like watching a movie. Then of force tugged
at her. She was pulled right through the wall of
the hospital and into a bright space, landing in a lush,
(08:12):
green landscape. She became one with it, she said, I
just merged with all of it. I was the flowers
and the water and the trees, and it was completely blissful.
She said she could have stayed there eternally, but she
chose to come back, and when she woke up, she
faced what so many experiencers face, the difficulty of explaining
(08:36):
the unexplainable. She admitted she became paranoid about sharing it,
fearing that she was making it up, but deep down
she knew I was so fundamentally transformed that I know
I wasn't making it up. The article also shares the
story of Valerie Kirkis, a sixty year old from Portland, Oregon.
(08:58):
Just a year ago, she had a cardiac arrest and
was gone for four minutes. In those four minutes, her
consciousness traveled. She had a vision of being in San Francisco.
She saw a red street car, and on that streetcar
were her deceased loved ones, And as she approached, she
saw her mother with her arms outstretched waiting to hold her.
(09:23):
Valerie was shocked back to life before she could reach
her mother's arms, but the impact was immediate. She said
she felt completely renewed, like I was a whole new person.
Not all the stories in this Washington Post report were
about the tunnels of light. The article bravely includes the
variety of NDEs, proving that each journey is unique. Take
(09:47):
kir Whitson. He suffered a heart attack and was in
a medically induced coma for a month. He wasn't in
a heaven of clouds, but in an in between world.
He describes his consciousiness traveling around his hometown witnessing interactions
as if he were watching a movie. He told the reporter,
I cannot shake this feeling that my consciousness, my soul, myself,
(10:12):
my mind was out and about while I was trying
to survive, and now that he's recovered, he feels a
little sadness. He said, I knew it was special and
unique and that I was privileged to have it, But
now it's over. It's like going on a great trip,
and now I only have the memories. The article also
highlights how these experiences shatter our fear of death. There's
(10:37):
the story of a man named Takata. During his nd
he found himself in a large area that reminded him
of an airplane gate. He saw a tunnel with light,
but people there stopped him, tapped him on the shoulder
and said, you have to go back. Before this happened,
Takata was terrified of dying. Marietta Polivanova from the University
(10:59):
of Virginia notes that nearly seventy percent of survivors experience
a change in their spiritual beliefs. They become more empathetic,
less materialistic, and more appreciative of life. However, the article
also does a great service by acknowledging that not every
MD is blissful and that is okay. It tells the
(11:23):
story of Mercedes Samich. She was only twenty four having
an emergency C section. She started bleeding profusely and felt
herself floating into black nothingness. It was peaceful, but then
she panicked about leaving her baby. She had to choose
to float back. For Mercedes, the experience wasn't filled with angels,
(11:46):
and it left her feeling isolated because it didn't match
the happy stories she's heard others tell. And then there
is Peter Cotter. He had a cardiac arrest at sixty four.
He woke up with a memory of being underglass, pounding
on it and screaming to his medical team, don't let
me die today. Even though it was terrifying, Peter says
(12:09):
it changed his life for the better and that it
made him a much less selfish person and more concerned
about the people around him. This is the key takeaway,
my friends. Whether the experience is a blissful merger with
nature like Krista, a reunion with mom like Valerie, or
a scary wake up call like Peter, the result is
(12:32):
the same transformation, a shift away from self and towards others,
a realization that consciousness is real and powerful. We are
more than our bodies. When we come back from the break,
we're going to dive deeper into another incredible story, this
time from a man who was a complete atheist working
(12:53):
in hospice, whose life was turned upside down by what
he witnessed at the bedsides of the dying. We'll be
right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a m paranormal podcast network.
(13:28):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
In our first segment, we looked at how the mainstream
news is finally waking up to the reality of near
death experiences. We heard about Laney Leary's journey and the
stories from the Washington Post. Now I want to take
you into a different kind of story. It's one thing
to hear about a near death experience from someone who's
(13:51):
had one. It's another thing entirely to hear about the
afterlife from someone whose job it was to help people
die and who didn't believe in any of this. The
story comes from a recent CNN report about a man
named Scott Jansen. Scott is a hospice social worker in
(14:13):
North Carolina, and he's been doing this work for thirty
three years. But when he started, he wasn't a believer.
In fact, he describes himself back then as a knee
jerk atheist. He was an existentialist. He believed that life
had no inherent meaning, There was no soul, no spiritual order,
(14:35):
and absolutely no afterlife. When his dying patients would ask
for prayer, he would awkwardly change the subject. When they
talked about seeing dead relatives, he dismissed it. He said,
I assumed it was a bunch of nonsense. I knew
about deathbed visitations, but I thought they were disease related hallucinations,
(14:59):
deprivation of oxygen, that it must be the morphine. He
was certain, he was logical, but he was wrong. His
transformation began on a crisp autumn day when he went
to visit a patient named Buddy. Buddy was an elderly
man who had just lost his wife May. Now Scott
(15:21):
had known this couple for nine months, and May had
suffered from severe Alzheimer's disease. She was bedridden in all
the months Scott had visited. He had never heard May
speak a single word. He had only seen her open
her eyes once. She was, for all medical purposes gone,
(15:44):
But on this day, Buddy seemed different. His depression had lifted.
When Scott asked him why, Buddy said she was talking
to the angels in the last hour. God let me know.
Then Buddy asked want to see. He brought out a
camera and showed photos he had taken of May in
(16:05):
her final moments. Scott looked at the photos and he
couldn't believe his eyes. The woman he knew as slumped
and non responsive was sitting upright in bed, and she
was smiling. Her eyes, which Scott described as illuminated blue,
were wide open and looking at something Scott couldn't see.
(16:29):
She was gesturing with her hands, talking to invisible visitors.
But he told him that in those final moments, May
looked at him, thanked him for taking such good care
of her, and then turned back to the unseen figures
and said it's beautiful. An hour later, she died. Scott
(16:52):
tried to rationalize it. He said he knew about terminal lucidity,
where the brain has a final rally, but this was extreme.
Her brain had been eroded by advanced dementia. Neural networks
were destroyed. How could she recognize buddy? How could she
(17:14):
speak in full sentences? And most hauntingly, what was she
seeing that made her smile like that? That was the
first crack in Scott's armor. But the universe was not
done with Scott Jansen. He had another patient named Evan,
a World War II veteran in his nineties. Evan was
(17:36):
deeply depressed and had been praying for death. But one
day Scott walked in and found Evan's gloom had vanished.
Evan told him a story from the war. He said
that during a brutal battle, he was carrying a wounded
soldier on a stretcher. He slipped, the soldier fell, and
(17:57):
the man died right in front of him in a
horrific way. That night, Evan was crying on his cot, traumatized.
He looked up and saw a soldier sitting at the
end of his bed. But this soldier was wreathed in light.
The figure didn't speak, but communicated a message telepathically, we
(18:20):
are all loved and connected. The vision visited him a
few times during the war and then stopped. But now
forty years later, in his hospice room, Evan told Scott
he's back. He said the glowing soldier had sat by
his bed the night before and told him I'm here
(18:42):
with you. I'm going to help you over the hill
when it's time to go. Evan died shortly after telling
Scott that story. Scott tried to brush these things off.
He was a professional, after all, he was grounded. But
the stories coming and they were getting harder to explain.
(19:03):
He visited a young father who was dying of brain cancer.
The man was devastated that he wouldn't see his children
grow up, but on one visit, his mood had completely shifted.
He was calm. He told Scott, I had a visit
from a little boy. He was about my kid's age.
