Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back George and Rory with you. Let me
Speaker 2: tell you a little bit about our guest. Jim willis
Speaker 2: a hit theologian, historian, musician. Jim earned his bachelor's degree
Speaker 2: from the Eastman School of Music and his master's degree
Speaker 2: from andover Newton Theological School. He has been an ordained
Speaker 2: minister for more than forty years, and while serving as
Speaker 2: an adjunct college professor in the fields of comparative religion
Speaker 2: and cross culture studies, he was the host of his
Speaker 2: own program radio show, and upon the retirement, he was
Speaker 2: determined to confront the essential mystical reality that has inspired
Speaker 2: humankind since the very beginning of time and started writing
Speaker 2: incredible books, including Ancient Gods, Supernatural Gods, Lost Civilizations, and
Speaker 2: his latest book, Near Death Experiences. Jim, welcome back to
Speaker 2: the program.
Speaker 3: Good to talk to you again. George. It's been a while.
Speaker 3: Last time I was on the show, I guess you
Speaker 3: were on vacation and I had a chance to meet
Speaker 3: Ian and I was so sorry to hear that he
Speaker 3: just passed away or passed away recently. Yeah, he did.
Speaker 2: We lost him in December of non alcoholic liver disease.
Speaker 3: Jim. Oh no, he was waiting first chance to meet him,
Speaker 3: and we had a We had a great time. I'm oh,
Speaker 3: I'm so sorry to hear that.
Speaker 2: Good guy. And he loved music. My gosh, he loved music.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, we had We had a lot of
Speaker 3: chance to talk about music.
Speaker 2: Speaking of music, what kind of music do you play?
Speaker 3: Well, A little of everything. I was trained as a
Speaker 3: symphony symphonic trombonist, but I got into conducting, especially conducting
Speaker 3: choral music. But then I had a love for jazz
Speaker 3: that couldn't go by. So for a while I was
Speaker 3: conducting choirs and playing orchestras and doing jazz gigs on
Speaker 3: the weekend, and a little of everything.
Speaker 2: Now, how did you get interested in your death experiences?
Speaker 2: This is an amazing work, by the.
Speaker 3: Way, Well it was. It was quite a shock to me.
Speaker 3: It basically three things happened, separated by about forty fifty years.
Speaker 3: About fifty years ago, I was in my twenties, got
Speaker 3: out of school, ready to take on the world. I
Speaker 3: knew all the answers, I knew everything. I was going
Speaker 3: to be the great expert on everything. And I walked
Speaker 3: into a hospital room one time to see a parishioner
Speaker 3: of mine who was a wonderful, wonderful old lady. I
Speaker 3: call her Hannah in the book, and she was just
Speaker 3: sharp as attack. And she was in the hospital room
Speaker 3: and I was told by the nurses that she probably
Speaker 3: wasn't going to come out, so I got into the
Speaker 3: habit of stopping by seeing her in the hospital. But
Speaker 3: when I did that, I heard I knew that she
Speaker 3: liked the old hymns. So I got to started to
Speaker 3: bring my guitar with me and singing some old hymns,
Speaker 3: you know, in the Garden and the old Rugged Cross
Speaker 3: and all that kind of stuff. And sometimes the other
Speaker 3: nurses would stick their heads in the room and listen
Speaker 3: her wheel patients, and it was awful lot of fun.
Speaker 3: But one day I was in the hospital room with
Speaker 3: just Hannah, and she asked me who I had brought
Speaker 3: with her, and I with me, and I looked around.
Speaker 3: I was the only one in the room and I said, well,
Speaker 3: I'm the only one. I'm here by myself, and she says, oh,
Speaker 3: they're out in the hallway. She said, I think they
Speaker 3: liked the music. They usually don't come in through the
Speaker 3: portal until you pass till you leave. And I said,
Speaker 3: the portal. I looked out at the door. I didn't
Speaker 3: know what she was talking about. She couldn't even see
Speaker 3: the door from where she was. There was a curtain
Speaker 3: hanging there, and there was the corner where the bathroom
Speaker 3: jutted out, and I looked out, I mean, at the
Speaker 3: foot of her bed, I could see out hallway and
Speaker 3: I looked out there and no, there was nobody there.
