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MYS435: A migrant worker named Maria had a heart attack in Seattle in 1977. When she came around, she told a social worker about a dark blue tennis shoe sitting on a third-floor ledge outside the hospital, worn over the little toe, with the lace tucked under the heel. The social worker went looking. The shoe was there.

Researchers call cases like this veridical near-death experiences. The person comes back with information they had no normal way to get, it’s too specific to be a lucky guess, and it checks out.

Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli work through the evidence gathered in The Self Does Not Die, a collection of 128 cases by Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven and Rudolf Smit, published by the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Every case in the book had to be confirmed by someone other than the experiencer: a doctor, a nurse, a family member, or a written record.

Some of those confirmations come from surgeons. A patient described his heart surgeon pointing with his elbows, a habit his cardiologist said he’d never seen another surgeon use. A Dutch nurse pulled the dentures out of a man with no heartbeat, and a week later the man greeted him with, “You know where my dentures are.” Heart surgeon Lloyd Rudydescribed a patient who spent about 20 minutes with no heartbeat or blood pressure, then told the team about the Post-it notes stuck to the monitor.

Then there’s Pam Reynolds. Her surgeons cooled her body, stopped her heart and drained the blood from her head to remove a brain aneurysm. Her eyes were taped shut and her ears were plugged with speakers playing loud clicks. She still described the bone saw and a conversation about the arteries in her groin.

The book sorts the cases into nine types, and the episode takes each one in turn: perceptions in the room, perceptions at a distance, perceptions during cardiac arrest, telepathy, meeting a relative nobody mentioned, meeting someone who had just died without anyone knowing, being seen somewhere else, healing, and psychic abilities that show up afterward.

Could it all be fraud, coincidence, things the patient already knew, or the brain rebuilding the scene from sound and touch? Jimmy tests each explanation against the cases, then turns to what the Church teaches about the soul and whether the evidence from near-death experiences fits it.

Plus, listener feedback on Joseph Williamson’s Tunnels, including an invitation to Liverpool.

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Links for this episode:

• Titus Rivas et al.’s book The Self Does Not Die
• The Day I Died (BBC documentary, 2002)—featuring the Pam Reynolds case
• Psi-Encyclopedia article on Near-Death Experiences
• International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS)

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Chapters:

• 0:00:12 – Intro
• 0:00:41 – The Setup: No Pulse, No Brain Activity, Yet He Describes the Room
• 0:01:50 – Earlier Episodes on NDEs
• 0:02:10 – What “Veridical” Means
• 0:03:24 – The Source: The Self Does Not Die
• 0:04:02 – The Book’s Standard: Independent Confirmation
• 0:05:28 – A Note for Sensitive Listeners
• 0:06:06 – The Nurse, the Punch, and the Doctor’s Watch
• 0:10:27 – Testing the Watch Case Against the Three Conditions
• 0:12:07 – Confirmation in Writing
• 0:12:51 – Nine Types of Veridical NDEs
• 0:14:31 – Type 1: Nearby Perceptions — The Surgeon Who Flapped His Elbows
• 0:19:53 – The Elbow Habit Confirmed
• 0:21:43 – Type 1: The Night Watchman’s Open-Heart Surgery
• 0:24:03 – Checking the Account Against the Operative Report
• 0:27:49 – Type 2: Distant Perceptions — Maria’s Shoe
• 0:30:37 – Skeptics and the Shoe
• 0:31:13 – Type 2: Major Scull and the Red Pantsuit
• 0:33:41 – Type 3: Perceptions During Cardiac Arrest
• 0:34:10 – The Man with the Dentures
• 0:38:37 – “You Know Where My Dentures Are”
• 0:42:44 – Lloyd Rudy’s Patient and the Post-it Notes
• 0:48:03 – Auto-Resuscitation: The Lazarus Syndrome
• 0:48:47 – What the Patient Saw
• 0:50:39 – A Second Surgeon Confirms It
• 0:51:33 – Pam Reynolds and the Standstill Operation
• 0:56:35 – The Saw, the Arteries, and the High Natural D
• 0:58:53 – Surgeons Confirm Pam’s Account
• 1:00:33 – Pam’s Uncle and the Push Back
• 1:02:57 – Type 4: Telepathy — “And Then You Ate My Lunch”
• 1:05:00 – A Thought Never Spoken
• 1:06:56 – Type 5: Stranger Encounters — Vi Horton’s Baby Brother
• 1:10:30 – Type 6: Familiar Encounters — Peak in Darien Cases
• 1:11:33 – Eddie Cuomo and His Sister Teresa
• 1:13:22 – Type 7: Apparitions — Olga Gearhardt’s Message
• 1:17:14 – Type 8: Miraculous Healing — Anita Moorjani
• 1:22:39 – An Oncologist Investigates
• 1:23:29 – Type 9: Paranormal Abilities After an NDE
• 1:25:47 – Thank you to Patrons
• 1:26:18 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
• 1:26:39 – Sponsor: In Time by Robert Young
• 1:27:16 – Sponsorship Opportunities
• 1:28:18 – Theories: Five Explanations
• 1:29:18 – Reason Perspective …of Fraud
• 1:31:03 – …of Coincidence
• 1:32:45 – …of Prior Knowledge
• 1:34:45 – …of Sensory Reconstruction
• 1:37:25 – …of Mind-Body Separation
• 1:38:22 – Faith Perspective
• 1:39:24 – Bottom Line
• 1:40:42 – Further Resources
• 1:41:16 – Mysterious Feedback: #424 Joseph Williamson’s Tunnels
• 1:47:22 – Your mysterious feedback
• 1:47:56 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
• 1:48:04 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
• 1:49:07 – Next Time: What Are Demons?
• 1:50:13 – Get your Mysterious merch
• 1:50:21 – Show notes
• 1:50:29 – Become a Patron
• 1:50:36 – Sponsor: Grave Tending Solutions
• 1:51:17 – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
• 1:51:38 – Outro

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