He seemed happy, and he told me everything is going
(19:27):
to be okay, and I'm here to help you. The
man told Scott that he had told the little spirit
boy he wasn't ready to go yet because one of
his children had a birthday coming up, so the spirit
boy agreed to come back the following Tuesday. Scott Jansen
remembers that moment vividly. He said, and guess when he
(19:49):
died Yep the following Tuesday. These weren't just hallucinations, they
were scheduled appointments. But the moment that find finally clinched
it For Scott, the moment that turned him from a
skeptic to a believer wasn't something he saw in a patient.
It was a memory that these experiences forced him to
(20:13):
unlock from his own life. Years earlier, when Scott was
just twenty three and a graduate student, he was sleeping
in his apartment during a snowstorm. Suddenly, in the middle
of the night, he was jolted awake by the sound
of a loud ambulance siren. It wasn't outside, the sound
(20:33):
was coming from the corner of his bedroom. He heard
the siren, he heard the sound of a gurney being
rolled on asphalt, and he heard a man's voice yell,
bring it here quick. Scott jumped out of bed. He
looked out the window. The street was empty, silent, snow.
(20:54):
He checked his eyes in the mirror. He did math
problems to make sure he wasn't having a mental breakdown.
He was wide awake. He eventually went back to sleep,
telling himself it was just a vivid dream. The next morning,
his phone rang. It was his father. His father told
him that his uncle Eddie had been killed in a
(21:17):
car accident. Scott asked what time had happened. It was
the exact same time Scott had been woken up by
the phantom siren in his room. Later that day, Scott's radio,
which had been broken, suddenly turned on by itself. It
started playing the Beatles song Let It Be, and as
(21:39):
the music filled the room, Scott felt an overwhelming wash
of peace and comfort. The Beatles were his uncle Eddie's
favorite band. For years, Scott had buried that memory. It
didn't fit his atheist worldview. But working in hospice, seeing
the impossible photos of May, hearing about the glowing soldier,
(22:01):
witnessing the Tuesday appointment, he couldn't deny it anymore. He
realized that his scientific worldview was actually small and limited.
He said, I'd hear people talk about spiritual surrender, and
back then my knee jerk response was hell, no, you surrender,
(22:22):
not me. But today Scott Jansen is a believer. He says,
whenever people ask if I believe in God, I say yes,
I believe there is a unifying, conscious energy or force
that connects all of us. I think we go back
to our source. His sister says, he's a different person now.
(22:43):
He's less judgmental. He sees the good in everyone. He
values all life, even removing bugs from his house instead
of killing them. And perhaps the most beautiful change is
how he treats his patience. He no longer changes the
subject when they about the other side. Three years after
seeing those photos of May, Scott was called to the
(23:06):
home of a patient named Reba who had just passed
her husband. Cliff was standing by her body, heartbroken. The
funeral home men were there to take her away. Cliff
asked for a moment, can we have a prayer? First?
The old Scott would have refused, but the new Scott,
(23:26):
the one who had seen the truth, took Cliff's hand.
He closed his eyes and he prayed, Dear God, we
thank you for the life of Reba and the lives
she's touched. When he finished, Cliff hugged him, crying and said,
thank you, brother Scott. This story is so important because
it shows us that evidence doesn't just come from having
(23:48):
a near death experience ourselves. Sometimes it comes from simply
paying attention. It comes from witnessing the profound, unexplainable peace
that descends on the dying. It comes from seeing the
impossible clarity of a loved one who has returned to
say goodbye. Scott Jansen went looking for the end of life,
(24:09):
and instead he found proof of the beginning. And speaking
of proof, sometimes the evidence isn't a quiet whisper or
a vision. Sometimes it's dramatic, a physical journey to a
place so real you never want to leave when we
come back. I'm going to share the story of Craig Morris.
He was the victim of a home invasion, a brutal
(24:31):
attack that left him dead for fifteen minutes. What he
saw in those fifteen minutes, the colors, the feelings, the
absolute reality of paradise will make you rethink everything you
know about where we go from here. And here's a
bit of nd trivia for you. We assume when we
(24:51):
leave our bodies that we will see things just as
we do now with two eyes looking forward. But researchers
have found that this is not the case. Many reporters
report what is called omni directional vision. They don't just
see in front of them, They can see three hundred
and sixty degrees around, up, down, and even through objects,
(25:13):
all at the same time. It suggests that once we
step out of our physical bodies, our limitations vanish and
our awareness expands in ways our human brains can't even
begin to comprehend. We'll be right back. You're listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(25:35):
Coast am Heirinormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of
(26:00):
the Afterlife. I'm Sanders Champlain. We've been exploring stories that
have made headlines, stories that challenge our understanding of life
and death. But the story I want to share with
you now hasn't been in mainstream news yet, and honestly,
it's one of the most dramatic, terrifying, and ultimately beautiful
accounts I've heard. It proves that even in the midst
(26:22):
of the worst human violence, the soul remains untouched, safe
and loved. This is the story of Craig Morris. In
May of twenty twenty two. Craig was sixty six years old.
He was living in Panama, Central America, and he had
gone up into the remote mountains to help a friend
who was ill. They were staying in a little unfinished
(26:45):
two bedroom house on the hill. It was simple living,
no glass in some of the windows, and the electricity
came from a generator. One Tuesday night, they were just
sitting in the living room having a cup of tea
when suddenly the lights went out. It was pitch black.
Craig grabbed a flashlight. He assumed one of the dogs
(27:08):
had knocked a loose cable, so we went out to
the back door to check the generator. He knelt down
in the dirt he saw the cables. They hadn't been
knocked loose. They had been cut severed. Craig said, in
that flash of a moment, I just thought, that's not right,
something's wrong. That is the last thing I remember. He
(27:32):
didn't hear footsteps behind him. He didn't feel the blow.
He had been struck in the head with a crowbar
by men in military fatigues who were raiding the house.
The blow was massive. It killed him instantly. Craig said,
I was looking at the back of a generator and
(27:53):
now I'm standing in paradise. It was instantaneous. I was thinking, well,
I must be dead, But how can I be here
if I'm not dead. I don't remember dying. He was
standing in a meadow, but it wasn't like any meadow
on earth. He described it. It was incredible. It was
(28:16):
like a rainbow wrapped in a valley. I could see
way in the distance a river, and I'm checking out
my body. I'm wearing a white robe. I wasn't wearing
any shoes. I was standing on grass, and the grass
was beautiful green, and it felt like silk, as if
(28:36):
I could feel every blade of grass on my feet.
This is what we call hyperreality. His senses weren't dull,
they were superhuman. Craig looked at a tree about thirty
feet away. He said, I could see every little nook
and cranny and the texture of the bark. I could
focus at thirty feet away and see the tiny details
(29:01):
of the veins in the leaves. And then he looked
past that tree to a mountain a quarter of a
mile away. I noticed if I looked, I could see
the leaves on those trees, and they were a quarter
mile away. That was really cool. He realized he had thoughts,
(29:21):
and when he thought them, he heard his own voice
in surround sound. He asked out loud, if I'm here,
then I must be dead, And immediately a voice answered him,
that's correct, you died. You're dead. Craig said, he felt
an overwhelming sense of acceptance. This is home, Welcome home.
(29:46):
This is where I'm supposed to be. He wanted to explore.
He thought about the river he saw in the distance,
and just by thinking it, he began to move. He said,
I realized I wasn't walking anymore. I just took off,
flying over the meadow. So I stopped. I didn't realize
(30:07):
I stopped, But as soon as I stopped thinking, my
body just slowly floated right back down until I was
on level ground. It was paradise. But then something pulled
at him, a heaviness in his heart. He remembered his life.
He said, I've got five biological sons. I've got two
(30:29):
step kids. I've been their dad for twenty years. They're
my closest friends, and I'm thinking they're going to be devastated.
Even in the perfection of heaven, the bond of love
for his children was stronger. Craig made a choice. He said,
I can't stay here. I don't want to stay here.
