Dr. Mary Neal
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Mary Neal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
they experienced not only what they were doing to other people, but they experienced the other person's emotions, which made them more compassionate. Yes.
But they often feel things that they didn't do, but other people did to them. For example, someone I knew was a woman who had an abusive childhood. And when she went back through her life review, she experienced her mother beating her from the mother's perspective. and realized her mother was trapped in this mode and she didn't know how else to relate to her daughter. Wow.
And she came away feeling a tremendous compassion for her mother for the first time in her life. And Tom and this woman, they all come back with this idea that we're all the same. There's no barrier between me and you. And this leads them basically to the golden rule, which is part of every religion we have on this planet.
That when you hurt someone else, you're hurting yourself as well. Yeah.
That's right. They come back totally changed. For them... The golden rule is not a guideline we're supposed to follow. It's the law of the universe that they've experienced.
There's no getting around it.
Yeah.
Right, right. So many things you've said, Jeremy, are so typical of near-death experiences, having no sense of time, feeling the love, feeling like you don't really need the body and all its restrictions. But let me ask you, with all this new understanding, how does it change your day-to-day interactions with people?
Right, right. Is that true? People often say that it was designed specifically for them, like they had a role in creating it for them. And maybe that's just the way they perceived it. We all perceive the same experience in different ways. That's right. So maybe it's just what they take back from the experience is what's relevant to them.
Right, right. Yes. If you and I took a plane to Paris, we'd come back with very different memories because we have different interests. Even if we were on the same plane. Exactly. Absolutely.
Oprah, I've known Mary for a number of years, and what you don't see in this interview is that she's a down-to-earth, no-nonsense orthopedic surgeon who is very much making her career in this world by treating us, our physical bodies. And yet she's been aware for decades of this other world that we're part of as well that's more important than the physical.
Well, that first episode with Holly was just a fluke. And I thought, well, you know, she's a psychiatric patient. Who knows what's really going on? Yeah. This has got to be an explanation. So I started collecting other cases of people who had come close to death or been pronounced dead and had these fantastic stories to tell. And I was trying to find some consistency in...
Are they related to oxygen deprivation? Are they related to drugs? Are they related to heart arrhythmias? You know, what's going on with these people? Over the last 50 years, we've talked to thousands and thousands of people, done some physiological measurements on people when they were close to death. We found that none of these simplistic hypotheses turns out to be true.
It's not oxygen deprivation. It's not drugs. It's not endorphins being produced by the brain. It's not erratic electrical activity in the brain or the heart. These things just don't explain what's going on.
What we're taught in college and medical school is that the mind is what the brain does. And all our thoughts and feelings must come from the brain. And people who are trained in this way tend to accept that and not look at the data that contradict that.
Right. But we see experiences like near-death experiences and lots of others as well that disprove that. And yet many scientists are reluctant to acknowledge this evidence that doesn't go along with what they were taught. I wish they were more skeptical about what they were taught and be more open to the evidence.
As a scientist, I can't say we've proven that. But as a person who's heard all these stories, I find it hard to deny that. There seem to be so many cases where people are pronounced dead and yet seem to be thinking clearly otherwise. And in fact, more vividly than ever before.
And if that can happen without the brain being active, that opens a possibility that it keeps going forever or as long as we can measure.
Well, for many scientists, they have to experience it themselves. And they may do that eventually. Yeah. But I wanted to ask you a question, Harmony. I know we've heard from so many adult near-death experiences how hard it was to go back to a, quote, normal life after this. What was it like for a 13-year-old to go back to school and to do the usual activities of a teenager?
I haven't dealt with a lot of children, but those that I have talked to often have difficulty communicating. taking life seriously at that point. It's one thing when you're 30, 40 years old and you realize it's nothing more important. But when you're a kid trying to figure out who you are anyway, to have this thrown at you, it makes it much harder to figure out, what is my life all about?
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