1 00:00:00,321 --> 00:00:12,321 South Wing Code Blue, South Wing Code Blue, South Wing Code Blue. 2 00:00:12,321 --> 00:00:18,322 Code Blue. An emergency call used in hospitals all over the country. 3 00:00:18,322 --> 00:00:25,322 Code Blue alerts a special team of doctors and nurses that a patient has died. 4 00:00:26,322 --> 00:00:32,322 A resuscitation attempt will be made. If it is successful, the patient is brought back to life. 5 00:00:32,322 --> 00:00:43,322 In some cases, they have amazing stories to tell about what it is like on the other side. 6 00:00:43,322 --> 00:01:02,323 Dr. Thomas Rockwell is on intimate terms with death. As head of the emergency room at Santa Monica Hospital in California, 7 00:01:02,323 --> 00:01:07,323 he treats over 90 patients a day who are on the outer edge of life. 8 00:01:08,323 --> 00:01:16,323 Rockwell is one of many doctors caught in the debate over what is the end of life. 9 00:01:16,323 --> 00:01:22,323 The medical definition of death has been challenged by the advance of science. 10 00:01:22,323 --> 00:01:32,324 We're all composed of billions of cells. These cells depend on each other for their survival, 11 00:01:32,324 --> 00:01:36,324 but each of them has a lifespan of its own. 12 00:01:46,324 --> 00:01:54,324 In the past, death has been defined as the point at which the heart stopped beating. 13 00:02:03,324 --> 00:02:18,325 But we've come to find out that some of the cells in the body can live on for a considerable length of time after the heart stops beating. 14 00:02:18,325 --> 00:02:26,325 Now we have redefined death to mean death of the cells in the brain. 15 00:02:26,325 --> 00:02:31,325 Now it's very difficult sometimes to tell when that has occurred. 16 00:02:31,325 --> 00:02:34,325 If you use the definition of death, it used to be used. 17 00:02:34,325 --> 00:02:44,326 Many patients who would have been declared dead under those criteria are resuscitated and regain consciousness and go on and live a useful life. 18 00:02:44,326 --> 00:02:51,326 The medical profession's dilemma over the definition of death has startling implications for everyone. 19 00:02:52,326 --> 00:02:54,326 What is it like to die? 20 00:02:54,326 --> 00:03:01,326 For centuries, man has turned to his priests and wise men for answers that were no first-hand accounts to go by. 21 00:03:01,326 --> 00:03:08,326 Now, due to advances in medical science, there are a few among us who claim to know what death is. 22 00:03:08,326 --> 00:03:17,327 Not scientists or doctors, but people who have technically crossed the line between life and death. 23 00:03:17,327 --> 00:03:23,327 Western custom is to mask the pain of dying and the sting of bereavement. 24 00:03:23,327 --> 00:03:33,327 But the accounts of those who have died and been brought back to life are remarkably similar in that the experience seems not to have been an unpleasant one at all. 25 00:03:33,327 --> 00:03:41,327 The words they choose may be different, but their stories lead to the same astonishing conclusion. 26 00:03:41,327 --> 00:03:49,327 One account goes, I lost control of my car on a curve and I remember thinking, this is the end. 27 00:03:49,327 --> 00:03:57,328 I felt like I was tumbling through a long tunnel and then suddenly I found myself floating over the scene of the accident. 28 00:04:03,328 --> 00:04:07,328 Another victim describes his experience this way. 29 00:04:07,328 --> 00:04:12,328 It happened years ago. I was playing in the pool with my brother when I lost my breath. 30 00:04:12,328 --> 00:04:17,328 I kept bobbing up and down and then suddenly I was engulfed in blackness. 31 00:04:17,328 --> 00:04:29,329 I could hear a soft vibrating sound in my ear like wind chimes and then I was above my body watching them pull me out of the water and pound on my back. 32 00:04:31,329 --> 00:04:35,329 A third account also stresses the feeling of euphoria. 33 00:04:35,329 --> 00:04:43,329 I was on the steps when the heart attack came. I collapsed and then felt myself go out of my body. 34 00:04:43,329 --> 00:04:48,329 The next thing I knew, I was in a rolling field too beautiful to describe. 35 00:04:53,329 --> 00:04:58,329 I was overcome with a feeling of utter peace and tranquility. 36 00:04:59,329 --> 00:05:07,330 Many have been reluctant to tell others of their encounters with the unknown, but a few have begun to speak out publicly. 