(30:51):
I'm not going to die like this. Somebody took my
life from me, so I said, in my mind, I'm
not going to stay here. I'm not going to die today,
not like this, and I put my hand down. The
moment he made that decision, the moment he asserted is
will to live. He was slammed back into his body
(31:14):
and he wasn't in paradise anymore. He said, I was
instantly back in my body here on earth, and oh
my god, I was gasping for air. I had been
dead for fifteen minutes. My hands instantly shot up to
my head. The pain was unbelievable. Blood is coming out
(31:34):
of the side of my head like a garden hose.
He was lying in the mud in the dark, surrounded
by the men what attacked him. They had flashlights pointed
at him. One of the men jumped down, straddled him,
grabbed his shirt and screamed in Spanish, Oh my god,
he's alive. They were terrified. They knew they had killed him.
(31:57):
And this is where the story becomes truly harrowing, but
also miraculous. These men were not done to incapacitate him.
One of the men took a rifle, pressed the barrel
directly into the back of Craig's leg, and pulled the trigger.
Craig screamed, he felt the pain. He said, the pain
(32:18):
felt like a welding torch inside his leg. They tied
him up with zip ties. They interrogated him about money,
but Craig, having just come from a place of infinite power,
did something incredible. He looked the man right in the
eye and screamed, you already killed me Once, he said,
(32:38):
the man's eyes went wide with fear. The attackers eventually left.
Craig was alone, bleeding, shot and battered in the mud.
He knew he had to save his friend inside the house,
he crawled. He dragged his shot leg through the mud.
He braced himself on the wall to stand up. He
(33:00):
found a knife, freed his friend, and then realized he
had to go for help. This man, who had been
dead minutes earlier, managed to crawl up a hill, find
his truck keys in the mud, get into his vehicle,
and drive a manual transmission truck with a bullet hole
in his left leg, the leg you use for the clutch.
(33:23):
He drove for an hour down the mountain, fighting unconsciousness,
until he finally found a security guard station and got help.
But the miracle wasn't just that he had survived the attack.
It was what the doctors found later, Craig said, in
the afternoon, a doctor came by and he asked me, Hey,
(33:47):
have you seen the X rays of your legs? And
I said, no, sir. He showed me four pictures and
he says, these bullets never touched your bone. Think about that.
A high powered rifle pressing directly against his calf, fired
point blank. Craig said, the bullet split in two and
(34:10):
moved all around inside my leg, but never touched the bone.
I wasn't meant to lose the use of one leg.
Within seven days, Craig was walking. He cut off his
own cast because he didn't need it. He was playing
basketball Shortly after. Craig was asked if the memory of
(34:30):
the other side has faded or if the trauma of
the attack overshadowed it. His answer is why I'm telling
you this story today, He said, no, not at all.
For many weeks afterwards, I would have dreams and I
would relive it over and over. It was as if
I was in a lucid dream and I was there again.
(34:52):
That was more home to me than where I am
right now. He said. The experience changed him comple Lately.
I haven't feared death since I know that this life
is but a blink of time. This body is so temporary,
it really is. And you know, when I was on
(35:13):
the other side and I was flying, I felt like Superman.
You realize how free you are when you're outside of
this earthly realm. Craig's story is extreme, it's violent, it's terrifying.
But in the middle of that darkness, there was a
light that could not be extinguished. He died, he went home,
(35:34):
He felt the grass, saw the leaves, flew with his mind,
and felt a love so total that it is still
with him. And when he chose to come back, his
body was protected in a way that defies physics. His
story teaches us that no matter what happens to our
physical bodies, whether it's cancer, a car accident, or something
(35:57):
senseless as an attack, is indestructible. We are not these
fragile bodies. We are supermen and superwomen flying over meadows.
We are consciousness that can see For miles, Craig said
something that I think sums it all up. He told
(36:18):
the doctors, who are amazed at his survival, that it
was the human will to live. But then he corrected himself.
He said, no, I don't believe that for a minute.
I think the strongest force in the universe is your
soul's will to love. That's what brought him back, love
(36:38):
for his children. When we come back for our final break,
I've got another story to tell you. And all of
these stories Laaney's, Scott's Craigs, and what they tell us
about our lives right now is if death is nothing
to fear, then life is everything to live. And here's
(36:58):
another bit of near death experience trivia for you. We
often think these experiences are rare, something that only happens
to a lucky few, But did you know how incredibly
common they are. A famous Gallup poll estimated that over
eight million Americans have had a near death experience. That's
(37:19):
a big number. It means that if you are in
a room with thirty people, statistically at least one of
them has peaked behind the curtain. It just goes to
show that the afterlife isn't a distant memory. It's the
reality that touches people's lives every single day right here
in our neighborhoods. So next time you're with a group
(37:42):
of people or just one or two, talk about near
death experiences and see if they or someone they know
has had one. We'll be right back. You're listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Normal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of
(38:23):
the Afterlife. I'm Sander Champlain. We've been traveling through headlines
from CNN and the Washington Post about near death experiences,
then the social worker by the bedside of the dying,
and the scary attack with poor Craig Morris. But in
our final segment, I want to share a story that
hasn't been in the news just yet. It was sent
(38:46):
to me directly by the International Association for Near Death
Studies or ians dot org. It is a raw account
from a woman who calls herself Waterlight, and it offers
one of the most detailed and profound explanations of why
we are here. Her story begins during the height of
(39:07):
the pandemic in late twenty twenty. I just thirty six
years old. She contracted COVID on Christmas Day. By January second,
she was in a desperate state. She said, I could
not talk, really, I could barely breathe. I was too
afraid to call nine one one, because something in my
(39:29):
spirit told me that if I went to the hospital,
I would not be coming back. Just before the end,
she had a phone call with her cousin, Carrie. Carrie
had just called her out of the blue, sensing something
was wrong. She said, I spoke to her about what
I was experiencing, that I did not feel like I
(39:50):
was part of my body, and that I was going somewhere.
The last thing I remember is her telling me to
not go anywhere, to just stay where I was. The
phone call ended, I closed my eyes and I couldn't
breathe anymore. But I wasn't afraid. I was just tired,
and at that moment, in her bed while her children
(40:13):
were downstairs, she died suddenly. She was no longer in
her sick body. She was in a place she calls
death consciousness. She described it vividly. It's a darker place,
like a shadow land. I could see various landscape differences,
like hills and valleys, but it is many dark colors
(40:34):
and shades. I wasn't afraid. Standing in the shadowland, she
looked into the distance and saw something breath taking a
little to the left, she saw a horizon that looked
like a sunrise and sunset combined. She called this place
beyond consciousness. She said, the warmth that I feel from
(40:57):
this place is greater than the come comfort of a
warm blanket. But also, imagine entering a room full of
everyone you have ever loved before. It is pure love.
And I remember feeling like that and seeing everyone. Well,
that is where I needed to be, almost like a party.
(41:20):
I want to be there. She wasn't there yet, but
she realized she wasn't alone. There was no physical person
with her, but she felt a presence. She realized she
had access to total knowledge. It was like a telepathic
voice in her mind that could answer everything, and because
(41:41):
she is an inquisitive person, she started asking big questions,
questions we all have. First, she asked about the dying
process itself. The voice explained to her that while the
body might look like it's suffering on the outside, the
consciousness is actually protected. She learned the pain caused by
(42:03):
dying isn't fully registered in your consciousness, so there isn't
much suffering. But those in death consciousness are still present.
They can hear you, they can fill your touch, and
they can understand what you say from your heart. Then
She asked the question that haunts so many of us,
(42:25):
why do we suffer so much here on earth? The
answer she received is radical, The voice told her. Living
consciousness is one of so many lies, so many stories,
and absolutely none of the matter. Much of it is
made up by other living beings that want rules, regulations,
(42:49):
and control. Once you realize this, none of it matters.