Speaker 3: But I didn't want to, you know, discourage her. I mean,
Speaker 3: she was obviously confused, you know, telling me these people
Speaker 3: come after, you know, when I'm there, and the music
Speaker 3: seems to bring them. Well, I didn't want to disturb her,
Speaker 3: so I didn't say anything. But on my way out,
Speaker 3: I stopped by the nurse's station and I said, what's
Speaker 3: Hannah talking about? People out outside the portal? And the
Speaker 3: nurse said, oh, she's been talking like that the last
Speaker 3: couple of days. She said, I think she's out of
Speaker 3: her head. Probably won't be long, And sure enough, a
Speaker 3: couple of days later, Hannah died, and my wife and
Speaker 3: I sang in the garden at her funeral, and I
Speaker 3: didn't think much more of it.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: Then forty years went by until just a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago, I got a call from another parishioner of
Speaker 3: his mother was in the hospital and she was about
Speaker 3: the same age Hannah was when she died. And his
Speaker 3: mother was in the but she used to love to
Speaker 3: listen to the old hymns too, And he went to
Speaker 3: see her, which in what turned out for the last time,
Speaker 3: and his mother said something strange him. She said, oh,
Speaker 3: who did you bring with you? And he said, I
Speaker 3: didn't bring anybody, mom, It's just me. And she said, oh, no,
Speaker 3: there are people people with you outside the portal.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: Well she looked at me, I mean he looked at me,
Speaker 3: and he said, I don't know what she was talking about,
Speaker 3: But my mind went back fifty years to Hannah. And
Speaker 3: I'm glad to say that even though when I was
Speaker 3: visiting Hannah and I was a young minister, I thought
Speaker 3: I had all the answers, and I thought I was
Speaker 3: much too sophisticated for all this. But I'm glad to
Speaker 3: know that over the next forty years, not only did
Speaker 3: I realize I didn't know all the answers, I didn't
Speaker 3: even know all the questions so I was much more
Speaker 3: open to this. And in the meantime, I had heard,
Speaker 3: I had heard the stories and talked to dozens of
Speaker 3: people myself personally who had died and come back with
Speaker 3: a story, and I was, Oh, God, forgive me. I
Speaker 3: was all ready to use all of the normal stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, the blood and the brain is shutting down,
Speaker 3: or we're reliving our past memories and all this kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. And I realized toward the end of my ministry,
Speaker 3: and I retired sixteen years ago, so it was quite
Speaker 3: some time. I realized that I had missed a tremendous
Speaker 3: opportunity to really talk to all those people who claimed
Speaker 3: that they saw people and claimed that they met with
Speaker 3: loved ones and came back with stories. And so I
Speaker 3: was much more open. When a good friend of mine,
Speaker 3: who was an ex parishoner of mine, my name is Joe,
Speaker 3: down in Florida, he was in the hospital. He actually
Speaker 3: worked in the hospital U and he was he had
Speaker 3: a very technical job. And when he was in the
Speaker 3: hospital he had a heart attack. And if you're going
Speaker 3: to have a heart attack, I guess the place to
Speaker 3: have it is in the fully equipped hospital with you.
Speaker 3: But when he told me when I went to visit him.
Speaker 3: He said, I got a story to tell you if
Speaker 3: I can find the courage. And I said, well, okay.
Speaker 3: He said, you know, I'm going home tomorrow. Come on
Speaker 3: over to the house. I have a cup of coffee
Speaker 3: in the morning. And I said okay. So I went
Speaker 3: over and the next morning I could tell you wanted
Speaker 3: to talk, but I didn't know what it was. He
Speaker 3: was hesitant, but he wanted to unburden himself. You know,
Speaker 3: Joe is a just a great, great guy. He likes
Speaker 3: to hunt and fish and get out, and he loves
Speaker 3: his family, and he works in his church and all
Speaker 3: this kind of it's just a really, you know, super guy.
Speaker 3: And you wouldn't think that he would have any trouble
Speaker 3: sharing his story. But when he shared the story of
Speaker 3: his near death experience and what he saw when he died,
Speaker 3: passed over and then came back, I put together Hannah's story,
Speaker 3: in Eva's story, in Joe's story, and said, I got
Speaker 3: to write a book. So it began. I began to
Speaker 3: start remembering all the people that I had talked to
Speaker 3: and then getting that up with oh, all the rest
Speaker 3: of the information that I'd gathered over the years and
Speaker 3: all the research I'd done and everything else, going up
Speaker 3: to Monroe Institute, for instance, and studying out of body
Speaker 3: experiences with Bill Buhm and other things like that. I
Speaker 3: began to try to put it all together, and I
Speaker 3: decided I wanted to write a book that wasn't just
Speaker 3: fantastic stories, although the stories are fantastic enough to warrant
Speaker 3: a book. I wanted to tell a story a look
Speaker 3: about the history about this and how it seems as though,
Speaker 3: possibly I'm hoping this is the case in our generation.