37 00:05:07,330 --> 00:05:14,330 In 1970, I was diagnosed and told I had Hodgkin's disease. 38 00:05:14,330 --> 00:05:21,330 And at the time I was unable to have any treatment because I was pregnant. 39 00:05:21,330 --> 00:05:29,330 And both medicine and radiation treatment were not appropriate at that time. 40 00:05:31,330 --> 00:05:37,330 Catherine Hayward knew she was dying. Her disease advanced to the final stage. 41 00:05:37,330 --> 00:05:44,331 She made plans to have her children cared for and prepared to enter the hospital with no expectation of leaving. 42 00:05:44,331 --> 00:05:51,331 I was 27, critically ill, terminally ill. 43 00:05:51,331 --> 00:06:03,331 I began getting weak, very weak in June 1973 and called my best friend Anne who took me to the hospital. 44 00:06:03,331 --> 00:06:11,331 They took her immediately into the emergency room and began to try to locate vein so that they could get some blood from her. 45 00:06:12,331 --> 00:06:18,332 And after that they took her to the coronary care unit. 46 00:06:18,332 --> 00:06:30,332 Then it happened I was lying on my side and I looked over at the heart monitor and the line went straight across. 47 00:06:30,332 --> 00:06:38,332 The next thing I knew, I was standing over my body looking down at the form in the bed. 48 00:06:39,332 --> 00:06:47,332 I watched the nurse beside the bed adjusting the wires and I was fascinated by it. 49 00:06:47,332 --> 00:06:52,333 I kept wanting to tap around the shoulder and tell her that I wasn't there. 50 00:06:52,333 --> 00:07:02,333 Then I saw this team of nurses and this little green thing on wheels coming toward the bed and they were in such a hurry. 51 00:07:02,333 --> 00:07:04,333 It really scared me. 52 00:07:04,333 --> 00:07:17,333 So I turned and stepped into a tunnel, I guess you'd call it, because it definitely had sides and I definitely felt confined. 53 00:07:17,333 --> 00:07:30,334 I started moving upward and I felt exhilarated but when I got to the end of the tunnel there was a light that was so bright 54 00:07:30,334 --> 00:07:33,334 I thought would hurt my eyes. 55 00:07:33,334 --> 00:07:43,334 Then I saw him about 100-150 feet ahead of me and it was the figure that I knew to be God. 56 00:07:43,334 --> 00:07:52,334 They began punching on her chest and thrusting some sort of instrument down her throat to help open up her passages so that she could breathe. 57 00:07:52,334 --> 00:07:56,334 Kathy wasn't responding. 58 00:07:56,334 --> 00:08:01,334 I said, please don't make me go back. Please let me stay here with you. 59 00:08:01,334 --> 00:08:06,335 I sounded like a spoiled child and I was really, really hanging on. 60 00:08:06,335 --> 00:08:13,335 Finally he just took me in firmly but gently pushed me away from him and said, you must go back. 61 00:08:13,335 --> 00:08:19,335 There is a task that you have to do for me and if you do this you will come to me. 62 00:08:19,335 --> 00:08:27,335 Then he turned and he walked away and I was furious. 63 00:08:27,335 --> 00:08:35,335 They had somehow managed to start her heart again and to start her breathing again. 64 00:08:35,335 --> 00:08:46,336 The doctor that was standing over me said, we've put the two past her lungs into her stomach and apparently they were pumping air into my stomach instead of into my lungs. 65 00:08:46,336 --> 00:08:54,336 They said that's what was causing all this tremendous pain as I was experiencing as I was coming to but I knew it wasn't that. 66 00:08:54,336 --> 00:08:57,336 I knew I was resisting coming back in the body. 67 00:08:57,336 --> 00:09:05,336 I felt a quiver running up and down my body and I felt rage and I felt like I didn't belong there. 68 00:09:05,336 --> 00:09:13,336 So there I was and not speaking and all of a sudden the line went straight again. 69 00:09:13,336 --> 00:09:23,337 I saw this nurse come running in and she took the portable oxygen tank down and I watched all this and I watched her put the mask on me. 70 00:09:23,337 --> 00:09:28,337 Even though the machine, the line went straight, I still saw this. 71 00:09:28,337 --> 00:09:34,337 I saw the bed being pushed down the corridor towards the intensive care unit. 72 00:09:34,337 --> 00:09:40,337 That's the last thing I remember seeing before I left my body again. 