She was told that many of our ideas about karma
and punishment are just human inventions. She said that suffering
isn't connected to a spiritual karma beyond the living. Therefore,
phrases like you reap what you sew is very much
(43:11):
a living consciousness concept. It does not come with you
when you die. So if the rules don't matter and
the karma doesn't follow us, what does and what's the point?
The voice was clear. Love is the only thing that
can cross transitional levels of consciousness. The love you give
(43:32):
and the love you receive can pass with you. It
doesn't matter what you did or who you were. All
that matters is who you helped, who you loved and
who loved you. The amount of money, your job, your looks,
mistakes or perfection, none of it matters. After you die,
(43:54):
you won't remember any of those details. They don't exist
where you go. Think about that freedom, all that pressure
we have to be perfect, to be successful, to be
as somebody, It all dissolves. Only the love remains. She
also learned incredible things about our planet. She was shown
(44:15):
that nature is far more alive than we realize. She said,
trees are very much living beings that speak, have consciousness,
and exist to help us. Water has its own consciousness,
probably the most powerful consciousness on planet Earth. It is
not just life. It has its own consciousness and carries
(44:38):
all answers to any single question you could ever ask.
She learned that we must honor the earth and live
in harmony with it, not just as a resource, but
as a fellow living being. She also asked about suicide
and death. She learns something that might bring comfort to
those who have lost someone to She was told living
(45:02):
humans do not actually get to choose whether to die.
Death happens to all of us, and we must honor
that transition because it is sacred, beautiful, and justified spiritually,
even if we do not understand it. She wanted to stay.
She wanted to walk into that beautiful beyond consciousness where
(45:24):
the party of souls were waiting for her, but she
felt the pull of her children, the lives she was
connected to. Here, she realized she didn't have a choice.
Returning was incredibly painful. She said. It was only after
I came back into my body and realized my pain
(45:44):
and how terribly sick I was, that all of the
feelings of grief, sadness, and anger occurred. For two weeks,
she fell into a deep depression. She had touched a
pure love and now was back in the heavy, slim,
ludging through the mud feeling of earth, just as Lany
Leary described. But she didn't stay in that sadness. She transformed.
(46:09):
She realized she was not the same person who had
died from COVID in that bed. She even changed her
name to Waterlight to honor the piece she felt when
she was floating in that waitless state, and she came
back with gifts. Her psychic abilities, which she had glimpsed
as a child, were now wide open. She said, I
(46:30):
can now lucid dream, and it is here that I
also meet with spirits. I received messages from the deceased
for other living people. She also developed a power of vision.
She said, I can touch objects and see who is
sick or what another person is feeling. I can also
find missing objects for people. It can be in another state,
(46:53):
and I can tell them where something is located. She
even went back to school to get a degree in
botany because now she can hear plants speak with the trees,
and she wants to help bridge the gap between western
science and the consciousness of nature. She experienced. Her life
is now dedicated to service, to healing, and to reducing suffering.
(47:17):
As she put it, I suffer much less and can
now help others suffer much less. This brings our journey today,
my friend, into a full circle. In the beginning, we
heard doctor Landy Leary's words, who was told by the light,
you have work to do, and she came back to
serve the dying in hospice. Next we heard about Scott Jansen,
(47:38):
the skeptic who realized that a scientific view was too
small to contain the reality of the soul, and who
learned to say yes to the spiritual needs of his patients.
Then we heard about Craig Morris, who survived brutal violence
and came back with the absolute knowledge that the soul's
will to love is the strongest force in the universe,
(48:02):
and now water light confirms it all. She tells us
that the rules, the status, the money, it's all a distraction.
The only thing that crosses the threshold is love. The
evidence is mounting from the pages of major newspapers to
the personal transformations of people just like us, my friends.
(48:24):
The world is waking up to a simple yet powerful truth.
We are not our bodies. We are connected, and we
are eternal consciousness, and that means how we live today.
It really matters if trees have consciousness, if water holds answers,
if our loved ones are just a thought away, then
(48:45):
the world is not a lonely place. It is crowded
with help, guidance and love. So my challenge for you,
should you choose to accept it, is to live like
you know this is true. Forgive someone not because you
have to, but because holding onto anger is just living
consciousness baggage that won't come with you anyway. Love fearlessly,
(49:09):
appreciate nature, and know deep down in your heart that
you are safe, you are eternal, and you're never ever alone,
and you are deeply loved. Remember come visit me at
wedotdie dot com. At the bottom of the page. Just
enter your name and email address. I've got a bunch
(49:30):
of free goodies there for you, including a copy of
my book We Don't Die, a skeptics discovery of life
after Death. Every Sunday two o'clock New York time on Zoom,
I host a free Sunday gathering inspirational service with some
friends of mine, and there's a medium demonstration included. People's
loved ones come back with messages from all over the world.
(49:53):
I'll do my very best for you to continue letting
you know that you are a divine soul, You're having
a human experience, and you are loved and every day matters.
I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you so much for listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to iHeartRadio dot com.
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 1 (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.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Hi.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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, we'll discuss reasons we now know that
our loved ones have survived physical debt and so will we.
Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife on our episode today,
(01:11):
we have a collection of stories that I think will
really excite you. We're going to dig deep into a
brand new report from the newspaper The Washington Post that
shows how near death experiences are finally hitting the mainstream news.
You'll hear about a young mother and her experiences during
a c section, and a man who traveled out of
(01:33):
his body to visit his hometown while in a coma.
We're also going to explore the story of Scott Jansen,
a hospice social worker and a die hard atheist who
thought deathbed visions were hallucinations until he saw something impossible
that changed his life forever. And later we have the
(01:56):
scary and miraculous story of Greg Morris. He was the
victim of a brutal home invasion, died for fifteen minutes,
and traveled to a paradise so real, so physical, that
coming back to earth was the hardest part. But before
we get into those incredible stories, I came upon a
(02:19):
special clip of doctor Laney Leary describing her own near
death experience. She is the author of the book No
One Has to Die Alone, and her story explains exactly
why she does the work she does. I'll play her
words for you now.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
I was twenty nine years old. I went to the
dentist's office. They were using laughing gas at the time,
I had never had a drink, never used drugs, never
smoked hardly ever took aspirin. I think my body just said,
what is this? And I went into anaphylactic shock. So
one minute I was in the dentist's chair, the next
minute I was up on the ceiling looking down at
(02:59):
this body. And as I looked at my twenty nine
year old body, I felt as though it was just
a piece of clothing. I had a fondness for it,
I knew it, I had used it well, but it
was time to go to the Salvation army. I wasn't
connected to it. I felt no fear, no pain, no anxiety.
The dentist was freaking out, and I was trying to
(03:20):
talk to him from up there and say it was okay,
but of course he didn't get it, and I had
also within this. I had no sense of time. There
was no anxiety, there was no sense of passing time.
So I don't know how long I was up there
in the corner. But the next thing I knew, it
was as though I had turned around and I was
going into a tunnel, and my mother, who had been
(03:42):
dead for fifteen years, was right at the tunnel I
can still see it. And she was beautiful and whole
and vibrant and healthy, and she did not die that way.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
She was healed.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Her arms were outstretched to me, and we communicated telepathically,
so our mouths didn't move. But I thought and she received,
and she thought and I heard, and I thought, I
miss you. And what came back to me was I know,
as though her arms were around me, and I was
not able to tell her I loved her before she died,
(04:16):
and I said I love you, and she said, I know.
And my ego was not present, because my ego here
would have said I wanted to stay with my mother
for years and years and tell her every single first
date I had in my wedding and all about my child.
