Sex, Drugs and Quantum Physics – Interview with an expert of near death experiences

Is it really possible to float above your own body? Does consciousness live on after we die? Are all our brains and the entire universe just a hologram?

Digital Dying recently spoke about these matters with Kevin Williams, who runs one of the web’s most popular sites on near death experiences.

What’s a near death experience like?

There are succinct stages, going through the tunnel, having the homecoming with the deceased loved ones, the life review. Some people see temples, universities, cities of light. Many are given visions of the future, like what would happen if they stayed in heaven, something that causes them to want to come back to earth. People who have had near death experiences often return saying the whole world is upside down. They remember things they experienced from before they were born, forgotten knowledge. In dying you can enjoy life unrestricted by the body, it is like taking off an old coat you have been wearing for a long time.

What typically triggers a near death experience?

The most transcendental ones are caused by things that bring people closest to physical death, like cardiac arrests. You can also experience them through mediation, hypnosis, psychedelics or sex. I have one woman on my site who says in orgasms she has out of body experiences. Dreams too. People don’t realize this but when we dream at night we actually enter other realms of consciousness. Every night we go back into the spiritual realm. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Other Great Reads: Dead but not dead, fantastic but true stories of coming back from the grave

Have you ever had a near death experience?

My mother was killed in a terrible auto accident, two days later she interrupted my dreams. I opened the door, entered a room and saw her sitting on a couch. She appeared to be in what they call the waiting area. When I woke up I realized my mom wanted to communicate with me to tell me she was still alive. I called my sister, she said she had had the exact same dream. This was my own personal validity that consciousness survives. I no longer have any doubt that life goes on after death. And people who have near death experiences realize that too. Nobody can tell them otherwise.

When did humans first begin having near death experiences?

Plato was the first person to describe a near death experience, he told of a soldier called Er. They were getting ready to burn his body and he woke up. He talked about people descending to lower realms, some going up to higher realms, some reincarnating back to earth. You might say Plato was the father of the near death experience, but hundreds of years earlier in Tibet they had already written a whole book on this, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s like science and everyone else is trying to catch up with what these Tibetan monks have known for millennia.

How does the idea of God fit into a near death experience?

The word God has so much baggage that goes along with it. When I say God, I don’t mean an old man on a throne, I mean more like mother nature. Everything that can be explained in the universe by mathematics seems to be the language of God. People who have died describe God as being like the air that you breathe. It’s so obvious that God is everywhere you can’t deny it. A lot of scientists don’t like that. But atheists often have more intense near death experiences than religious people. My uncle is a radiologist and an evolutionary nut. He doesn’t believe in the God in the bible but I know he worships God in his own way, in his devotion to studying science and nature. He may be more of a disciple of Christ than many practicing Christians.

Other Great Reads: How different religions around the world deal with death

How does faith determine ones’ ability to have a near death experience?

It doesn’t matter how or what you believe or how you die, it matters how you lived. That’s what determines our reality after death. Whether you’re a communist or run a major corporation, the only one thing that matters is how much you have loved and how much others love you. It appears that love is like the Grand Unified Theory on the other side. Love is the force that brings everything together. Love is light. Love is life. Love is God. God is everywhere. The devil is nowhere. Love is the closest thing we can experience to heaven, to the divine. By love I mean passionate love, love that goes beyond the physical, that’s unconditional. People who have near death experiences say love over there isn’t like love over here. Love here is more like erotic love, on the other side love is much greater, depending on what dimension you’re in. There are many dimensions of love.

What does quantum physics have to do with near death experiences?

It’s going to be quantum physics that discovers that consciousness survives death, that consciousness is an energy that can neither be created or destroyed. It’s consciousness that causes the collapse of the wave function. When you see something it’s because the wave becomes a particle, allowing you to actually see it as a solid. But things are not really solid, that’s the illusion. There’s a dual nature to reality and it’s this duality which explains why our bodies are separate from our actual selves, our consciousness. Our reality is determined by consciousness. It determines what we see and what we believe. Our consciousness is not just some invisible thing in our heads. We are not our brains. We are not just matter. There is more to us than just the sum of our parts. Consciousness is something akin to the airwaves of a radio station. You can destroy a radio but you haven’t destroyed the airwaves where the music is playing.

Will science someday be able to explain the afterlife with a simple equation?

There’s some exciting stuff coming up this year. Quantum physicists are probably going to find the God particle, also known as the Higgs boson particle, this elusive particle that bestows mass on all other particles. Once they have this last piece of the puzzle many ideas that have just been theories will become fact. There’s a Norte Dame study going on right now trying to determine whether under scientific controls patients can relate things they have seen during out of body experiences. There’s a mountain of this type of evidence, the only problem is these are subjective experiments and science demands objective experiments. Many people think the scientific method is broken because of this. It’s why science is having so much trouble keeping up with mysticism and spirituality. It seems to me like science, religion and philosophy are all coming to a point of merger, and neither one really likes it.

Are our brains really holograms?

One theory that seems to be emerging is the holographic theory, which says that our brain is a hologram, the whole universe is a hologram, everything is a hologram. That would explain a whole lot of paranormal stuff. It would explain why our consciousness sometimes seems to be in line with other consciousness. You’d think this were impossible because nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but in physics scientists now know two particles a million miles away, if they are entangled, can still affect one another.

What does the future hold for humans?

Some day in the future we will all be able to walk on water. We will reach a point when we can control weather with our minds. All this paranormal stuff will become mainstream once science catches up and determines that the universe is a single organism and we’re all part of it. What we consider magic now will be science. But there appears to be coming a day of reckoning. We are headed for a disaster, whether it be global climate or war or an asteroid. Something is going to happen, many people think this year, some kind of catastrophe will cause mankind to unite. Many civilizations will disappear, especially around the coast. But it’s not the end of the world, it’s the end of an old paradigm and the beginning of a new paradigm. People will be less technological and more spiritual. They will be closer to nature. Civilization as we know it will be destroyed in an instant.