73 00:09:40,337 --> 00:09:53,338 I was immediately in the light and I was immediately in God's presence again and he just took me in his arms and very gently said, do you understand? 74 00:09:53,338 --> 00:09:56,338 I said yes I do. 75 00:09:56,338 --> 00:10:02,338 And then I came back into the body with just the easiest breath. 76 00:10:02,338 --> 00:10:05,338 I left, signed myself out of the hospital. 77 00:10:05,338 --> 00:10:09,338 I left the hospital and I haven't been back. 78 00:10:10,338 --> 00:10:17,338 Three years later, Catherine's physician reports that she has no trace of Hodgkin's disease. 79 00:10:17,338 --> 00:10:23,338 Catherine was recently remarried and she and her husband Jim have started a new life. 80 00:10:23,338 --> 00:10:26,339 Catherine's story is not unique. 81 00:10:26,339 --> 00:10:34,339 The out-of-body experience has had a great impact on others who have come close to death. 82 00:10:34,339 --> 00:10:45,339 Over the last several years I've been involved on various levels with several hundred people who have died and intimately involved with about a hundred. 83 00:10:45,339 --> 00:10:53,339 Dr. Charles Garfield is a psychiatrist at the University of California Cancer Research Institute. 84 00:10:53,339 --> 00:10:59,339 A number of years ago I was teaching a class at UC Berkeley called Psychology of Death. 85 00:10:59,339 --> 00:11:11,340 I got a letter from Shelley Ruderman in which he described his experiences some twelve years prior in which he was dealing with a life-threatening illness. 86 00:11:11,340 --> 00:11:14,340 In fact, he was dealing with a seriously advanced lung cancer. 87 00:11:14,340 --> 00:11:27,340 The emotional tone of both the letter and the subsequent meetings we had spoke really powerfully to me about the powerful emotional reality they're represented in the present. 88 00:11:28,340 --> 00:11:33,340 Sheldon Ruderman's encounter with death began in 1960. 89 00:11:33,340 --> 00:11:38,341 The experience had a profound effect on him and changed the direction of his life. 90 00:11:38,341 --> 00:11:47,341 He now counsels cancer patients like Micah Friedman and believes that the power of the mind can reinforce medical treatment. 91 00:11:47,341 --> 00:11:50,341 Thus far, the results have been positive. 92 00:11:50,341 --> 00:11:52,341 When's your birthday again? 93 00:11:52,341 --> 00:11:54,341 January 29. 94 00:11:54,341 --> 00:11:57,341 Okay, by January 29. 95 00:11:57,341 --> 00:12:04,341 If we keep doing this, if we keep doing what the doctors tell you to do, it's coming on. 96 00:12:04,341 --> 00:12:10,341 When I asked my surgeon what he thought, he gave me less than two years to live. 97 00:12:10,341 --> 00:12:18,342 Like a lot of other cancer patients, my original diagnosis seemed to me unbelievable. 98 00:12:18,342 --> 00:12:21,342 I mean, somehow it still seemed a little unbelievable. 99 00:12:21,342 --> 00:12:27,342 Less than two years to live was somehow not within my emotional capability at that point. 100 00:12:27,342 --> 00:12:30,342 So I communicated this back to the doctor and I said, 101 00:12:30,342 --> 00:12:36,342 but I'm not going to die and your task is to help me in how not to die. 102 00:12:36,342 --> 00:12:38,342 You tell me what to do. 103 00:12:38,342 --> 00:12:42,342 But I'm not going because I have to stick around now. 104 00:12:42,342 --> 00:12:51,343 In my research, approximately 15% of the people I work with have what might be described as death accepting attitudes. 105 00:12:51,343 --> 00:12:56,343 A sense of the basic old rightness of their death, that death feels appropriate to them. 106 00:12:56,343 --> 00:12:59,343 That's a pretty small percentage, 15%. 107 00:12:59,343 --> 00:13:07,343 Many other people are angry, furious, in the sense that Dylan Thomas was furious, raging against the dying of the light. 108 00:13:07,343 --> 00:13:10,343 Okay, I survived an eight hour operation 109 00:13:10,343 --> 00:13:14,343 in which my surgeon did what he later described was the best surgery of his life. 110 00:13:14,343 --> 00:13:16,343 I came out of that. 111 00:13:16,343 --> 00:13:21,343 I felt physically violated and no one had prepared me for these kind of feelings. 112 00:13:21,343 --> 00:13:29,344 17 days after this major operation, my surgeon finally walked in and he said, 113 00:13:29,344 --> 00:13:32,344 well, Shelley, we got a problem. 114 00:13:32,344 --> 00:13:35,344 We got a mechanical thing that we're going to have to correct. 