The ego was not present because I knew from a
(04:38):
soul level at that moment that she had always been
with me, We had never been apart. I knew that
I still know that, and so with that, I was
drawn into a tunnel that to me, the words I
can describe it are almost an opalescent blue, beautiful, And
at the end of the tunnel was a pinpoint of light,
and I couldn't do anything but go towards it. And
(05:01):
so I went toward this light. And as I got
to this light, it became bigger and brighter, almost like
looking into the sun. But it wasn't painful to look
into this light. And the light was in front of me,
and then the light was around me, and then I
was in the light, and then I knew I was
the light that as a drop of water in the
ocean is not separate, the light and I were made
(05:21):
of the same substance.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
And I was home.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Bliss doesn't come close to the word, but I knew
in that moment that I was forgiven for anything I
thought was unforgivable. I was loved beyond all measure in
a way that I'd never been loved before, and I
wanted to stay there. And again, in the same telepathic
way as with my mother, I heard a voice that
said to me, and you can call this light whatever
you want, because words really get in the way of
(05:48):
what it was. But this light said to me, you
must go back. And with all the kutzpah I had,
I responded and said, and the light said, you have
work to do, you must go back, And again I
yelled with everything I had. Oh And then I felt
and I heard like a churning, like I was in
(06:10):
a blender coming back down through the tunnel. And the
next thing I knew, I was in the dentist's chair,
and the dentist thought that he had resuscitated me so
he can have the credit. And my life changed as
a result of that. Now, when I came back, I
was disoriented in a way of now what, because I
(06:30):
wanted to stay there, and my sense was if I
got to be back here, it better be good. And
because it really the difference, the comparison was that this
is like sledging through mud compared to the ease and
the love that's there. And it was shortly after that
experience and I was having these feelings of now what
(06:52):
that I was reading a newspaper fully open. I turned
the page and there was a full page article on
hospice and there were yes, just came up off the page.
And I've been working in hospice ever since.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Laney's story is so moving because it shows us the
purpose of these experiences. She came back with a mission
to help others transition without fear. Just recently, the Washington Post,
one of the most respected newspapers in the World published
a major feature titled These people experienced near death. Here's
(07:29):
how it changed their lives. One of the most beautiful
stories they reported is about a woman named Krista Gorman.
Years ago, Christa went into cardiac arrest while giving birth
to her daughter. She describes being on a hospital bed
feeling a sense of peace, and then suddenly her vision switched.
(07:50):
She wasn't looking from her eyes anymore. She was looking
down at the scene of her daughter's birth from up above.
She told the reporter, I didn't know it was my body.
It was like watching a movie. Then of force tugged
at her. She was pulled right through the wall of
the hospital and into a bright space, landing in a lush,
(08:12):
green landscape. She became one with it, she said, I
just merged with all of it. I was the flowers
and the water and the trees, and it was completely blissful.
She said she could have stayed there eternally, but she
chose to come back, and when she woke up, she
faced what so many experiencers face, the difficulty of explaining
(08:36):
the unexplainable. She admitted she became paranoid about sharing it,
fearing that she was making it up, but deep down
she knew I was so fundamentally transformed that I know
I wasn't making it up. The article also shares the
story of Valerie Kirkis, a sixty year old from Portland, Oregon.
(08:58):
Just a year ago, she had a cardiac arrest and
was gone for four minutes. In those four minutes, her
consciousness traveled. She had a vision of being in San Francisco.
She saw a red street car, and on that streetcar
were her deceased loved ones, And as she approached, she
saw her mother with her arms outstretched waiting to hold her.
(09:23):
Valerie was shocked back to life before she could reach
her mother's arms, but the impact was immediate. She said
she felt completely renewed, like I was a whole new person.
Not all the stories in this Washington Post report were
about the tunnels of light. The article bravely includes the
variety of NDEs, proving that each journey is unique. Take
(09:47):
kir Whitson. He suffered a heart attack and was in
a medically induced coma for a month. He wasn't in
a heaven of clouds, but in an in between world.
He describes his consciousiness traveling around his hometown witnessing interactions
as if he were watching a movie. He told the reporter,
I cannot shake this feeling that my consciousness, my soul, myself,
(10:12):
my mind was out and about while I was trying
to survive, and now that he's recovered, he feels a
little sadness. He said, I knew it was special and
unique and that I was privileged to have it, But
now it's over. It's like going on a great trip,
and now I only have the memories. The article also
highlights how these experiences shatter our fear of death. There's
(10:37):
the story of a man named Takata. During his nd
he found himself in a large area that reminded him
of an airplane gate. He saw a tunnel with light,
but people there stopped him, tapped him on the shoulder
and said, you have to go back. Before this happened,
Takata was terrified of dying. Marietta Polivanova from the University
(10:59):
of Virginia notes that nearly seventy percent of survivors experience
a change in their spiritual beliefs. They become more empathetic,
less materialistic, and more appreciative of life. However, the article
also does a great service by acknowledging that not every
MD is blissful and that is okay. It tells the
(11:23):
story of Mercedes Samich. She was only twenty four having
an emergency C section. She started bleeding profusely and felt
herself floating into black nothingness. It was peaceful, but then
she panicked about leaving her baby. She had to choose
to float back. For Mercedes, the experience wasn't filled with angels,
(11:46):
and it left her feeling isolated because it didn't match
the happy stories she's heard others tell. And then there
is Peter Cotter. He had a cardiac arrest at sixty four.
He woke up with a memory of being underglass, pounding
on it and screaming to his medical team, don't let
me die today. Even though it was terrifying, Peter says
(12:09):
it changed his life for the better and that it
made him a much less selfish person and more concerned
about the people around him. This is the key takeaway,
my friends. Whether the experience is a blissful merger with
nature like Krista, a reunion with mom like Valerie, or
a scary wake up call like Peter, the result is
(12:32):
the same transformation, a shift away from self and towards others,
a realization that consciousness is real and powerful. We are
more than our bodies. When we come back from the break,
we're going to dive deeper into another incredible story, this
time from a man who was a complete atheist working
(12:53):
in hospice, whose life was turned upside down by what
he witnessed at the bedsides of the dying. We'll be
right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast, a m paranormal podcast network.
(13:28):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain.
In our first segment, we looked at how the mainstream
news is finally waking up to the reality of near
death experiences. We heard about Laney Leary's journey and the
stories from the Washington Post. Now I want to take
you into a different kind of story. It's one thing
to hear about a near death experience from someone who's
(13:51):
had one. It's another thing entirely to hear about the
afterlife from someone whose job it was to help people
die and who didn't believe in any of this. The
story comes from a recent CNN report about a man
named Scott Jansen. Scott is a hospice social worker in
(14:13):
North Carolina, and he's been doing this work for thirty
three years. But when he started, he wasn't a believer.
In fact, he describes himself back then as a knee
jerk atheist. He was an existentialist. He believed that life
had no inherent meaning, There was no soul, no spiritual order,
(14:35):
and absolutely no afterlife. When his dying patients would ask
for prayer, he would awkwardly change the subject. When they
talked about seeing dead relatives, he dismissed it. He said,
I assumed it was a bunch of nonsense. I knew
about deathbed visitations, but I thought they were disease related hallucinations,
(14:59):
deprivation of oxygen, that it must be the morphine. He
was certain, he was logical, but he was wrong. His
transformation began on a crisp autumn day when he went
to visit a patient named Buddy. Buddy was an elderly
man who had just lost his wife May. Now Scott
(15:21):
had known this couple for nine months, and May had
suffered from severe Alzheimer's disease. She was bedridden in all
the months Scott had visited. He had never heard May
speak a single word. He had only seen her open
her eyes once. She was, for all medical purposes gone,
(15:44):
But on this day, Buddy seemed different. His depression had lifted.
