https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WZBBO8dWD30
I was in a head-on collision and survived a car accident that the California Highway Patrol said I shouldn’t have survived. And I had what they call a near-death experience. I got very interested in what happens after you die. I realized that I could have very easily transitioned. And so I was very interested in what happens after death. I actually went and met with Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote the books on life after life. And he did a lot of the work with near-death people that had had it. Can I ask you what happened in your near-death experience? I think it was pretty classic. I definitely saw my… I went into a very different spatial temporal state where I just… Everything went into a kind of slow motion. It was as if the glass was just suspended in air from the crash. And then I just saw my inception all the way up to that moment. And I just saw my whole life, literally. And it was just this… As if I lived my life a second time, but in a moment. That was the experience. And what did that do for you, that experience? How did it change you? Well, one, it made me… At the time I was a senior in high school, my probably biggest interests were baseball and other things. But music was certainly a big interest. My family… I come from a family of musicians. So I think what it did is it made me really think about death in a very deep way. And if you’ve ever seen… There’s a film about a man who’s in a plane crash. And then he survives the plane crash. And he’s a man who had a lot of fears. But he comes out of it, Jeff Bridges is the person. And he’s looking at his hands and, am I alive or am I dead? I was in that state for about two weeks. It was a very strange state to be in. And that got me interested in what religions say about after death. And so I decided to study all the world religions just from that perspective. The one that really, really resonated and struck me as having a very, very powerful description was the Islamic tradition. And I actually ended up, ironically, I ended up writing in the study of Quran, which was published by Harper. I ended up writing the essay on death in the Quran, which is how I actually became Muslim. So it was a very interesting serendipitous evolution. So walk me through that. So, OK, so you just about died. How old were you? Seventeen. Yeah, so there have been studies showing, for example, that if you have someone, I remember this study, if you have someone jump off a bungee cord watching a digital The clock goes slower for them subjectively. So if you subject people to a tremendous amount of stress, then time slows down. And I suspect the neurophysiological reason for that is that when you’re in a tremendous crisis, your body floods itself with the hormones and neurochemicals, probably mostly dopamine that are necessary for you to act extraordinarily quickly. And it’s extremely energy intensive to do that. So you can’t do it all the time. But maybe we can snap ourselves into a psychophysiological state where we’re 100 times faster than we would normally be for some very finite amount of time. I’m not trying to, what would you say, reduce this to a physiological explanation? Well, that’s a very common reductionist approach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it’s an experience, an experience that I mean, you can look at the soft, the hard drive aspect of it, but the software is the mystery. Yeah, I’m definitely not trying to remove the phenomenological significance, you know, because that would be foolish. And even those those explanations are only attempts at understanding a phenomenon that we really don’t have access to because cause and effect is a very difficult thing to it. It certainly is. Yeah. And that kind of explanation doesn’t account for all the near death experience phenomena either. But I mean, I mean, you asked you asked me how, you know, that that got me thinking a lot about death, right? Irrespective of whatever the neurochemical phenomena that were happening within my body, that experience, that phenomenological experience had a existential effect on me. That was very powerful. And and I decided that I really wanted to know if I could have died in that moment, which was very possible, I wanted to know what what if anything happens and if something happens, how do you prepare for that? Like what, you know, if we’re if we’re genuinely on the doors of infinity, then we should take this time that we have very seriously to prepare to go through that door. And that’s what existentially that’s what happened to me. I wanted to know if I can go through that door at any moment as a 17 year old, I could have done it now as a 64 year old. It’s possible that I could do it today or tomorrow or the next day. What type of preparation do I need? Why did you why do you think that you derived the conclusion that it was something that you needed to be prepared for? Well, I think that, yeah, I just think that’s a kind of. I just think it’s common sense, you know, like, I mean, preparing for death. It’s interesting. When I worked when I worked in critical care, what became very clear to me, some people seem to be ready for death and other people are definitely not ready for death. And I and I can see the difference. I saw a difference. You know, both my parents died. I was with both my parents and and I could see, you know, I mean, my mother had an incredible transition and I think my mother was fully ready to go into the next world. I don’t think a lot of people are ready. I think a lot of people are very afraid of death. And I think that’s something that one of the gifts of religion is it does remove that fear, not necessarily of the act of dying, because obviously that’s a very intense experience, especially for those of us who have seen that in people who die. But the transition into the next world is something the Quran says it’s something to be looked forward to. It’s not something to fear, but but it’s also Islam is not a death cult. The Prophet, Allah said, I’m said, don’t desire to die, but ask God for a long life. And and he said that none of you should ever desire death. You should desire to have a long life because you have more time to do more good. And the more good you do, the more you accrue in terms of preparation for that transition.