115 00:13:35,344 --> 00:13:40,344 There's a valve that's filed up in there and it's making some kind of mess. 116 00:13:40,344 --> 00:13:45,344 But it's really a minor correction. 117 00:13:45,344 --> 00:13:47,344 I'll have to take you back in the operating room. 118 00:13:47,344 --> 00:13:50,344 But it's such a minor thing we won't have to give you a shot. 119 00:13:50,344 --> 00:13:58,344 They took me back into the operating room and I was on the table now, sort of face down. 120 00:13:58,344 --> 00:14:04,345 And since this is a teaching hospital, there are like now about 25 students in the room surrounding the table. 121 00:14:04,345 --> 00:14:07,345 And I couldn't believe what was happening. 122 00:14:07,345 --> 00:14:10,345 He was cutting me open. I was wide awake. 123 00:14:10,345 --> 00:14:14,345 One of the things I originally was trained in myself was engineering. 124 00:14:14,345 --> 00:14:23,345 What was perfectly obvious to me was that of the 25 people in the room, very few could see the surgery. 125 00:14:23,345 --> 00:14:26,345 So what I did was sort of like a little engineering thing. 126 00:14:26,345 --> 00:14:35,346 In my mind, I built a board coming out of the wall and back of me, which would go right over the table, right above the body. 127 00:14:35,346 --> 00:14:37,346 I'd be able to look down. No one would block the view. 128 00:14:37,346 --> 00:14:40,346 It was just, you know, mind play. 129 00:14:40,346 --> 00:14:48,346 No sooner had I thought of that when my consciousness was on the ceiling watching this operation. 130 00:14:49,346 --> 00:15:02,346 I have to say at this point that the guy that I was at that time was somebody who thoroughly disbelieved in anything that was psyched. 131 00:15:02,346 --> 00:15:07,346 I was a very scientific character. I was an atheist, very pragmatic. 132 00:15:07,346 --> 00:15:11,347 I didn't believe anything I couldn't see. 133 00:15:11,347 --> 00:15:15,347 Here I was experiencing something that was impossible. 134 00:15:15,347 --> 00:15:20,347 My consciousness was on the top of the room watching the operate on my body. 135 00:15:20,347 --> 00:15:28,347 The view looking down was very clear when it came to the people watching the surgery. 136 00:15:28,347 --> 00:15:31,347 I could see all of the students, very clear. 137 00:15:31,347 --> 00:15:37,347 When it got to the outlines of the table that I was on, it got fuzzy. 138 00:15:37,347 --> 00:15:42,347 When it got to the outlines of my body, it got fuzzier yet. 139 00:15:42,347 --> 00:15:48,348 And when it got to the wound itself where he was actually operating, I could not see. 140 00:15:48,348 --> 00:15:53,348 People have the sense of leaving their bodies, of rising above their bodies, 141 00:15:53,348 --> 00:16:03,348 and of drifting throughout the room, of being aware of images, of being able to see the room, to see the world from a different point of view, 142 00:16:03,348 --> 00:16:11,348 to be able to see their own bodies lying in the bed, and in essence to be detached from the physical body. 143 00:16:12,348 --> 00:16:20,348 Now, about every 15 minutes or so, my surgeon asked me how I was doing. 144 00:16:20,348 --> 00:16:28,349 Somehow I had to be back in the body to answer those questions, and I'd say, alright, and then I'd get out again. 145 00:16:28,349 --> 00:16:38,349 I mean, while there was something going off someplace that said, this is impossible, the rest of it felt completely normal. 146 00:16:38,349 --> 00:16:44,349 I think the important part is that we're not just generating pictures in our mind out of anxiety, 147 00:16:44,349 --> 00:16:51,349 that somehow there appears to be a contact with a level of reality that we don't normally address. 148 00:16:51,349 --> 00:16:59,350 I felt like I was within, at the most, 24 hours of dying if I let myself die. 149 00:16:59,350 --> 00:17:06,350 And somehow I did not seem at all incredible at this point that it was up to me whether I would have to die. 150 00:17:06,350 --> 00:17:11,350 And that's something I never would have believed before, but it seemed totally obvious right then. 151 00:17:11,350 --> 00:17:20,350 He had come as a natural scientist, as a scientist from the conventional mold, and had had an experience that totally baffled him. 152 00:17:20,350 --> 00:17:30,350 Another thing was the fact that he was quite convinced that he was responsible, largely responsible for his survival, 153 00:17:30,350 --> 00:17:40,351 that his will to live, his powerful sense of having to stay alive, in Shelley's case for the sake of a newly born son, 154 00:17:40,351 --> 00:17:47,351 was the ingredient that enabled him to survive an outrageous set of experiences. 