When Scott asked him why, Buddy said she was talking
to the angels in the last hour. God let me know.
Then Buddy asked want to see. He brought out a
camera and showed photos he had taken of May in
(16:05):
her final moments. Scott looked at the photos and he
couldn't believe his eyes. The woman he knew as slumped
and non responsive was sitting upright in bed, and she
was smiling. Her eyes, which Scott described as illuminated blue,
were wide open and looking at something Scott couldn't see.
(16:29):
She was gesturing with her hands, talking to invisible visitors.
But he told him that in those final moments, May
looked at him, thanked him for taking such good care
of her, and then turned back to the unseen figures
and said it's beautiful. An hour later, she died. Scott
(16:52):
tried to rationalize it. He said he knew about terminal lucidity,
where the brain has a final rally, but this was extreme.
Her brain had been eroded by advanced dementia. Neural networks
were destroyed. How could she recognize buddy? How could she
(17:14):
speak in full sentences? And most hauntingly, what was she
seeing that made her smile like that? That was the
first crack in Scott's armor. But the universe was not
done with Scott Jansen. He had another patient named Evan,
a World War II veteran in his nineties. Evan was
(17:36):
deeply depressed and had been praying for death. But one
day Scott walked in and found Evan's gloom had vanished.
Evan told him a story from the war. He said
that during a brutal battle, he was carrying a wounded
soldier on a stretcher. He slipped, the soldier fell, and
(17:57):
the man died right in front of him in a
horrific way. That night, Evan was crying on his cot, traumatized.
He looked up and saw a soldier sitting at the
end of his bed. But this soldier was wreathed in light.
The figure didn't speak, but communicated a message telepathically, we
(18:20):
are all loved and connected. The vision visited him a
few times during the war and then stopped. But now
forty years later, in his hospice room, Evan told Scott
he's back. He said the glowing soldier had sat by
his bed the night before and told him I'm here
(18:42):
with you. I'm going to help you over the hill
when it's time to go. Evan died shortly after telling
Scott that story. Scott tried to brush these things off.
He was a professional, after all, he was grounded. But
the stories coming and they were getting harder to explain.
(19:03):
He visited a young father who was dying of brain cancer.
The man was devastated that he wouldn't see his children
grow up, but on one visit, his mood had completely shifted.
He was calm. He told Scott, I had a visit
from a little boy. He was about my kid's age.
He seemed happy, and he told me everything is going
(19:27):
to be okay, and I'm here to help you. The
man told Scott that he had told the little spirit
boy he wasn't ready to go yet because one of
his children had a birthday coming up, so the spirit
boy agreed to come back the following Tuesday. Scott Jansen
remembers that moment vividly. He said, and guess when he
(19:49):
died Yep the following Tuesday. These weren't just hallucinations, they
were scheduled appointments. But the moment that find finally clinched
it For Scott, the moment that turned him from a
skeptic to a believer wasn't something he saw in a patient.
It was a memory that these experiences forced him to
(20:13):
unlock from his own life. Years earlier, when Scott was
just twenty three and a graduate student, he was sleeping
in his apartment during a snowstorm. Suddenly, in the middle
of the night, he was jolted awake by the sound
of a loud ambulance siren. It wasn't outside, the sound
(20:33):
was coming from the corner of his bedroom. He heard
the siren, he heard the sound of a gurney being
rolled on asphalt, and he heard a man's voice yell,
bring it here quick. Scott jumped out of bed. He
looked out the window. The street was empty, silent, snow.
(20:54):
He checked his eyes in the mirror. He did math
problems to make sure he wasn't having a mental breakdown.
He was wide awake. He eventually went back to sleep,
telling himself it was just a vivid dream. The next morning,
his phone rang. It was his father. His father told
him that his uncle Eddie had been killed in a
(21:17):
car accident. Scott asked what time had happened. It was
the exact same time Scott had been woken up by
the phantom siren in his room. Later that day, Scott's radio,
which had been broken, suddenly turned on by itself. It
started playing the Beatles song Let It Be, and as
(21:39):
the music filled the room, Scott felt an overwhelming wash
of peace and comfort. The Beatles were his uncle Eddie's
favorite band. For years, Scott had buried that memory. It
didn't fit his atheist worldview. But working in hospice, seeing
the impossible photos of May, hearing about the glowing soldier,
(22:01):
witnessing the Tuesday appointment, he couldn't deny it anymore. He
realized that his scientific worldview was actually small and limited.
He said, I'd hear people talk about spiritual surrender, and
back then my knee jerk response was hell, no, you surrender,
(22:22):
not me. But today Scott Jansen is a believer. He says,
whenever people ask if I believe in God, I say yes,
I believe there is a unifying, conscious energy or force
that connects all of us. I think we go back
to our source. His sister says, he's a different person now.
(22:43):
He's less judgmental. He sees the good in everyone. He
values all life, even removing bugs from his house instead
of killing them. And perhaps the most beautiful change is
how he treats his patience. He no longer changes the
subject when they about the other side. Three years after
seeing those photos of May, Scott was called to the
(23:06):
home of a patient named Reba who had just passed
her husband. Cliff was standing by her body, heartbroken. The
funeral home men were there to take her away. Cliff
asked for a moment, can we have a prayer? First?
The old Scott would have refused, but the new Scott,
(23:26):
the one who had seen the truth, took Cliff's hand.
He closed his eyes and he prayed, Dear God, we
thank you for the life of Reba and the lives
she's touched. When he finished, Cliff hugged him, crying and said,
thank you, brother Scott. This story is so important because
it shows us that evidence doesn't just come from having
(23:48):
a near death experience ourselves. Sometimes it comes from simply
paying attention. It comes from witnessing the profound, unexplainable peace
that descends on the dying. It comes from seeing the
impossible clarity of a loved one who has returned to
say goodbye. Scott Jansen went looking for the end of life,
(24:09):
and instead he found proof of the beginning. And speaking
of proof, sometimes the evidence isn't a quiet whisper or
a vision. Sometimes it's dramatic, a physical journey to a
place so real you never want to leave when we
come back. I'm going to share the story of Craig Morris.
He was the victim of a home invasion, a brutal
(24:31):
attack that left him dead for fifteen minutes. What he
saw in those fifteen minutes, the colors, the feelings, the
absolute reality of paradise will make you rethink everything you
know about where we go from here. And here's a
bit of nd trivia for you. We assume when we
(24:51):
leave our bodies that we will see things just as
we do now with two eyes looking forward. But researchers
have found that this is not the case. Many reporters
report what is called omni directional vision. They don't just
see in front of them, They can see three hundred
and sixty degrees around, up, down, and even through objects,
(25:13):
all at the same time. It suggests that once we
step out of our physical bodies, our limitations vanish and
our awareness expands in ways our human brains can't even
begin to comprehend. We'll be right back. You're listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(25:35):
Coast am Heirinormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of
(26:00):
the Afterlife. I'm Sanders Champlain. We've been exploring stories that
have made headlines, stories that challenge our understanding of life
and death. But the story I want to share with
you now hasn't been in mainstream news yet, and honestly,
it's one of the most dramatic, terrifying, and ultimately beautiful
accounts I've heard. It proves that even in the midst
(26:22):
of the worst human violence, the soul remains untouched, safe
and loved. This is the story of Craig Morris. In
May of twenty twenty two. Craig was sixty six years old.
He was living in Panama, Central America, and he had
gone up into the remote mountains to help a friend
who was ill. They were staying in a little unfinished
(26:45):
two bedroom house on the hill. It was simple living,
no glass in some of the windows, and the electricity
came from a generator. One Tuesday night, they were just
sitting in the living room having a cup of tea
when suddenly the lights went out. It was pitch black.