Speaker 3: Maybe the doctors and the scientists and the people who
Speaker 3: are often called metaphysical and everything else, maybe we're all
Speaker 3: getting down in the same track and understanding that this
Speaker 3: is not just some kind of a supernatural woo woo thing,
Speaker 3: but a real bona fide leap forward in human existence.
Speaker 3: And this seems to be happening on so many levels
Speaker 3: that I'm just I'm almost encouraged. Now. It seems as
Speaker 3: though science and religion and spirituality are coming together and
Speaker 3: maybe we're beginning to share the same highway again. So
Speaker 3: that was the that was the basis of the book.
Speaker 2: Fantastic Job, And you open it with the preface of
Speaker 2: our friend Raymond Moody, who's one of the best, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, he is. You talk about MDes without
Speaker 3: talking about Raymond Moody. In nineteen seventy five when he
Speaker 3: wrote Life After Life, he was the one that actually
Speaker 3: coined the experience of the expression a near death experience.
Speaker 3: And he's also done, he's doing a lot of research
Speaker 3: even now into what he calls shared death experience. I've
Speaker 3: had that experience too, being around a hospital bed when
Speaker 3: somebody dies and three or four of us standing around
Speaker 3: the bed and we all have the same experience of
Speaker 3: feeling or seeing something happened somebody in the room, something
Speaker 3: the spirit depart or the soul depart or whatever we
Speaker 3: want to call it. It's a really moving experience. And
Speaker 3: I'm just one of the good things about writing this book.
Speaker 3: It was just wonderful to hear it, not only these stories,
Speaker 3: but to hear how people are so their lives are changed.
Speaker 3: Any of them don't want to say anything because they're
Speaker 3: afraid of being ridiculed by friends and family. You know,
Speaker 3: they're all poo poo it, you know, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: And so they actually hold on and they don't tell
Speaker 3: the stories for a long period of time, and when
Speaker 3: they do, you can tell the story. It's just as
Speaker 3: vivid and new as it was when it happened. So
Speaker 3: it was very encouraging to me, to tell you the
Speaker 3: honest truth. I really it was a positive, positive book,
Speaker 3: and I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Now we call these near death experiences, Jim, but aren't they,
Speaker 2: in fact really death experiences for a split moment the
Speaker 2: person actually dies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the wonderful part about seeing this. We live
Speaker 3: in a time now where a lot of these people
Speaker 3: have these experiences and they're hooked up to machines in
Speaker 3: the hospital. They can tell you exactly when the person died,
Speaker 3: and they're flatlined by every definition science has a medicine.
Speaker 3: These people have died. In some cases, they actually talk
Speaker 3: about floating up to the top of the room and
Speaker 3: seeing the doctor's work on them and seeing and hearing,
Speaker 3: you know, they're not.
Speaker 2: Hearing them talking sometimes even joking about the body.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's unbelievable to me that we're
Speaker 3: not taking these more seriously. And I think maybe for
Speaker 3: the first time in the last twenty years, certainly, I
Speaker 3: think maybe medicine is starting to come around, and it's
Speaker 3: it's amazing the number of doctors like Raymond Moody is
Speaker 3: a you know, is an m D. And doctor Bruce Grayson,
Speaker 3: who wrote the Classic Handbook of Near Death Experience a
Speaker 3: legitimate field and they're really beginning to see but that
Speaker 3: this is a real, bona fide scientific thing. Still though
Speaker 3: there is a public perception out there. I think people
Speaker 3: there are some people who just plane, don't want to believe,
Speaker 3: and so they'll and when that happens, it's so easy.
Speaker 3: Instead of attacking the facts, you attack somebody's personality. You know,
Speaker 3: they don't want to believe, and so they'll just ridicule
Speaker 3: the person or the doctor who does it. And it's
Speaker 3: it's just a shame. I'm sure you see the same
Speaker 3: thing when you're talking about alien encounters. There are people
Speaker 3: who just plane, don't want to believe it, and so
Speaker 3: they won't follow the facts. They just they just gather
Speaker 3: the facts that substantiate their own belief which they've come
Speaker 3: to beforehand. Well that's not science. I mean, I want
Speaker 3: to throw the roof off this. I want to look
Speaker 3: at the science of it and really really see what's
Speaker 3: going on because if if this is real, and I'm
Speaker 3: sure it is, it can change everything. It can change
Speaker 3: the way we live, it can change the way we
Speaker 3: live with each other, it can change the history of
Speaker 3: the planet about how we're going to adapt as a species.