155 00:17:47,351 --> 00:17:53,351 My wife did, in retrospect, was pure genius. 156 00:17:53,351 --> 00:18:00,351 There were no kids allowed on this ward, but she knew what it was I was trying to save my life for. 157 00:18:00,351 --> 00:18:11,352 So she took our kid, who was six months old, put him in a shopping bag, hit him, brought him up, brought him into my room, 158 00:18:11,352 --> 00:18:15,352 and in fact reminded me what the whole thing was about. 159 00:18:15,352 --> 00:18:19,352 When I saw him, it was like... 160 00:18:20,352 --> 00:18:23,352 That sent you the question, I had to stay alive. 161 00:18:23,352 --> 00:18:29,352 Let's go in your chest, where all the Red Soldiers are. 162 00:18:29,352 --> 00:18:37,352 So let's call them, and tell them all to bring their Squid Cones. 163 00:18:37,352 --> 00:18:44,352 And when they're all following you, we'll go into the other room where all the White Soldiers are. 164 00:18:44,352 --> 00:18:47,353 Until then to bring their Squid Cones. 165 00:18:47,353 --> 00:18:57,353 Help all the Soldiers to shoot all that gooey stuff into the holes in the monster, plugging up all those holes. 166 00:18:59,353 --> 00:19:05,353 And as the gooey stuff goes in there, watch the monster get smart. 167 00:19:05,353 --> 00:19:08,353 Just watch the monster shrink. 168 00:19:08,353 --> 00:19:23,354 What the out of the body experience did, what I became aware of was that whether I lived or died did not depend on the kinds of rules that the doctors understood. 169 00:19:23,354 --> 00:19:32,354 The other thing that I think has been a major transformation is that I don't believe, as I did at the time, this experience unfolded, 170 00:19:32,354 --> 00:19:36,354 that the end of life was the end of everything. 171 00:19:36,354 --> 00:19:40,354 I believe now, very strongly, that there is a life after death. 172 00:19:40,354 --> 00:19:52,354 My personal belief is that there is continuity, that it would be outrageous for me at this point to believe that this was all there was. 173 00:19:52,354 --> 00:19:58,355 If you ask me what I know for sure, I'm in the same ambiguous position that the rest of the human race is in. 174 00:19:59,355 --> 00:20:05,355 I feel sure to myself that there is something that transcends beyond when you die. 175 00:20:05,355 --> 00:20:11,355 I have to say that the out of the body experience was probably the key thing, 176 00:20:11,355 --> 00:20:17,355 because it was very hard once you realized you couldn't have your consciousness and your body to separate, 177 00:20:17,355 --> 00:20:22,355 not to at least entertain the idea that even when your body is going, your consciousness may go on. 178 00:20:28,355 --> 00:20:33,356 Independent accounts of the out of body experience are remarkably similar. 179 00:20:33,356 --> 00:20:39,356 What they tell us about the nature of human consciousness may have great significance. 180 00:20:39,356 --> 00:20:48,356 The fact that the experience cannot be adequately explained by science has led many to question the finality of death. 181 00:20:48,356 --> 00:20:51,356 Is there life after death? 182 00:20:51,356 --> 00:20:56,356 Today there are many who've gone over the brink and returned to tell us about it. 183 00:20:56,356 --> 00:21:03,356 They do not offer proof of life after death, but their reports give us a new perspective on the possibility 184 00:21:03,356 --> 00:21:07,356 that death is not an ending, but a beginning. 185 00:21:11,357 --> 00:21:17,357 Coming up next in Search of continues with the facts and fiction about voices from the beyond. 186 00:21:17,357 --> 00:21:23,357 Then the 20th century with Mike Wallace reports on the history of the U.S. Israeli connection. 187 00:21:23,357 --> 00:21:29,357 And later tonight, an almost forgotten document reveals new information about one of our greatest presidents 188 00:21:29,357 --> 00:21:33,357 as Lincoln, the Untold Stories, continues on History's Mysteries. 189 00:21:33,357 --> 00:21:37,357 At 8, here on the History Channel, where the past comes alive.