Craig grabbed a flashlight. He assumed one of the dogs
(27:08):
had knocked a loose cable, so we went out to
the back door to check the generator. He knelt down
in the dirt he saw the cables. They hadn't been
knocked loose. They had been cut severed. Craig said, in
that flash of a moment, I just thought, that's not right,
something's wrong. That is the last thing I remember. He
(27:32):
didn't hear footsteps behind him. He didn't feel the blow.
He had been struck in the head with a crowbar
by men in military fatigues who were raiding the house.
The blow was massive. It killed him instantly. Craig said,
I was looking at the back of a generator and
(27:53):
now I'm standing in paradise. It was instantaneous. I was thinking, well,
I must be dead, But how can I be here
if I'm not dead. I don't remember dying. He was
standing in a meadow, but it wasn't like any meadow
on earth. He described it. It was incredible. It was
(28:16):
like a rainbow wrapped in a valley. I could see
way in the distance a river, and I'm checking out
my body. I'm wearing a white robe. I wasn't wearing
any shoes. I was standing on grass, and the grass
was beautiful green, and it felt like silk, as if
(28:36):
I could feel every blade of grass on my feet.
This is what we call hyperreality. His senses weren't dull,
they were superhuman. Craig looked at a tree about thirty
feet away. He said, I could see every little nook
and cranny and the texture of the bark. I could
focus at thirty feet away and see the tiny details
(29:01):
of the veins in the leaves. And then he looked
past that tree to a mountain a quarter of a
mile away. I noticed if I looked, I could see
the leaves on those trees, and they were a quarter
mile away. That was really cool. He realized he had thoughts,
(29:21):
and when he thought them, he heard his own voice
in surround sound. He asked out loud, if I'm here,
then I must be dead, And immediately a voice answered him,
that's correct, you died. You're dead. Craig said, he felt
an overwhelming sense of acceptance. This is home, Welcome home.
(29:46):
This is where I'm supposed to be. He wanted to explore.
He thought about the river he saw in the distance,
and just by thinking it, he began to move. He said,
I realized I wasn't walking anymore. I just took off,
flying over the meadow. So I stopped. I didn't realize
(30:07):
I stopped, But as soon as I stopped thinking, my
body just slowly floated right back down until I was
on level ground. It was paradise. But then something pulled
at him, a heaviness in his heart. He remembered his life.
He said, I've got five biological sons. I've got two
(30:29):
step kids. I've been their dad for twenty years. They're
my closest friends, and I'm thinking they're going to be devastated.
Even in the perfection of heaven, the bond of love
for his children was stronger. Craig made a choice. He said,
I can't stay here. I don't want to stay here.
(30:51):
I'm not going to die like this. Somebody took my
life from me, so I said, in my mind, I'm
not going to stay here. I'm not going to die today,
not like this, and I put my hand down. The
moment he made that decision, the moment he asserted is
will to live. He was slammed back into his body
(31:14):
and he wasn't in paradise anymore. He said, I was
instantly back in my body here on earth, and oh
my god, I was gasping for air. I had been
dead for fifteen minutes. My hands instantly shot up to
my head. The pain was unbelievable. Blood is coming out
(31:34):
of the side of my head like a garden hose.
He was lying in the mud in the dark, surrounded
by the men what attacked him. They had flashlights pointed
at him. One of the men jumped down, straddled him,
grabbed his shirt and screamed in Spanish, Oh my god,
he's alive. They were terrified. They knew they had killed him.
(31:57):
And this is where the story becomes truly harrowing, but
also miraculous. These men were not done to incapacitate him.
One of the men took a rifle, pressed the barrel
directly into the back of Craig's leg, and pulled the trigger.
Craig screamed, he felt the pain. He said, the pain
(32:18):
felt like a welding torch inside his leg. They tied
him up with zip ties. They interrogated him about money,
but Craig, having just come from a place of infinite power,
did something incredible. He looked the man right in the
eye and screamed, you already killed me Once, he said,
(32:38):
the man's eyes went wide with fear. The attackers eventually left.
Craig was alone, bleeding, shot and battered in the mud.
He knew he had to save his friend inside the house,
he crawled. He dragged his shot leg through the mud.
He braced himself on the wall to stand up. He
(33:00):
found a knife, freed his friend, and then realized he
had to go for help. This man, who had been
dead minutes earlier, managed to crawl up a hill, find
his truck keys in the mud, get into his vehicle,
and drive a manual transmission truck with a bullet hole
in his left leg, the leg you use for the clutch.
(33:23):
He drove for an hour down the mountain, fighting unconsciousness,
until he finally found a security guard station and got help.
But the miracle wasn't just that he had survived the attack.
It was what the doctors found later, Craig said, in
the afternoon, a doctor came by and he asked me, Hey,
(33:47):
have you seen the X rays of your legs? And
I said, no, sir. He showed me four pictures and
he says, these bullets never touched your bone. Think about that.
A high powered rifle pressing directly against his calf, fired
point blank. Craig said, the bullet split in two and
(34:10):
moved all around inside my leg, but never touched the bone.
I wasn't meant to lose the use of one leg.
Within seven days, Craig was walking. He cut off his
own cast because he didn't need it. He was playing
basketball Shortly after. Craig was asked if the memory of
(34:30):
the other side has faded or if the trauma of
the attack overshadowed it. His answer is why I'm telling
you this story today, He said, no, not at all.
For many weeks afterwards, I would have dreams and I
would relive it over and over. It was as if
I was in a lucid dream and I was there again.
(34:52):
That was more home to me than where I am
right now. He said. The experience changed him comple Lately.
I haven't feared death since I know that this life
is but a blink of time. This body is so temporary,
it really is. And you know, when I was on
(35:13):
the other side and I was flying, I felt like Superman.
You realize how free you are when you're outside of
this earthly realm. Craig's story is extreme, it's violent, it's terrifying.
But in the middle of that darkness, there was a
light that could not be extinguished. He died, he went home,
(35:34):
He felt the grass, saw the leaves, flew with his mind,
and felt a love so total that it is still
with him. And when he chose to come back, his
body was protected in a way that defies physics. His
story teaches us that no matter what happens to our
physical bodies, whether it's cancer, a car accident, or something
(35:57):
senseless as an attack, is indestructible. We are not these
fragile bodies. We are supermen and superwomen flying over meadows.
We are consciousness that can see For miles, Craig said
something that I think sums it all up. He told
(36:18):
the doctors, who are amazed at his survival, that it
was the human will to live. But then he corrected himself.
He said, no, I don't believe that for a minute.
I think the strongest force in the universe is your
soul's will to love. That's what brought him back, love
(36:38):
for his children. When we come back for our final break,
I've got another story to tell you. And all of
these stories Laaney's, Scott's Craigs, and what they tell us
about our lives right now is if death is nothing
to fear, then life is everything to live. And here's
(36:58):
another bit of near death experience trivia for you. We
often think these experiences are rare, something that only happens
to a lucky few, But did you know how incredibly
common they are. A famous Gallup poll estimated that over
eight million Americans have had a near death experience. That's
(37:19):
a big number. It means that if you are in
a room with thirty people, statistically at least one of
them has peaked behind the curtain. It just goes to
show that the afterlife isn't a distant memory. It's the
reality that touches people's lives every single day right here
in our neighborhoods. So next time you're with a group
(37:42):
of people or just one or two, talk about near
death experiences and see if they or someone they know
has had one. We'll be right back. You're listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Normal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of
(38:23):
the Afterlife. I'm Sander Champlain. We've been traveling through headlines
from CNN and the Washington Post about near death experiences,
then the social worker by the bedside of the dying,
and the scary attack with poor Craig Morris. But in
our final segment, I want to share a story that
hasn't been in the news just yet. It was sent
(38:46):
to me directly by the International Association for Near Death
Studies or ians dot org. It is a raw account
from a woman who calls herself Waterlight, and it offers
one of the most detailed and profound explanations of why
we are here. Her story begins during the height of
(39:07):
the pandemic in late twenty twenty. I just thirty six
years old. She contracted COVID on Christmas Day. By January second,
she was in a desperate state. She said, I could
not talk, really, I could barely breathe. I was too
afraid to call nine one one, because something in my
(39:29):
spirit told me that if I went to the hospital,
I would not be coming back. Just before the end,
she had a phone call with her cousin, Carrie. Carrie
had just called her out of the blue, sensing something
was wrong. She said, I spoke to her about what
I was experiencing, that I did not feel like I
(39:50):
was part of my body, and that I was going somewhere.