Speaker 3: And it's almost as if we're coming to a place,
Speaker 3: I think, where in a number of different fields where
Speaker 3: we either have to make these tough decisions and follow
Speaker 3: the facts and understand that we are not alone and
Speaker 3: there's something much bigger than us going on, or we
Speaker 3: could destroy ourselves, you know, who knows. I think it's
Speaker 3: that important.
Speaker 2: Mark in your introduction, you quote Apostle Mark talking about wine.
Speaker 3: Tell me about that. Oh yeah, yeah, that was a
Speaker 3: quote that I've always really liked. In the Gospel of Mark,
Speaker 3: we're told that you can't put new wine in old wine.
Speaker 3: You know, old wine skins are hard and dry and brittle,
Speaker 3: and if you pour a new wine in there and
Speaker 3: it starts to ferment, they just can't. They aren't pliable,
Speaker 3: they don't go. Then they just break and they and
Speaker 3: all the wine breaks out and they and that's what
Speaker 3: it is. I think that the old containers, the old
Speaker 3: wine skins, so to speak, of thought that we have
Speaker 3: lived with maybe for too long, they simply won't handle
Speaker 3: the new science of NDEs. We're going to have to
Speaker 3: have new ways of thinking and new ways of of
Speaker 3: of understanding, perhaps beginning to understand that maybe there's places
Speaker 3: where where science can't go. Maybe science only works in
Speaker 3: the material universe, and as soon as we leave that
Speaker 3: material universe, uh, maybe there we need other kinds of
Speaker 3: ways of of of knowing. And so I think, not
Speaker 3: only are we're pouring a bunch of new yeastie working
Speaker 3: wine of spirituality into this thing. I think we have
Speaker 3: to have new containers for it so that we can
Speaker 3: handle it and work with it.
Speaker 2: You use a lot of metaphors in the book, don't you.
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, And it's funny because I didn't even know
Speaker 3: I was doing it until it was all done, and
Speaker 3: somebody pointed it out, and I said, oh, I didn't
Speaker 3: realize that. For instance, the book is set up and
Speaker 3: I had the idea that I wanted to bring together
Speaker 3: a marriage, so to speak, between science and spirituality. I
Speaker 3: remember the old thing, the old marriage advice for bride,
Speaker 3: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And
Speaker 3: I chose that metaphor because I wanted to celebrate the
Speaker 3: marriage of old metaphysics and old wisdom that people have
Speaker 3: known about for thousands and thousands of years, and marry
Speaker 3: that to new science that can now measure, for instance,
Speaker 3: as you said, when actual people die, and all this
Speaker 3: kind of stuff. And so I started with something old,
Speaker 3: and I began to use a lot of the old
Speaker 3: stories that have been around forever, the Apostle Paul's near
Speaker 3: death experience, going back to the time of Plato and
Speaker 3: Socrates and near death experiences there. But then I wanted
Speaker 3: to transfer to the idea of something new, So I
Speaker 3: went to new stories of death when people are hooked
Speaker 3: up to modern equipment that actually says, yeah, they're dead,
Speaker 3: no question about the equipment can measure that. But then
Speaker 3: I went into something borrowed, and it began to occur
Speaker 3: to me that really we need to cross polony in
Speaker 3: academic studies. We need to cross disciplines. People are getting
Speaker 3: to be such specialists in one area that they don't
Speaker 3: know how to converse or compare with people in different fields,
Speaker 3: and so we need to borrow from academic disciplines. We
Speaker 3: need to take the field of medicine and has to
Speaker 3: get into the field of religion and the field of spirituality,
Speaker 3: and then it has to get into the field of
Speaker 3: science such as Edgar Mitchell's Institute of no Edic Research
Speaker 3: and that kind of thing. And then when a came
Speaker 3: time to the last one, something I got as I
Speaker 3: had something old, something new, and something borrowed. I needed
Speaker 3: something blue. And it occurred to me how many times
Speaker 3: I've heard people say this knowledge just came to me
Speaker 3: right out of the blue, and visions that unexpected, you know,
Speaker 3: right out of the blue. It just popped into my
Speaker 3: and which seemed to be the way that people communicated
Speaker 3: on the other side.
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