The last thing I remember is her telling me to
not go anywhere, to just stay where I was. The
phone call ended, I closed my eyes and I couldn't
breathe anymore. But I wasn't afraid. I was just tired,
and at that moment, in her bed while her children
(40:13):
were downstairs, she died suddenly. She was no longer in
her sick body. She was in a place she calls
death consciousness. She described it vividly. It's a darker place,
like a shadow land. I could see various landscape differences,
like hills and valleys, but it is many dark colors
(40:34):
and shades. I wasn't afraid. Standing in the shadowland, she
looked into the distance and saw something breath taking a
little to the left, she saw a horizon that looked
like a sunrise and sunset combined. She called this place
beyond consciousness. She said, the warmth that I feel from
(40:57):
this place is greater than the come comfort of a
warm blanket. But also, imagine entering a room full of
everyone you have ever loved before. It is pure love.
And I remember feeling like that and seeing everyone. Well,
that is where I needed to be, almost like a party.
(41:20):
I want to be there. She wasn't there yet, but
she realized she wasn't alone. There was no physical person
with her, but she felt a presence. She realized she
had access to total knowledge. It was like a telepathic
voice in her mind that could answer everything, and because
(41:41):
she is an inquisitive person, she started asking big questions,
questions we all have. First, she asked about the dying
process itself. The voice explained to her that while the
body might look like it's suffering on the outside, the
consciousness is actually protected. She learned the pain caused by
(42:03):
dying isn't fully registered in your consciousness, so there isn't
much suffering. But those in death consciousness are still present.
They can hear you, they can fill your touch, and
they can understand what you say from your heart. Then
She asked the question that haunts so many of us,
(42:25):
why do we suffer so much here on earth? The
answer she received is radical, The voice told her. Living
consciousness is one of so many lies, so many stories,
and absolutely none of the matter. Much of it is
made up by other living beings that want rules, regulations,
(42:49):
and control. Once you realize this, none of it matters.
She was told that many of our ideas about karma
and punishment are just human inventions. She said that suffering
isn't connected to a spiritual karma beyond the living. Therefore,
phrases like you reap what you sew is very much
(43:11):
a living consciousness concept. It does not come with you
when you die. So if the rules don't matter and
the karma doesn't follow us, what does and what's the point?
The voice was clear. Love is the only thing that
can cross transitional levels of consciousness. The love you give
(43:32):
and the love you receive can pass with you. It
doesn't matter what you did or who you were. All
that matters is who you helped, who you loved and
who loved you. The amount of money, your job, your looks,
mistakes or perfection, none of it matters. After you die,
(43:54):
you won't remember any of those details. They don't exist
where you go. Think about that freedom, all that pressure
we have to be perfect, to be successful, to be
as somebody, It all dissolves. Only the love remains. She
also learned incredible things about our planet. She was shown
(44:15):
that nature is far more alive than we realize. She said,
trees are very much living beings that speak, have consciousness,
and exist to help us. Water has its own consciousness,
probably the most powerful consciousness on planet Earth. It is
not just life. It has its own consciousness and carries
(44:38):
all answers to any single question you could ever ask.
She learned that we must honor the earth and live
in harmony with it, not just as a resource, but
as a fellow living being. She also asked about suicide
and death. She learns something that might bring comfort to
those who have lost someone to She was told living
(45:02):
humans do not actually get to choose whether to die.
Death happens to all of us, and we must honor
that transition because it is sacred, beautiful, and justified spiritually,
even if we do not understand it. She wanted to stay.
She wanted to walk into that beautiful beyond consciousness where
(45:24):
the party of souls were waiting for her, but she
felt the pull of her children, the lives she was
connected to. Here, she realized she didn't have a choice.
Returning was incredibly painful. She said. It was only after
I came back into my body and realized my pain
(45:44):
and how terribly sick I was, that all of the
feelings of grief, sadness, and anger occurred. For two weeks,
she fell into a deep depression. She had touched a
pure love and now was back in the heavy, slim,
ludging through the mud feeling of earth, just as Lany
Leary described. But she didn't stay in that sadness. She transformed.
(46:09):
She realized she was not the same person who had
died from COVID in that bed. She even changed her
name to Waterlight to honor the piece she felt when
she was floating in that waitless state, and she came
back with gifts. Her psychic abilities, which she had glimpsed
as a child, were now wide open. She said, I
(46:30):
can now lucid dream, and it is here that I
also meet with spirits. I received messages from the deceased
for other living people. She also developed a power of vision.
She said, I can touch objects and see who is
sick or what another person is feeling. I can also
find missing objects for people. It can be in another state,
(46:53):
and I can tell them where something is located. She
even went back to school to get a degree in
botany because now she can hear plants speak with the trees,
and she wants to help bridge the gap between western
science and the consciousness of nature. She experienced. Her life
is now dedicated to service, to healing, and to reducing suffering.
(47:17):
As she put it, I suffer much less and can
now help others suffer much less. This brings our journey today,
my friend, into a full circle. In the beginning, we
heard doctor Landy Leary's words, who was told by the light,
you have work to do, and she came back to
serve the dying in hospice. Next we heard about Scott Jansen,
(47:38):
the skeptic who realized that a scientific view was too
small to contain the reality of the soul, and who
learned to say yes to the spiritual needs of his patients.
Then we heard about Craig Morris, who survived brutal violence
and came back with the absolute knowledge that the soul's
will to love is the strongest force in the universe,
(48:02):
and now water light confirms it all. She tells us
that the rules, the status, the money, it's all a distraction.
The only thing that crosses the threshold is love. The
evidence is mounting from the pages of major newspapers to
the personal transformations of people just like us, my friends.
(48:24):
The world is waking up to a simple yet powerful truth.
We are not our bodies. We are connected, and we
are eternal consciousness, and that means how we live today.
It really matters if trees have consciousness, if water holds answers,
if our loved ones are just a thought away, then
(48:45):
the world is not a lonely place. It is crowded
with help, guidance and love. So my challenge for you,
should you choose to accept it, is to live like
you know this is true. Forgive someone not because you
have to, but because holding onto anger is just living
consciousness baggage that won't come with you anyway. Love fearlessly,
(49:09):
appreciate nature, and know deep down in your heart that
you are safe, you are eternal, and you're never ever alone,
and you are deeply loved. Remember come visit me at
wedotdie dot com. At the bottom of the page. Just
enter your name and email address. I've got a bunch
(49:30):
of free goodies there for you, including a copy of
my book We Don't Die, a skeptics discovery of life
after Death. Every Sunday two o'clock New York time on Zoom,
I host a free Sunday gathering inspirational service with some
friends of mine, and there's a medium demonstration included. People's
loved ones come back with messages from all over the world.
(49:53):
I'll do my very best for you to continue letting
you know that you are a divine soul, You're having
a human experience, and you are loved and every day matters.
I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you so much for listening to
Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast am Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
Day and Paranormal Podcast Network. Make sure and check out
all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going
to iHeartRadio dot com.
Host
Sandra Champlain
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